Imagining, Constructing and Reifying Disability in Volunteer Abroad: Able Global Citizens Helping the Disabled Southern Other
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this chapter, I argue that the ways that disability is constructed and produced through encounters in volunteer abroad (VA) programs functions to (re)produce a caring and benevolent able-bodied Northern global citizen. This subject formation relies on two main processes: (1) the creation of the able/disabled binary; the volunteer/the one being helped and (2) the obscuring of the role the Global North (the place from where the volunteer comes from) plays in producing impairment. The research presented in this paper is from a larger study theorizing encounters with Southern disabled others . Here I engage in a qualitative textual analysis of Projects Abroad, a large VA organization based in North America that provides international volunteer placements to young people from Canada and the United States. I consider how the lack of analysis of Global North/Global South power relations reproduces depoliticized and ahistorical approaches which individualize and pathologize disability, and subsequently obscure any analysis of the social production of impairment and disability. I end the paper by asking how we can invite young people to engage in more inclusive ways, and in a learning that destabilizes hegemonic narratives of disability in this space.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".