Theorizing Encounters with Southern Disabled Others: The Reproduction of Disablement in International Experiential Service Learning and Global Citizenship Education and Invitations for Disruptions

In this study I seek to understand the way disability is employed to work towards the construction of normative subject-making in the field of International Experiential and Service Learning and Global Citizen Education (IESL and GCE). I theorize the way disability is constructed and responded to in IESL and GCE programs through interventions into the lives of disabled people. I explore how certain bodies are imagined as needing protection, care and interventions and other bodies are imagined as entitled to do that labour. I argue that these pedagogical processes reproduce certain subjectivities under Capital, and I query the ways in which the imagined Southern disabled body is integral in constituting Northerners able-bodied global citizenship identity.

I then turn to a case study analysis of a small Canadian IESL organization, Intercordia Canada, founded by Jean Vanier that operates a relational North/South model of being with rooted in the experience and pedagogy of LArche. I analyze narratives from Intercordia student participants, centering their learning in a larger systemic analysis of neoliberalism and ways learning, relating, and care is structured. I use this case study as a way to get at the tensions and cracks in neoliberal education. I am not interested in countering the dangerous and damaging IESL and GCE narratives with good ones. I am interested in exploring the complexity of working with young people in this space, and identifying moments of disruption to the reproduction of disabling narratives. 

I draw from interdisciplinary fields, including critical pedagogy, critical IESL and GCE, critical disability, critical feminist and postcolonial theory to understand this complex and diverse space. I ask how we can envision this space in different ways, rejecting simplistic binaries and disabling discourses that marginalize and oppress certain subjectivities while celebrating others. This study extends the critical scholarship by employing critical disability theory to think through these encounters through in different ways, understanding how the disabled Southern other is essential in the forming of caring able-bodied Northern global citizens, imagined as desired subjects in the current phase of capitalism (Vrasti 2012). The critical literature in this field has thus far built a very rich and textured intersectional analysis using gender, race, class, but the attention to disability has yet to be taken up. Decolonization of this space cannot be realized without a deep consideration of disability and impairment. 
This study takes up two broad fields of inquiry. Firstly, I ask how disability is utilized in the broad mainstream neoliberal field of IESL and GCE programs as a depoliticized and individualized fixed identity embodied in an imagined Southern othered body that can be cared for, intervened on, and helped, which works to constitute the imagined able-bodied, caring, benevolent, and helping global citizen from the North. I then work through alternative ways of imagining the Southern disabled other, through interviews with Northern student participants and mentors. I completed semi-structured qualitative interviews with former Intercordia Canada student participants and mentors who accompanied student participants in the program. All of the research participants were Northern student participant alumni of Intercordia, had completed the program between 2012 and 2014 and lived with host families and worked with small grass roots NGOs in various countries in the Global South for three months. They came from diverse identity positions and were geographically spread across the country. 

Through the narratives of the Intercordia student participant alumni, I identified four areas of disruption to the disabling and uncomplicated IESL and GCE narratives of encounters with Southern others; vulnerability and mutuality as disruptions, disruptions to disability as individual and I explored their own responses to disruptions from the Southern other. I end by exploring the themes of uncertain subjectivities and future(s), speaking to the uncertainty that Intercordia student participants were left with after the program, which I contend signals to the unstableness of difficult learning. 

My interviews with Intercordia student participants demonstrated that even programs with critical pedagogies are not attending to disability in a critical way. Student participants are not equipped with the analytical and theoretical tools to understand encounters with the disabled Southern other in ways that uncover complex disablement and the production of impairment. The narratives from Intercordia student participants demonstrated disruptions into normative learning that reproduces disablement; their narratives included attention to larger structures that disable and oppress Southern others, but their learning did not include the uncovering of the production of impairment. This uncovering needs analytical tools that the Intercordia model does not employ. There is fertile ground for deeper, more intersectional learning to be integrated into the Intercordia model. The lack of a focused Critical Disability lens means that those who enter into the space of being open to unknowing, to receiving the Southern other as teacher and knowledge-holder do not have the skills to engage in a more complex critical disability analysis. 

This study ends by taking up four ways that this uncovering can be facilitated: that international experiences need to be proceeded and followed by academic courses that are housed in critical and intersectional programs of study like Critical Disability Studies; vulnerability and mutuality must be integrated into pedagogy; there is a need for deeper preparation with Southern hosts to allow them to challenge Northern students when they engage in hurtful or damaging ways, this preparation needs to be driven by their needs and desires, to deepened their participation; and pedagogy needs to be uncomfortable and destabilizing, with Intercordias model of mentorship in placement is posited as a way to facilitate and support this. Opportunities to destabilize knowledge, ideas of and who can hold knowledge, and the creation of spaces to create new narratives for hope and a future resisting and decolonizing the project of dehumanizing neoliberalism is necessary work for educators to be actively engaging in. Educators in the field must remain unapologetically radical and work towards engaging otherwise.