This chapter examines how critical art-based research (Denzin, 2008, Finley, 2018; Rice, Chandler, Harrison, Liddiard, & Ferrari, 2015) can be used to engage young women and girls with disabilities in the global South. Critical art-based research is structured on “the notion of possibility, the what might be, of a research tradition that is post-colonial, pluralistic, ethical, and transformative in positive ways” (Finley, 2018, p. 561). This research practice embraces the responsibility of the researcher to engage in political activism by creating conversations for social change through community-engaged and decolonizing methods (Smith, 1999). While feminist disability studies in the global North has employed art-based research to problematize medicalized and pathologized understandings of disability and difference, and thus, opens possibilities for transformation by revisioning what disabled bodies could become (Rice et al., 2015), this approach has been, historically, situated within the global North, and thus, has been disengaged with the politics of disability in the intersection with racialized and female bodies in the global South. We ask: What are ways in which critical arts-based research can engage with decolonizing methodologies to challenge hegemonic discourse on “women and girls with disabilities” that has emerged in the global development agenda (United Nations, 2012, 2016)? What are ways in which arts-based research can engage, challenge, or transform the disability rights movements outside the Western contexts? What are some tensions and challenges of this feminist approach in regard to epistemological and political differences between researchers and activists in the global North and South?
This presentation starts from 27 mins 37 secs.
Related Resources
- Envisioning Inclusion_TDKRA.pdf
- Engaging girls with disabilities through cellphilming: Reflections on participatory visual research as a means of countering violence in the Global South – Xuan Thuy Nguyen, Marnina Gonick, Tuyen Bui, 2021 – journals.sagepub.com
- Transforming Disability Knowledge, Research and Activism (TRKRA) Policy Brief
Presenters
Xuan Thuy Nguyen
Xuan Thuy Nguyen is an Associate Professor in the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies and Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies at Carleton University in Canada. She is the Project Director of a Partnership Development Project entitled “Learning with and from the global South: Opportunities for engaging girls & young women with disabilities across Southern spaces” (ENGAGE) funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) [2021-2024]. Her work has been published in many peer-review journals such as Disability & Society, Disability and the Global South, Global Studies of Childhood, Foucault Studies, and Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. She is author of The Journey to Inclusion (2015, Sense/Brill Publishers).
Marnina Gonick
Marnina Gonick is Professor of Education and Women and Gender Studies at Mount St Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her recent articles have been published by journals such as Young: Nordic Youth Studies; Feminist Media Studies; and Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. She is currently the Canada Fulbright Visiting Research Chair at Dartmouth College, USA.
