International Disability Rights Advocacy

Languages of Moral Knowledge and Institutional Critique

Daniel Pateisky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000367102
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Behinderungen in der Soziologie

This book provides insight into the globally interlinked disability rights community and its political efforts today. By analysing what disability rights activism contributes to a global power apparatus of disability-related knowledge, it demonstrates how disability advocacy influences the way we categorise, classify, distribute, manipulate, and therefore transform knowledge.

By unpacking the mutually constitutive relations between (practical) moral knowledge of international disability advocates and (formal) disability rights norms that are codified in international treaties such as the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), the author shows that the disability rights movement is largely critical of statements that attempt to streamline it. At the same time, cross-cultural disability rights advocacy requires images of uniformity to stabilise its global legitimacy among international stakeholders and retain a common meta-code that visibly identifies its means and aims. As an epistemic community, disability rights advocates simultaneously rely on and contest the authority of international human rights infrastructure and its language.

Proving that disability rights advocates contribute immensely to a global culture that standardises what is considered morally and legally 'right' and 'wrong', thereby shaping the human body and the body politic, this book will be of interest to all scholars and students of critical disability studies, sociology of knowledge, legal and linguistic anthropology, social inequality, and social movements.

1 Introduction

As a relatively young academic field, disability studies draws on experiences and positions from manifold areas of research and is inherently interdisciplinary and its areas or research are linked and intersectional. Indeed, a significant contribution of disability research has been its functional coordination of previously disparate fields of knowledge. Moreover, real-life applicability to the daily needs of persons with disabilities, rather than theoretical or political concerns, has been at the foreground of most disability research.

My present purpose is to provide an actor-based sociology of knowledge analysis that explores who contributes to knowledge around international disability practices and how. To this end, this book investigates practices directed at and resulting from knowledge relations that concern the visibility, social recognition, ethical positions, and legal rights of people affected by disabilities. This work (a) explores disability from the overlapping but distinct perspectives of scholars and theorists (including medical and materialist paradigms), on the one hand, and disability advocates (linking paradigms), on the other, and (b) includes a Foucauldian analysis of the power dynamics inherent in both approaches. I seek to investigate how the power dynamics of disability knowledge emerge from and affect the knowledge of disability rights advocates who navigate many sides of this heterogeneous field of knowledge while attempting to influence political decisions as well as social perceptions around dis/ability.¹ To start off, I want to introduce readers to key ideas that this book revolves around and requires consistent awareness of. The guiding question and concomitant sub-questions of this book are the following:

1. How do international disability rights advocates shape power-knowledge around dis/ability?
2. Whence does this heterogeneous field of knowledge draw its authority?
3. What role do disability rights advocates ascribe to language and law in their work?

These questions are relevant for three reasons. First, no study has yet adequately compared and connected the patchwork knowledge of local actors and disciplinarily bound researchers with a global disability rights discourse. Second, an analysis of authoritative knowledge that advocates unite has remained largely overlooked. Third, while linguistic exchange between and among the different groups of disability rights actors might at first appear to be a matter of course, the production and reproduction of specific terminology should be granted conscious attention. Etymologies, established vernaculars, policy language, legal wording, and many other areas where specific terminology is used, omitted, prohibited, transmitted, translated, copied, or reiterated need to be taken into account as valuable sources of insight to illustrate the axes of epistemic influence (influence of knowledge) and therefore power relations. ‘Epistemes’ are understood here (following Michel Foucault) as a system of understanding based on ideas that shape perceptions of knowledge—both academic and non-scientific—at a particular period. The political dimension of such language use can be observed through the interaction of different terminologies and the successful or failed attempts, which occur as part of any advocacy effort, to establish new language norms.

Overall, this investigation seeks to trace how the global disability rights enterprise and its premises—in academia, politics, and advocacy efforts—occupy politically and socially authoritative views that can impact power-knowledge relations. These spaces of knowing are deemed to be established not only in many natural languages (and also through other forms of direct exchange; see Knapp and Hall 2009) but also in light of globally differentiated ideologies and cultural convictions that are subject to constant and inescapable shifts due to this knowledge production’s reliance on shared signs (cf. Barth 2011).

Intertwined ap...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Lists of figures
• Glossary of abbreviations and notes on terminology
• 1 Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Index