Making Sense of the Disability Autonomy and Collectivity Binary

As scholar-activists, we are aware that ableist attitudes and binaries get animated differently across cultural settings. Take, for example, a seemingly unchangeable binary such as autonomy and collectivity. In the Western world, autonomy may signify a capacity to perform on one’s own in public and private spaces. In global Southern contexts, on the other hand, disability autonomy may signify finding a breathing space of one’s own from within interdependent social arrangements and collectives, and at the same time a will to foster the latter in favor of intersectional disability justice. We use a transnational approach to disability/disablement/injury to account for the diverse, or often contradictory, politics of the social justice movements and disability justice initiatives in different geographical locations. We deploy a transnational lens to resist alienation of the global South and normalization of the global North, whiteness, and the West as the only focal point in disability studies.

What does disability justice mean informally when taught and practiced individually, collectively, and globally? We examine the possibility of taking stock of disability justice pedagogy from within communities and cross-cultural settings, while attending to the ways in which disability justice is negotiated as everyday aesthetics across cultures. We call the workings of such everyday learnings concerning disability, Informal Disability Justice Pedagogy (IDJP).

This chapter emerges out of decades-long teaching, scholarship, activism, and our involvement in social movements, and mentorship across transnational spaces in South Asia, North America, and the Middle East in formal classrooms and informal learning spaces as well as aligning and organizing with several multilingual communities across the globe.