Indian Journal of Critical Disability Studies

Making Sense of the Occurrence of Impairments among Women with Locomotor Disabilities in Assam

Jyotishmita Sarma — 2022-08-21

This paper elaborates on how women with locomotor disabilities and their family members make sense of the occurrence of their impairments in the specific contexts of their lives. The paper argues that the binary distinction between impairment and disability as espoused by the social model is irrelevant in the context of persons with disabilities in the majority world. The study was conducted among 18 women with different locomotor disabilities who had acquired their impairments early in life in the district of Kamrup Metropolitan in Assam. Using intersectionality as an analytical framework, this paper helps in understanding how the interplay of a multitude of factors such as nature of impairment, social class, social capital, access to healthcare, parents’ knowledge about child health and, place of residence work simultaneously to co-construct the experience of impairment, which in turn helps to go beyond the refrains that people usually use to make sense of their impairments.

Disablement of Women:

Zarana Maheshwari — 2022-08-21

The present paper undertakes a comparative study of two Gujarati short stories ‘Lohi ni Sagai’ (Engagement of Blood) and ‘Shruti ane Smruti’ (Shruti and her Memory) by Ishvar Petlikar (1916-83) and Chandrakant Bakshi (1932-2006) respectively, and attempts to study how narrative of the stories devises various narrative techniques and disables their female protagonists Mangu and Smruti in ‘Lohini Sagai’ and ‘Shruti ane Smruti’ respectively. The paper further attempts to study how the bodies of both these women characters are rendered ‘abject’ (Butler, 1993), how they are relegated to a ‘heterotopic space of deviation’ (Foucault, 1984), and how they are denied citizenship at the end. It further brings to the fore how ‘abject bodies’ of people with disability pave the way for creation of the normative bodies and make the normative bodies more viable and desirable and eventually make them fit into ‘paradigm citizenship’.

Intersectional relationships between coping with virtual learning spaces, dyslexia and English as a second language during the COVID-19 pandemic:

Onyenachi Ada Ajoku — 2022-08-21

This paper addresses the gap in intersectionality discourse by exploring how the move towards online learning during the COVID-19 lockdown in the UK served as an agent of discord resulting in disparities in technology accessibility and support provision. Six West African working-class mothers with a diagnosis of dyslexia in higher education, living in London were recruited for the study using the convenience sampling method. Due to the COVID-19 crisis and restrictions with face-to-face contact, all semi-structured interviews were conducted remotely. The four themes identified, highlighted findings around online learning spaces, dyslexia support, ableist constructions, motherhood and home schooling.

Notes on Contributors

2022-08-21

Disability Discourse in Hindi Literature

Santosh Kumar — 2022-08-21

Reviews of Documentaries

Ritika Gulyani — 2022-08-21

Kriti Film Club with Ritika

Sharmishthaa Atreja — 2022-08-21

Review of two documentaries

“What is she doing here?” Containing identities, foreclosing abilities

Shireen Irani — 2022-08-21

Unfolding (of) theories, not programmes (programs?)

Tanmoy Bhattacharya — 2022-08-21

I question, provocatively, whether disability studies (DS) as a discipline deserves to be called studies. When a field zeroes in on any claim about ‘realities’, I think, it actually treads on shaky grounds. The general fear of theories necessarily leads to a form of anti-intellectualism that is most often cloaked in an activist’s guise. The question really is how does one release DS from this bondage of pragmatism and practicalities. In this piece, I want to talk about a bit of this and a bit of that, aimlessly. In fact, that is the aim, I think.

Editorial