About the Decolonial Disability Studies Collective (DDSC)
Welcome to the Decolonial Disability Studies Collective (DDSC) Lab!
DDSC is a collective body of knowledges, theories, and praxis produced by disabled and non-disabled scholars and activists across intellectual and activist spaces. Drawing on different colonial and imperialist spaces across the Global South and North, DDSC offers an alternative way of engaging and connecting with different forms of knowledge and praxis that are decolonial, interdisciplinary and community engaged. Our projects are also contextually distinctive and transnational.
We believe that the transfer of Western disability studies (DS) from the North to the South has been uncritical because it privileges discourses from the Global North. To put theory and praxis from distinct Global Southern spaces into conversations with North American and Western Eurocentric disability studies, DDSC focuses on building relationships, knowledge, and agency with Disabled People’s Organizations (DPOs), disabled academics, and activists, as well as young people with disabilities, including women and girls in colonial and neo-colonial spaces in the South. We also engage with scholarship in critical disability studies, girlhood and childhood studies and post-colonial and decolonial studies in the creation of what may be called Decolonial Disability Studies – an alternative body of knowledge, theory, and praxis that aims to unsettle hegemonic forms of knowledge production in Western disability studies.
DDSC supports evolving research projects; each of which does a substantial job in shaping our decolonial approach to Disability Studies. ·
- Transforming Disability Knowledge, Research and Activism (TDKRA)
- Engaging girls and young women with disabilities across Southern Spaces (ENGAGE)
- Engender Disability Inclusive Development (EDID)- Vietnam Project
- Decolonial Partnership Project (DEPA)
With a wealth of expertise in interdisciplinary and decolonial disability studies our research team members and partners from different activist and intellectual spaces in the Global North and South, engage in discussions and actions that put decolonial disability studies into conversations with Western disability studies, while creating new forms of collective learning, engagement, co-existence, and transformation.
We hope that DDSC will be a unique and innovative space for engaging researchers and partners in this important and often overlooked area of study.
Xuan Thuy Nguyen, PhD
Associate Professor & Project Director
Engaging Girls and Young Women with Disabilities across Southern Spaces (ENGAGE) Project
Carleton University
