Since the advent of the Disability Rights Movement in the 1960s and 1970s, practitioners and scholars have sought ways of conceptualizing disability and understanding the strategies employed in its management. The push for a rights-based approach to disability first begun in North America and Europe has become globalized, influencing the discourse, strategies, and day-to-day activities of international policy-making bodies, non-governmental organizations working on disability, and individuals with disabilities worldwide. Scholarship within disability studies has fixed attention on a small range of models for explaining the meanings and experience of disability. However, the adequacy of these models in describing the relationship between international institutions, disability organizations, and individuals with disabilities has not been examined. Similarly, scholars have not examined the influence these different theoretical models have on the everyday work of organizations working with individuals with disabilities.
This paper explores the way in which two organizations in South Asia have framed and defined organizational goals and a rights based approach to disability. It employs ethnographic data from preliminary field projects in Kathmandu, Nepal and Delhi, India to examine the underlying theoretical models of disability that each organization operationalizes through its programming. Analysis of each organizations values, programming, and disability discourse suggests that organizations are differently defining disability rights, leading to heterogeneity in the types of services available to people with disabilities. I suggest that this heterogeneity in available services across organizations, as well as within a single organization is the product of organizations employing different theoretical understandings of the meaning of disability. However, programming opportunities available to an individual with a disability not only stem from different theoretical models of disability, but also forge new hybrid models of disability that incorporate multiple theoretical constructs in order to address the challenges facing individuals with disability. This suggests that disability organizations are actively engaged in defining and transforming disability policy and discourse at the local level and beyond. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications these findings have on how we understand and study disability, as well as design and implement services for individuals with disabilities.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-08172006-190651 |
| Date | 28 September 2006 |
| Creators | Baldwin, Jennifer L. |
| Contributors | Carol L. McAllister, Ph.D, Richard Scaglion, Ph.D, Kathleen M. DeWalt, Ph.D |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-08172006-190651/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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