Day 1: Thinking with Disability
What is disability? In the introductory lecture, we will explore disability as a pervasive and intersectional discourse that produces worlds, and is also produced by inequality. We will move from thinking about disability as an identity, to disability as an analytic of social justice, and a world-making force.
Day 2: Disability and Debility
What is debility and how does thinking with debilitation allow us to apprehend the normalisation of injustice and the massification of suffering? How does the logic of knowledge production obscure the enmeshment of debilitation with everyday life? In this lecture, we will explore the relationship between disability and debility and why thinking with debility matters.
Day 3: Racialising disability and debility
Disability and debility cannot meaningfully be separated from race. Neither can race be meaningfully separated from disability or debility. Disability discourse was/is fundamental to the crafting of racialised discourses and undergirds racialised logics of the nation.
Day 4: Carceral logics and abolitionist sensibilities
In this lecture, we explore the entanglement of disability and debility with carcerality and what an abolitionist sensibility offers us. We will consider that to undo the logics of violence that normalise carceral practices, liberatory possibilities are enabled.
Bibliografia (Bibliography):
Day 1: Thinking with Disability
Mohamed, K. (2018) Disability Matters! South African Labour Bulletin, July/August: 30-32.
Mohamed, K. (2019) An African Feminist Decolonial Disability Studies, Codesria Bulletin, Vol 1&2: 19-21.
Recommended Readings:
Meekosha, H. (2011). Decolonising disability: Thinking and acting globally. Disability & Society, 26(6), 667-682.
Davis, L. (2017). Introduction: Disability, Normality and Power. In. Lennard Davis (ed.) The Disability Studies Reader, 5th Edition (pp. 1-14). Abingdon & New York: Routledge.
Day 2: Disability and Debility
Mohamed, K. (2024) Debilitating Research: Scholarship of the Obvious and Epistemic Trauma. African Studies, 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2024.2431801
Recommended Readings:
Mohamed, K. 2024. Epistemic Debilitation and the Erasure of Genocide. Palestine Now: Social Text Online. February 13, https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/epistemic-debilitation-…
Puar, J.K. (2017). The right to maim: Debility, capacity, disability. Durham: Duke University Press. (Preface, pp.ix-xxiv)
Day 3: Racialising disability and debility
Baynton, D. C. (2013). Disability and the justification of inequality in American history. In L. Davis (ed.) The disability studies reader, 17-34. Abingdon & New York: Routledge.
Recommended Readings:
Ka-Canham, H. 2023. Riotous Deathscapes. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. (ch.4)
Mitchell, D., & Snyder, S. (2003). The eugenic Atlantic: Race, disability, and the making of an international eugenic science, 1800–1945. Disability & Society, 18(7), 843-864.
Day 4: Carceral logics and abolitionist sensibilities
Rowe, S., & Dowse, L. (2021). Enabling penal abolitionism: The need for reciprocal dialogue between critical disability studies and penal abolitionism. In Michael J. Coyle & David Scott (eds.) The Routledge International Handbook of Penal Abolition (pp. 206-216). New York & London: Routledge.
Recommended Listening:
Tippet, Krista (2023). Ruth Wilson Gilmore: Where life is Precious, life is precious. On Being With Krista Tippett. (Podcast) Accessed on 12 June 2025, at https://onbeing.org/programs/ruth-wilson-gilmore-where-life-is-precious…
Recommended Readings:
Ben-Moshe, L. (2020). Decarcerating disability: Deinstitutionalization and prison abolition. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Ch.1
Shange, S. (2022). Abolition in the Clutch: Shifting through the Gears with Anthropology. Feminist Anthropology, 3(2), 187-197.
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