Toward a Political Model of Disability: A reflection on Colonialism in Disability Health Research

• In Event: Cultivating resistance from within and beyond Palestine: Reflections on mass impairment, carcerality, and access-washing (HYBRID)

Abstract

Aligning with disability studies and disability rights discourse, the discipline of disability health research often emphasizes how disability is a ‘natural part of life’ that everyone will inevitably experience (WHO, APA, NIH). However, many times disability is not natural, as evidenced by geopolitical disparities in disability prevalence: 80% of the world’s disability is located in the Global South and disability inequitably afflicts poor communities of color within the United States. Despite this, disability health research continues to stagnate in a medical versus social model dichotomy that has failed, at large, to meaningfully engage with the geopolitical impacts of white supremacy, colonialism, and capitalism on the production of disability. This essay seeks to apply anti-imperialist knowledge birthed from theorists who explore mass impairment in Palestine to critically reflect upon the ways colonialism currently operates in US-based disability health research. This will be accomplished through a case study on the National Institute of Health’s (NIH’s) 2023 Request for Information (RFI) seeking input on a proposed update of their mission statement following advisory committee recommendations to remove the NIH’s goal to “reduce disability” which they stated “could be interpreted as perpetuating ableist beliefs that disabled people are flawed and need to be fixed.”

Following Rita Giacamen’s (Institute for Public Health, Birzeit University) call for a ‘political model of disability’ and drawing from theory produced within Jasbir Puar’s Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability on mass disablement in Palestine, the application of a political model of disability is needed within the discipline of disability health research. A political model of disability acknowledges the unjust manufacturing of disability through systems of violence such as militarized imperialism, settler colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism/unjust labor conditions, incarceration, police brutality, medicalized violence, and environmental injustice. It also acknowledges that disability prevalence and access to the resources that make disability livable are unevenly and inequitably distributed across nations, states, and communities because of these violent systems. Each nation, state, and community hold its own unique relationship to the interlocking forces of colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy, impacting geopolitical variability in the production of disability, as well as conceptualizations of disability.

The widespread neoliberal censorship, repression, and imperialist violence subjected upon people who speak about Palestine is inseparable from the NIH’s RFI (rooted in US-based disability studies) which is actively silencing discourse on the production of disability. Colonial nations repressing discourse on the production and manufacturing of disability inadvertently protects and sustains these violent systems that so often produce disability: as long as disability is conceptualized as always natural or inevitable, colonial nations do not have to materially change the violent systems (capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy) that produce disability and they can continue to benefit from the disablement of the colonized and oppressed. Anti-ableist disability liberation requires dialectically recognizing the wholeness of disabled people and challenging/dismantling sociopolitical disablement and unjust production of impairment. Disability health research must acknowledge that unjustly producing disability is ableist and must reflect upon the way colonialism impacts its theory production and practices.

Author

• Sabrina Ali Jamal-Eddine, University of Illinois At Chicago