This article seeks to examine the politics of human rights and disability in light of the recent United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (UNCRPD), which has been central to the struggle for recognition of disabled people. Northern discourses of disability rights have strongly influenced the UNCRPD. We argue that many of the everyday experiences of disabled people in the global South lie outside the reach of human rights instruments. So we ask what, if anything, can these instruments contribute to the struggle for disability justice in the South? While Northern discourses promote an examination of disabled bodies in social dynamics, we argue that the politics of impairment in the global South must understand social dynamics in bodies.

(2015). Disability and colonialism: (dis)encounters and anxious intersectionalities. Social Identities: Vol. 21, Disability and Colonialism: (Dis)encounters and Anxious Intersectionalities, pp. 1-5.

In this paper we aim to explore the realm of impairment in terms of its politicization under transnational claims for justice. The realm of disability rights and justice has been a central theme in disability analytical inquiry and by disability movement actors engaged in struggles of disability affirmative politics. Within this frame, there has been an increasing amount of disability scholarship and activism at the transnational sphere. In fact, since the ratification of the UNCRPD (2006) greater transnational alliances have become a central feature to advancing disability affirmative claims for rights and justice. While welcomed, we argue that within the transnational realm, the focus on disability alone critically marginalizes those groups engaging in repertories of action within the logos of impairment as transnational claims for disability justice tend to naturalise impairment and negate the production of impairment under global structural processes of violence. To address this issue, we suggest that the growing scholarship on transnational theorizing and activism within disability needs to respond to these claims for justice and rights. To conclude we argue that transnational theorizing and praxis is in fact, a double move – an affirmative politics of disability rights and justice and a transformative politics of impairment. Keywords: impairment, justice, rights, disability politics, majority world, justice, North–South power relations, Southern epistemologies

This paper examines recent social security policies in Australia and the UK for workless disabled people. The paper outlines developments in both countries over the past two decades and points to the fact that while there may be differences in the detail, the trends in such policies in the two countries are similar. This involves moves towards stricter eligibility criteria, greater expectation of workless disabled people to make efforts to (re)enter paid employment and, through such processes, a redrawing of the ‘disability category’ that denotes the ‘truly’ disabled from those who are deemed capable of doing at least some paid work. The paper goes on to consider explanations of such change, arguing that liberal explanations in the social administration tradition are problematic and that they, therefore, need to be placed within the neoliberal project, in particular its concern with putting people to work. The paper concludes that this has essentially involved a redrawing of the disability category to ensure a smaller number of people of working age in both countries can legitimately claim an existence outside of paid work. The paper also argues that more comparative research is required to understand the impacts of such trends on disabled people and provide insights for those resisting the influence of neoliberalism on welfare regimes

This paper questions whether Australia's new disability support regime, the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), can meet its aims for people with disabilities who also experience complex social disadvantage, using the examples of people with intellectual disabilities from cultural and linguistically diverse backgrounds and those who cycle in and out of the criminal justice system. The paper undertakes a critical analysis of the proposed eligibility requirements under the NDIS and assesses the risks of marginalisation in the proposed approach for people with intellectual disabilities who also experience other complex individual and social disadvantage, and begins to ask, “Will the NDIS meet its aims if it does not address these complexities?” The analysis suggests that under the draft rules for eligibility the onus is on individuals to prove their eligibility for supports funded by the NDIS on a case-by-case basis and, moreover, to prove that receiving such support will reduce their future dependence on the system. This raises a number of issues for those whose experience of disability is tied to complex and intractable social disadvantage, and raises questions about the NDIS's ability to meet its aims in relation to rights, choice, and control. The paper demonstrates the ways in which people with disabilities who are already at risk of disengagement from support systems and social exclusion risk further marginalisation in the context of an NDIS, as it currently appears to have little capacity to recognise and respond to their complex need for disability social support.

In this paper, my aim is to elaborate disability movement praxis so that transnational struggles for justice over the production of impairment emerging from the Global South can be represented within the transnational frame of disability politics. The paper seeks to explore the potential of deepening socio-political understandings of impairment as a means to radically democratize disability movement politics at the transnational scale to encompass pluralist, yet subaltern, collective claims for justice. I am guided by the question: if impairment is the place that makes visible invisible debts, can the global disability rights movement begin a process of re-identification to open the boundaries of disability justice claims and develop a strategic orientation which recognizes those collective justice claims for geopolitically produced impairments?