Objectives

Project Aims and Alignment with Decolonial Disability Research

Global South-CONNECT is a collaborative research initiative that seeks to reimagine knowledge, activism and solidarity through the lived experiences of young women and girls with disabilities across the Global South.

Our project aims to:

• Explore how young women and girls with disabilities identify, build, and sustain networks of learning, support, and activism within their communities and across Global South contexts.
• Examine the social, cultural, and structural barriers they encounter, as well as the strategies they use to advance disability justice and inclusion.
• Document and amplify the lived experiences, cultural knowledge, and creative practices that contribute to collective learning and activism.
• Co-create knowledge and strengthen partnerships that recognize young women and girls with disabilities as active contributors to research, advocacy, and social change.

Anchored in decolonial disability studies and building on our previous ENGAGE project, Global South-CONNECT challenges extractive research practices through co-production, relational accountability, and epistemic justice. This approach confronts the historical privileging of Western academic knowledge by recognizing disabled communities as knowledge producers whose lived experiences, cultural perspectives, and collective practices are essential to understanding and resisting intersecting colonial, patriarchal, and ableist systems.

Through this approach, Global South-CONNECT contributes to a growing body of decolonial disability research that illuminates how Southern activists and communities create new pathways for inclusive social transformation. It is not simply a study about communities, but a partnership with them, one that values lived knowledge as a form of theory, resistance, and world-making.

Key Themes

Each of our project’s key themes represents an interconnected strand of our broader vision for decolonial and inclusive change. Together, they shape how the research unfolds and how knowledge is shared across contexts and communities:

• Decolonial Disability Justice: resisting colonial and ableist hierarchies that marginalize the experiences, perspectives, and knowledge of people with disabilities.
• Youth Leadership: recognizing the voices, agency, creativity, and expertise of young women and girls with disabilities in shaping research, activism and social change.
• Knowledge Mobilization: sharing insights through community collaborations, exhibitions, and digital archives to strengthen inclusion and advocacy.
• Transnational Solidarity: connecting local and global networks to create opportunities for shared learning and collective action.
• Creative Storytelling and Art-Making as Knowledge: using participatory arts, digital media, and oral histories to reclaim narratives and recognize creative expression as a valuable form of knowledge.
• Intersectionality and Care: understanding disability experiences through the interwoven lenses of gender, race, class and colonial histories.

Together, these themes reflect Global South-CONNECT’s commitment to creating research that is by, for and with disabled communities, fostering spaces of connection, creativity and collective transformation across Southern contexts.