Becoming Disabled: An Ontological and Intersectional Inquiry into Disability, Education, and Embodied Transformation in India

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 2:15 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Embodied Histories, Collective Futures: Reframing Disability and Education in the Global South

Abstract

This paper explores the lived experience of disability through the story of a South Asian woman “becoming” a disabled person via late-onset blindness. Drawing on intersectional and equity-oriented scholarship, the paper analyzes how embodied disabled subjectivity is shaped within ableist educational and social systems. Grounded in narrative data from conversation between one of the authors and her sibling, the paper illustrates how dominant discourses frame disability identity as navigating between processes of being and becoming. Rather than framing disability as static or deficit-based, this paper theorises disability as fluid, complex, subjectivities that both reproduce and reimagine inclusive practices within social and educational ableist institutions.

Authors

• Shradha Babu, University of Alabama

• Nirmala Erevelles, University of Alabama