Online conversations

We are using a host of media to capture different perspectives from around the world about the power of disability to rethink health, science and research.

Our online conversations take many forms including Online Symposia and Online debate. We want to gather information from you! We are asking people to offer their own thoughts on the question:

'How is health research, theory and scholarship transformed by an engagement with disability studies'. 

You can offer a response either:

• via emailing to Disabilitymatters@sheffield.ac.uk, or;
• Adding your comments to our Jamboard  page, or
• Sharing your own writing with us.
• Tweeting/X'ing us using #DisMatters2023

We will collate these responses in this page of our website.

All best!
 

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Online Symposia follow up conversations

Our symposium in Delhi in February 2024 was a huge success. Some questions remained unanswered but one of the presenters - Aparna Sachdev - was on hand to offer some responses:

Question. Considering the incapacity of the inclusive schools in India to meet the needs of the non-disabled students, will they meet the needs of Disabled students?

Answer. That's one consistently relevant question, to which I don't have a concrete "will they?" "won't they?" kind of answer. All I have is some local-epistemic-position-type thoughts that I'll try and articulate. Your question brings to mind the idea of the narrative arc that Abhishek talked about - we are entirely too fond of grand narratives, and the matter is compounded when we think in those terms in a context where inclusive education is still not uniform in its approach (we still don't have a common pan-Indian inclusive education methodology). Inclusive education is perceived as a challenge for many reasons, but the availability of resources (of various kinds) is one reason that gets quoted a lot. Inclusive schools don't have to do it all alone, though - The nonprofit sector in India (that includes special education) has the resources to help when collaborations can be set up. Except that inclusive education is the purview of the Ministry of Education and special education falls under the purview of the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, making any large-scale systemic collaborations difficult to set up. Collaboration is a possibility we tend to miss also because our multiple legislations in this context lack textual and legal harmony - the Rights of Persons with Disabilities act (2016)and the Right to Education Act (2009)is one prime example.

On a different note, disabled people have increasingly started to recognize and acknowledge the importance of our disabled ancestors, the contributions our forebears  made that have enabled us to stand where we do today. As a disabled person, what I think I can do in this context is to work towards inclusive education in the ways that I can, do my own bit as my ancestors have done, and attempt to resist our collective grand-narrative-building impulse that would have us trying to answer questions like these in non-nuanced affirmatives or negatives. Our disabled ancestors very likely didn't think reform of that magnitude was the work of one lifetime - they did what they could, and left the system better than they found it. That latter we can aspire towards, at least. To leave things (even if fractionally) better than we found them. That's no grand strategy for success, but there it is nonetheless.

Apologies for the scattered nature of the answer - I'm one human being, and standpoint theory only goes so far with questions like these!

Question. Do we subscribe to the idea of complete abolition of special schools? Especially in India?

Ans. No, I don't think we do. Not unless inclusive schools pan-India prove themselves consistent in capably addressing disabled children's needs, and not an "abolition", even then. Drawing from my understanding of residential special education facilities for the blind here: special education attempts to create a level playing field by working to respond to the effects of various kinds of marginalizations in its immediate context: economic disadvantage is addressed by the nonprofit nature of organizations, gender-based concerns around safety are addressed by residential facilities etc. Admittedly the model solves as many problems as it creates: quality of education in special education settings has always been a concern, and there has been increased reporting of sexual misconduct and abuse in residential/institutional settings for disabled people in the last two decades in particular. If we appear to be at an impasse, then there is another factor at play here that I'd like to draw attention to. Apart from accessibility support, special schools in India perform another really important function, although that might be an incidental byproduct of the special education process. By the very nature of their functioning that involves bringing disabled people together under one umbrella, they create conditions conducive to the emergence of disabled communities, disability pried, foster creative crip ways of being in the world, etc. And then there's also the idea that disabled people's power often lies in our revolutionary obscurity, which make horizontal ways of organizing possible and viable (Lee Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha). All of this the special education system enables, advertently or inadvertently.

I might imagine an educational system like Paraguay, where special education is being slowly repurposed to serve a collaborative role with mainstream education, and is consequently being absorbed into the latter system. But not until the groundwork for that process is in place. Not until our special education and inclusive education legislation as well as the machinery for implementation speak to each other and to the context in which all of us are rooted.

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Online seminar conversations

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We held a hybrid seminar on 6th December 2023 and asked our speakers to think about the impact of disability studies on their work. Here is a link to the full text

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