Decolonising disability: thinking and acting globally

Disability studies can ask how a person gains access to school, work and public space while leaving another question outside its frame: how do war, pollution and dangerous labor keep producing injuries? Helen Meekosha’s 2011 article brings these questions together. Her target is not the demand for access or independent living, but the assumption that a particular history of those demands supplies an unlocated, universal starting point.

The author-uploaded article is a critical theoretical synthesis, not a newly recruited cohort study. Meekosha examines an asymmetry in knowledge: metropolitan research can leave its location unmarked, while other places are repeatedly presented as special cases. Adding more countries to an established model does not necessarily redistribute the authority to define its questions, concepts or acceptable answers.

Injury has a political geography

Colonial dispossession makes bodily injury difficult to separate from the conditions of life. Losing land, water, food or community support changes both bodies and relations of dependence. Indigenous experience challenges the one-way application of metropolitan categories to other societies. Taking situated knowledge seriously requires the interpreter to acknowledge a position; it does not require treating every inherited practice as ideal.

War, nuclear testing, exported pollution and dangerous factories supply another set of examples. Where cheap goods benefit one place while toxic exposure and workplace injury accumulate elsewhere, personal misfortune is an inadequate explanation. Access politics then reaches into production and trade: who is excluded from work, but also who participates on terms that expose them to harm? These historical examples are not a current global estimate of injury prevalence.

This produces a difficult political tension. Affirming disabled lives and preventing avoidable injury must remain compatible. Meekosha argues against avoiding suffering produced by violence and exploitation merely to escape the personal-tragedy model. Opposing war or toxic exposure need not imply that existing disabled lives are less worth living. Conflating these positions obscures institutions that injure people and subsequently restrict their support.

A feminist reading can follow the division of dangerous work, service labor and disrupted care networks. It asks how racialized and gendered obligations shape exposure and survival. This is a direction opened by the argument, not a completed gender analysis to attribute to the paper. Meekosha explicitly leaves gender’s complexities for further work. A global frame can still leave important differences among disabled women unresolved.

Nor should “South” become the name of one culture or an automatically correct standpoint. Here it marks unequal relations among colonial histories, resource control and intellectual authority. Explaining every local difference through colonialism would reproduce the totalization under criticism. Removing local rulers and elites from responsibility would also weaken an account of concrete harm. The article expands the field of accountability rather than establishing a single causal formula for the world.

Garland-Thomson’s feminist disability studies invites a comparison between bodily norms and transnational political economy. Mohanty’s Under Western Eyes offers a second connection: how can scholarship turn other people’s lives into local evidence while hiding its own situated position inside a supposedly universal theory?