Abstract
The ascendance of Donald Trump to the presidency has been extensively discussed with reference to disability rights in the USA; there has been less consideration of the implications of the Trump era for disability rights in the Global South. The “America first” doctrine coupled with the president’s disablism are reasons for concern. This chapter, however, deals with the context of the “post-truth” era. The disregard of Trump and his allies for the truth, and the authoritarian implications of this, must be resisted. However, the epistemic exclusion of disabled people in the Global South needs recognition. Excluded people have knowledge and expertise. It is a mistake to accept that there is an easy distinction between “truth” as defined by a narrow understanding of science on the one hand and “lies” as typified by the falsehoods perpetrated by Trump and his allies on the other hand. An understanding of the social context of knowledge for and about disability in the Global South requires us to be more nuanced and self-critical in thinking about what constitutes useful and useable knowledge.
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Notes
- 1.
There are numerous examples of this, the most recent being, at the time this book was being completed, Trump’s retweeting of videos distributed by the right-wing fringe group, Britain First. This act of retweeting was, according to White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a way in which Trump had sought to “elevate the conversation” on issues of “extreme violence and terrorism”. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/11/30/trump-was-seeking-to-elevate-the-conversation-with-retweets-of-anti-muslim-videos-spokeswoman-says/?utm_term=.7276eb536d4a
- 2.
It must be acknowledged that Shakespeare, with his insistence on the importance of empirical research alongside other forms of activism, is a controversial figure in some disability activist academic circles, as witnessed by a recent controversy concerning Shakespeare’s having been invited to give a lecture honouring the late Vic Finkelstein, a key figure in the development of the social model of disability (see http://blacktrianglecampaign.org/2017/11/10/university-apologises-after-asking-social-model-critic-to-deliver-first-finkelstein-lecture/). Collaborators of Finkelstein and key figures in disability in academia, Professors Mike Oliver, Colin Barnes, Len Barton and John Swain, are reported to have argued that because Shakespeare disagreed fundamentally with Finkelstein, he should not have been invited to give a lecture in Finkelstein’s honour. In response, Shakespeare is quoted as having said that the objections to his speaking were tantamount to a form of “no platforming”. In casting the issue in this way, Shakespeare implicitly raises the very question addressed in this chapter—that of what distinguishes knowledge claims in an emancipatory activism from those in a right-wing, authoritarian system.
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Swartz, L. (2019). Disability and Citizenship in the Global South in a Post-truth Era. In: Watermeyer, B., McKenzie, J., Swartz, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Disability and Citizenship in the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74675-3_5
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