Decolonizing Epistemologies and Politics: Disability, Accessibility and Rurality in India

<strong>Centre for the Study of Social Systems School of Social Sciences </strong> Discussion on <strong>Decolonizing Epistemologies and Politics: Disability, Accessibility and Rurality in India</strong> by <strong>VANDANA CHAUDHRY</strong> Assistant Professor, City University of New York College of Staten Island Date: <strong>20th August </strong> <strong>Abstract :</strong> This paper attempts to facilitate cultural theorizations of disability and accessibility in non-western/liberal cultures. Drawing from Indian context, I argue that productive engagement can result from orienting disability epistemologies and politics beyond liberal dichotomies of physical-social, individual-collective. I will shed light on these questions through an ethnographic exploration of disability and rurality in India. Based on an ethnographic study of disability and neoliberal development in rural south India, I will offer a cultural reading of disability and accessibility from collective and relational perspectives imbricated within the rural materiality and local culture. Rurality offers a vantage point to understand the interconnected nature of disability as a form of 'social suffering, collective marginality located at the intersection of nationhood, global structures of power, uneven development, public health, infrastructure, and opportunities to navigate bodily differences in these cultural spaces. Formulating our current understanding of disability and accessibility in the global south, these indigenous perspectives promote decolonizing epistemologies while orienting disability politics and praxis to ways that are culturally relevant and generative of change.