Editorial: Frames and debates for disability, childhood and the global South: Introducing the Special Issue

Our understanding of disability, as readers of this journal will be aware, is rooted in the epistemology of disability studies, seeing it not as a medical state contained within the body or mind of a person, but as a socially created phenomenon that takes its shape through social relations, cultural representations, and modes of production and reproduction. This means that disability cannot be discussed in universal or generalised terms, but always requires attention to the specific embodied, social, cultural and economic contexts in which it occurs. This special issue, therefore, seeks to explore the interconnections and intersections of disability, childhood, and South/North relations, three areas that are rarely examined together 1 . Disability and childhood: rationale and mutual configurations Disability studies is a relatively new academic field that has emerged in part from the disability rights movement and social change activism, spurred largely by people labelled and marginalized as ‘disabled’ in the UK and USA (Thomas, 2004). As such, many of the debates in the field focus on the economic and cultural contexts of the global North. These debates often assume the availability of advanced medical, educational and welfare services and discuss the relations of power within such services (Grech, 2009). Further, while disability studies in North contexts often assumes impairment to be caused by natural and unavoidable conditions, bodies also bear the mark of global power, and the social analysis of disability (particularly in relation to global South contexts) cannot ignore the ways bodies are constructed and impacted through the economic conditions of globalization and postcolonialism (Erevelles, 2014; Grech and Soldatic, 2015; Meekosha, 2011; Meekosha and Soldatic, 2011). Many of the papers in this issue explore how disability is created within different local and national contexts that have been colonized, and which are impacted by increased poverty and global inequality such as Kenya (Corcoron), India (Vaidya), Vietnam (Burr) and Brazil (Do Nascimento et al.). Other authors in this special issue consider NorthSouth relations and how these frame our understandings of disability and childhood (see Nixon et al; and Wolbring and Ghai), or focus on communities impacted by colonialism and extreme poverty, even when geographically located in the global North, such as indigenous people in Canada (see the article by Stienstra).

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