Postcolonial Encounters with Disability: Exploring Disability and Ways Forward Together with Persons with Disabilities in Western Zambia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The economic and epistemological dominance of the global North has outlived colonialism. This postcolonial dynamic causes impairment in the global South and renders life more difficult for persons with disabilities (PWDs). This dynamic also limits the ability of people in the global South to respond to disability. This thesis aimed to challenge the postcolonial dynamic through the development of new ways to think about disability, and what to do about it, through a North-South collaboration with a North American rehabilitation provider and two disability groups and their members in Western Zambia.\nThis constructionist qualitative research project was informed by critical and participatory approaches to research. The participating groups included one based in an urban area and another in a rural area. A total of 81 individual members of the two groups participated. Data were generated through eight focus group discussions and 39 interviews and analyzed using thematic and reflexive analysis strategies.\nThe participants of this research were most concerned with poverty. The strategy that they suggested to improve their situation was help, a gift or grant of material resources shared in a relationship of expected compassion. This research was complicated by power dynamics and differences between the participants and researcher with respect to priorities and ways of thinking. The complications likely impacted what people talked about and the way they talked about it. The complications also meant that this research was less collaborative than planned.\nThis research showed that PWDs in Western Zambia had concerns, and suggested strategies to improve their situation, that were different than those that are most common in Zambia. Since the current ways of thinking about disability in Zambia are largely informed by the concerns and priorities of the global North, this research points to possible alternatives that are based in the realities of the country.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".