ADA Part (B)

This part covers persons who have a history of, or have been classified or misclassified as having, a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities. It includes persons who had a disabling impairment in the past but have recovered in whole or in part and are not now substantially limited.

It is intended to prevent discrimination against individuals (a) who have been classified or labelled, correctly or incorrectly, as having a disability and (b) persons who have recovered, in whole or in part, from a disability but are subjected to discrimination because of their history of a substantially limiting impairment.

Sometimes school or other institutional (e.g., hospitals) documents labelling or classifying an individual as having a substantially limiting impairment would establish a "record" of a disability.In this context, labelling at schools is an important issue and should be done judiciously and responsibly.

Class Cancelled

The class for Wed 7th Sept stands cancelled as the meeting at the Dept of Telecommunications ministry will not get over in time to take the class. BTW, I will be presenting a paper on "ICT for PwDs: With special reference to Indian Sing Language" at the meeting.
See you on Fri at 3:30

Assignment #2

The following assigment is due on 10th Sept., 2011:

Find out if there are ANY disability-related acts or laws in India that has the following requirements of a definition of disability as in the The Developmental Disabilities Assistance and Bill of Rights Act Amendments of 1987 of the USA:

• Situation


• Occupation


• Certification


• Length
  

Assignment #1

This is a reminder that the following assignment is due on 7th Sept 2011:

 

(a) Discuss how the five "challenges", namely, Unfortunate, Useless, Different, Oppressed and Sick, discussed in Hunt (1966) are actually challenges in the sense that these are challenges for the society at large rather than disabled people.
(b) Provide at least one example each of the five challenges from your own experience, surrounding, news stories, etc. specifically in the Indian context.

Welcome!

Please check out the Pages listed on the right on Introduction, Plan and Readings. Most of the readings will be distributed before a topic is started and an attempt must be made to read, if required, in groups, the articles as much as possible. Much of the class lectures and discussion may be based on some of these articles. Unfortunately, most the readings are in English, barring a few, which we at the EOC have been able to translate to Hindi. Paul Hunt's, Anita Ghai's and my own article are translated into Hindi by a former student of this course, Himanshu Rai.I will try to post as much material a possible at this site but certainly not all. It's important to understand that you must have access to the Acts and Laws that will be dealt directly in the class, namely, ILA 1912, MHA 1987, PwD 1995, UNCRPD 2006, RTE 2009 and the draft of the new Disability Law, yet to be presented to the Parliament. I will also show a film called "Hear Me, Deaf" by Carol Thomas and we will go for a Special School visit to Amarjyoti.

As far as the message of the course is concerned, it needs to stressed that we are interested in issues of human rights that affect persons with disability. The course also emphasises the importance of understanding the true spirit of the various Acts and Policies so that advocacy can be impacted in the right manner. Finally, one lesson that must be remembered is to do with the fact that Disabilities Studies, the academic wing of disability activism, can only become meaningful if it is not devoid of activism that directly impacts the lives of persons with disabilities.

Looking for Parallel Themes

I remember Chomsky, when he was visiting India in November 2001 – a few weeks after I had returned to India to take up the teaching position in the University of Delhi that was offered to me long-distance while I was still in Germany/ UK – he was looking for a rather dull and dispassionate parallelism between the imperialist aggression of earlier centuries and the then current one; as if, all this was but expected. Those of us who grew up with almost the last vestiges of socialism, consider such positioning nothing but cynical.

However, over the years, I have come to appreciate this semi-journalistic, semi-academic strategy of seeking out such minimal parallel pairs. Apart from the obvious -- and much needed – in particular for issues that are almost universally neglected, populism that such a highlighting brings about, it provides you a pathway to follow your activism on; as long as there is decisive activism at the end of such a semi-academic tunnel, it cannot be cynical.

Here, I am interested in looking at a particular parallel that is more or less well-known in the context in which it is embedded – the context of oppression of women and of disabled persons. In the first stage, women were simply “added-in” to the male-dominated view of the world. However, it is only the so-called second wave of feminism that brought about an epistemological change in the perspective – it became a methodology, a decidedly feminist perspective of knowledge in general.

This has partly been the story of disability as a category as well. Disability has simply been an “add-on” category, especially so, in fact in early feminist literature, the following comment is therefore not a
surprise:

‘There are startling parallels between what feminists find disappointing and insulting in Western philosophical thought and what many women have found troubling in much of Western feminism’ (Spelman, 1990:6)

This parallel within a parallel is now a well recognised theme in the disability studies literature after Morris (1993). I will therefore move away from this well trodden path and look at in fact yet another parallel between, not oppression, but so-called “liberation” of women and of disabled persons. My area of focus will be education.

Sixty years ago, the earliest education commission, the University Education Commission report of 1948-49 of newly independent India, had a whole chapter devoted to Women’s Education which clearly stated that “There cannot be an educated people without educated women. If general education had to be limited to men or to women, that opportunity should be given to women, for then it would most surely be passed on to the next generation”. A humanistic statement like this by civil servants and bureaucrats is heart warming. However, the chapter also contains a section on what is called “Special Education” which lists and justifies home economics, nursing, teaching (primary and secondary schools), and the fine arts as the desirable vocations for women. It justifies this “desirable” alternative by the strange reasoning that to train a person who will not practise is a social loss, assuming (and therefore implying) that ‘to not practice’ is by choice; strange because the document does not bother to find out why women trained, for example, in medical sciences, do not take up medical practice. In addition, in its section on “Future of Women’s Education” it re-emphasises the need for, what it calls, “redirection of interest” through advocacy and counselling for women and people in general to remove social taboos against these vocations.

Furthermore, in the section on ‘Preparation of Home and Family Life’, the document advises that women’s education should include practical “laboratory” experience in the care of a home and family. It further includes the following as ‘equipment’ in women’s education:
(i) A baby home.
(ii) A nursery school, which incidentally would relieve nearby mothers during a part of the day.
(iii) A club for school children and adolescents.
(iv) A little home for convalescents.
(v) A small home for old people.
(vi) A home setting where students may have experience home Maintenance and operation, and where they may act as hostesses.

It’s interesting to see that out of these 6 equipments, 4 of them contain the word ‘home’ (underlined here), and the two which don’t contain the word home, imply women’s location as indoors. So, although the document stars with a visionary statement, it clearly locates the women firmly inside the home.

These three themes, (i) devalued social roles through special education, (ii) “redirection of interest”, and (iii) confinement in homes, are some of the very clear parallels found in how disabled persons have been treated and are continued to be treated.

Special schools for disabled children has been right from the National Policy of Education (NPE) 1986 to the very current Right to Education, 2009 aggressively pushed as the alternative for education/ training for disabled children. This is very clearly stated in the Persons with Disabilities (Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights and Full Participation) Act, 1995, the main disability act of India, and also in related documents like Comprehensive Action Plan on the Inclusion in Education of Children and Youth with Disabilities (IECYD); the latter containing the largest section on “Education in Special Schools”. Thus the concept of special schools,
as a modern-day version of the eugenics’ notion of segregation, continue to develop as a small-scale industry in the country.

A theme similar to the above “redirection of interest” is seen in the current practice in Indian schools of not allowing especially blind students to opt for mathematics as a subject at school level – the excuse being Braille not able to create special symbols and diagrams. As a result, blind students can never take up any science subject or Economics at the graduate level, and are forced take ‘softer’ subjects instead.

Similarly, the IEYCD lists among its goals the following:

• To provide for home based learning for persons with severe, multiple and intellectual disability
• To promote distance education for those who require an individualised pace of learning
  

It also talks about setting up resource centres which are envisioned to support non-formal education as also home-based learning activities. Clearly, home-based education is nothing but another form of segregation albeit in their own homes.

Although as far as the polices, documents and acts are concerned, equality in women’s education has been successfully programmed over the years, no such development has taken place in the case of disabled persons,whose education continues to be haunted by the modern-day segregationists’instrument of special schools.

Critical Disability Studies

We have now moved on to the core of UNIT 4, namely, critical disability studies. It was explained at the outset, how DS is an academic discipline that is hugely different from the other disciplines. The individual topics that we discussed are as follows:
(i) How disability is seen as a representation of the human condition
(ii) The role of UPIAS in the bringing up of the discipline of DS
(iii) The goals of DS
(iv) Methodologies of DS
(v) Foucault's Geneology
(vi Critical Theory (Beginning from the Frankfurt School)
The main emphasis has been on the need for an academic arm of the disability rights movement in the form of DS.
The notion of knowledge construction and organisation was emphasised. The point that was made convincingly was the typically western (and therefore limiting) thinking post-industrial revolution to organise knowledge in three types of disciplines, namely, Science, Humanities and Social Sciences. Critical studies was necessarily a reaction to this artificial divisioning of knowledge and accompanying methodologies, especially between Humanities and Social Sciences. Critical studies has been henceforth enriched by the addition of post-colonial studies methods -- a strongly Indian contribution of knowledge.