At the intersection of development, disability and postcolonial theory. Are people with a disability marginalised among the marginalised?

Abstract

While inequalities and injustices originating from the social categorisations of race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, or nationality seem to be a general focus of both development and postcolonial discourses, the issue of disability seems to be rather overshadowed. Therefore, since even the World Health Organisation (WHO) itself and its Mental Health Improvements for Nations Development (MIND) project represents disability as a barrier to development – so as a factor globally contributing to poverty, inequality, and injustice and not the other way around – there is a need to extend our attention when investigating exploiting and disempowering power relations inherent in the 21st century that aim at eliminating human differences. The present theoretical inquiry concentrates thus on emphasising a call for bringing together the disability and postcolonial debates in the investigation of social-justice-based development and the role education might in general play in the realisation of just societies and the equality of all individuals around the world. The paper starts by shortly introducing the concepts of development, disability, and postcolonial theory, and then aims at accentuating the need of a critical global disability studies for the sake of decolonising current practices and making present, marginalised, and disaccredited knowledges of a complex and heterogeneous disability experience. Finally, the paper highlights that a decolonised understanding of disability should be inherent in present educational agendas – integral to development processes – because human differences should not be factors that impoverish but that empower human relationships.