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Interrogating the impact of scientific and technological development on disabled children in India and beyond

WOLBRING, Gregor
GHAI, Anita
2015

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Products of scientific and technological developments are emerging at an ever increasing speed whereby these developments impact the daily life of humans in numerous ways. We focus for this paper on two classes of emerging products; one being social robots and the other being products that are envisioned to increase the cognitive abilities of humans beyond the species-typical and their impact on aspects of childhood such as education and self-identity formation. We analyse the utility and impact of these two classes of products through the lens of the alternative report on India to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) Committee on the Rights of Children authored by the by National Disability Network of India and the lens of ability expectations. We posit that the discourses around these two classes of emerging products do not address the problems the alternative report raises, but could heighten the problems identified by the report. We believe the two classes of products highlight the need for ability expectation governance.

 

Disability and the Global South (DGS), 2015, Vol. 2 No. 2

Representation, access and contestation: Facebook and vision impairment in Jordan, India, and Peru

PAL, Joyojeet
ALFARO, Ana Maria Huaita
AMMARI, Tawfiq W
CHHABRA, Sidharth
LAKSHMANAN, Meera
2015

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This paper presents qualitative research on the use of Facebook by visually impaired people and organizations representing them in Jordan, Peru, and India. We found that individuals and organizations have very different motivations and pathways for using social media. Social media serve as a means to help individuals with vision impairments to expand their social circles, network with casual acquaintances, and find various kinds of social and technical resources independently. However on issues of representation we found that social media have the potential to play a double-edged sword, reinforcing in some cases the same stereotypes that individual users of assistive technology (AT) sought to overcome by using technology in their professional lives. We find that individuals often characterize social media and assistive technology in the same vein — suggesting that for many parts of the global South, the dramatic change in the means and ability to leverage social and professional possibilities has not come from any one technology alone, but from a broader evolution of the technological environment available to people with vision impairments. Access to social media and technology disrupt an environment in which social and economic spaces for people with disabilities are still a zone of contestation between a dominant discourse of vision impairment enforced by generations of negative representations of disability, and a new world of technology users challenging representations and assumptions as engaged, connected professionals.

 

Disability and the Global South (DGS), 2015, Vol. 2 No. 3

Disability and the Global South (DGS), 2015, Vol. 2, No. 2 Special issue: Disabled children and disabling childhoods in the global South

2015

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Articles include:

  • EDITORIAL Frames and debates for disability, childhood and the global South: Introducing the Special Issue
  • Using Postcolonial Perspectives to Consider Rehabilitation with Children with Disabilities: The Bamenda-Toronto Dialogue
  • Vietnam’s children’s experiences of being visually or hearing impaired
  • Disabling streets or disabling education? Challenging a deficit model of street-connectedness
  • Revolutionary entanglements: Transversal mappings of disability in the favela
  • For Michael Charlie: Including girls and boys with disabilities in the global South/North
  • Childhood Sexual Abuse and Disability: A critical study of an invisibilized constituency in India
  • Interrogating the impact of scientific and technological development on disabled children in India and beyond

Does Africa dream of androids?

OKOYE, Florence
2014

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This paper is part of a broader investigation into the intersection of disability and technology in African societies. The paper will focus specifically on Nigerian cultures, exploring the social experience of disabled persons with respect to their use of available technologies in navigating a space within their respective cultures. The paper will first deal with the technologies available to disabled people in pre-colonial West Africa as suggested by archaeological and literary evidence, go on to analyse how changes in economic and cultural systems brought about by colonialism and the post-colonial state, shifted the roles and technologies available to disabled people. The paper argues that the African cyborg has been an inspiration for new technologies, and an agent of technological and social change. Simultaneously, increased connectivity has enabled indigenous technologists to more quickly share and develop ideas. It has also empowered new generations of technologists with the potential to radically improve disabled access to areas of public life. The paper concludes that as a focus of metaphysical anxieties, the cyborg has evolved to something approximating the New African, someone who can defy boundaries to achieve an act worthy of herself and the her community – an agent of revolution and social change rather than a passive recipient of imposed technologies.

 

Disability and the Global South (DGS), 2014, Vol. 1 No. 1

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