Why disability research globally?

A conversation with website founders Mango and Moritz

Mango: I began studying disability in political science because I felt like nobody was doing it. Nobody’s doing it, and someone needs to do it. Just in the way that (for the longest time) we did not think about gender until we started to have women coming in, and until we started to have a society that is more open to different kinds of people from different sexualities we don’t have people talking about it. So people do tend to, like, write and research what they know, or where they’re coming from - their perspective. And the fact that society has marginalized people with disabilities means that the chances of them getting those opportunities is way reduced. Disability is a poverty issue in some sense, many times out of ten. There are many cases where people are disabled because they have never had access to healthcare (either their parents did not or they did not). Or, because of their poverty, they are walking in spaces that are unacceptable or not conducive for them, and they’re socially disabled in that way. Disabled people are not helpless victims without agency, but the marginalization of poor disabled people in poorer countries is just wild.

People outside of academia are also interested in getting empirical, data-based information on disability that we have access to! I suggested coming up with this website because a major reason people don’t research disability is because they are just not aware you can do that. They’re not aware that it’s possible to look for data to do that, they’re not aware that there are people who are doing it. We agreed to do this because we met at APSA and said, “people don’t know that they can do this.” You can write about disability, and do rigorous, empirical research on disability-related issues. It was basically us trying to be, like, we need to make people know that they can do this by creating this space where people from all over come together. That’s why it’s disability research globally. We wanted to make sure that scholars from across the board - especially from the global south, because 80% of persons with disabilities live in the global south - have an open forum and can find connections with people. If somebody is interested in something they can find somebody, even if that person is not in the institution. We are just trying to connect people who do disability studies.

Moritz: I primarily study the ways that people with cognitive impairments get voting rights - or the reasons they do not - and the discourses around that, such as what the different camps or philosophies are on the subject of why our societies need competent voters or voters, that it appeared to us to be able to reason in certain ways or not. And yeah, I feel I have a responsibility, an urge to do that research because people with some types of cognitive impairments will not make it to the upper echelons of the academic or public debate in a sophisticated statistical or methodologically empirical way to make that point. I think that’s a duty someone has to fulfill and to push the research and the agenda, to learn what states are doing to investigate the consequences and effects of disenfranchisement, and to see which kinds of institutional settings allow us to have more inclusive, participatory democracies and voting rights for everyone. I feel these disenfranchised groups as well as other disenfranchised groups often do not have the power to do that themselves - to go and do a period of study and research and provide that as an argument, and to provide that to the world, to governments, and to executives of elections. So this is the space and the care that I want to fill in.