Disability, Human Rights and the Limits of Humanitarianism

Disability studies scholars and activists have long criticized and critiqued so-termed ’charitable’ approaches to disability where the capitalization of individual disabled bodies to invoke pity are historically, socially, and politically circumscribed by paternalism. Disabled individuals have long advocated for civil and human rights in various locations throughout the globe, yet contemporary human rights discourses problematically co-opt disabled bodies as ’evidence’ of harms done under capitalism, war, and other forms of conflict, while humanitarian non-governmental organizations often use disabled bodies to generate resources for their humanitarian projects. It is the connection between civil rights and human rights, and this concomitant relationship between national and global, which foregrounds this groundbreaking book’s contention that disability studies productively challenge such human rights paradigms, which troublingly eschew disability rights in favor of exclusionary humanitarianism. It relocates disability from the margins to the center of academic and activist debates over the vexed relationship between human rights and humanitarianism. These considerations thus productively destabilize able-bodied assumptions that undergird definitions of personhood in civil rights and human rights by highlighting intersections between disability, race, gender ethnicity, and sexuality as a way to interrogate the possibilities (and limitations) of human rights as a politicized regime.

Introduction, Michael Gill, Cathy J. Schlund-Vials; Chapter 1 The Promise of Human Rights for Disabled People and the Reality of Neoliberalism, Mark Sherry; Chapter 2 The New Humanitarianism, Maria Berghs; Chapter 3 Media, Disability, and Human Rights, Armineh Soorenian; Chapter 4 Volunteering as Tribute, Anna Mae Duane; Chapter 5 Structural and Cultural Rights in Australian Disability Employment Policy, Sarah Parker Harris, Randall Owen, Karen R. Fisher; Chapter 6 Disability in Humanitarian Emergencies in India, Vanmala Hiranandani; Chapter 7 Monitoring Disability, Tanya Titchkosky; Chapter 8 The Specter of Vulnerability and Disabled Bodies in Protest, Eunjung Kim; Chapter 9 Persons with Disabilities in International Humanitarian Law – Paternalism, Protectionism or Rights?, Janet E. Lord; Chapter 10 United Nations Policy and the Intersex Community, Ethan Levine; Chapter 11 HIV/AIDS, Disability and Socio-Economic Rights in South Africa, Lydia Apon Strehlau; Chapter 12 The Overrepresentation of Black Children in Special Education and the Human Right to Education, Jennifer Bronson; Chapter 13 “Becoming Disabled”, Nirmala Erevelles;

Michael Gill is faculty member in women's, gender and sexuality studies at Grinnell College, USA. Cathy Schlund-Vials is Associate Professor in English and Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut in the USA.