Building on my current work focusing on the biopolitics of inclusion in Singapore, and in conversation with the important work of scholars in mobilities studies, critical access studies, and geographies of disability (Hamraie 2013, 2017, 2018; Gleeson 1999; Imrie 2000; Boys 2017; Cresswell 2010, 2014), this paper examines the mobilities of disabled bodies in society as a key aspect of inclusion, in particular, its related aspects such as physical accessibility, physical infrastructure, policy legislation, social mobility and the aspiring mobilities of disabled people themselves. In centering disability mobility as a key fundamental analytic, the paper aims to theorise how inclusion in different locations in Southeast Asia has functioned as a biopolitical strategy (Foucault 1978; Esposito 2008; Agamben 1998; Mitchell and Snyder 2005; Puar 2017), focused on the mobilities of disabled bodies. It considers inclusion within international and transnational instruments around disability rights, and national strategies on inclusive citizenship, manifested in law and legislation, which are increasingly dominating the ways in which we see and know disability. With specific reference to events in Singapore and other Southeast Asian locations, the paper looks to examine how these dominant ways of inclusion, often seen within the lens of a universal disability rights agenda, imposes particular demands on disabled bodies, and the kinds of tensions, contestations, and contradictions as well as the mobilities/immobilities that occur as disabled bodies are folded into life. I consider the following questions: How can the biopolitics of disability mobility functions as a means to theoretical lens to understand and examine disability in and across Southeast Asia? What can disability mobility tell us about transnational flows of ideas such as disability rights and how have different locations localized such ideas historically and in the present? What kinds of futures and bodies are foretold by disability mobility? What are the implications of reading the biopolitics of disability mobility as theory in Southeast Asia?
References
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo sacer. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Boys, Jos. 2017. Disability, space, architecture: a reader. Vol. Book, Whole. London: Routledge.
Cresswell, Tim. 2010. “Towards a politics of mobility.” Environment and planning D: society and space 28 (1): 17-31.
—. 2014. “Mobilities III: moving on.” Progress in Human Geography 38 (5): 712-721.
Esposito, Roberto. 2008. Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction. London: Penguin Books.
Gleeson, Brendan. 1999. Geographies of Disability. London: Routledge.
Hamraie, Aimi. 2013. “Designing Collective Access: A Feminist Disability Theory of Universal Design.” Disability Studies Quarterly 33 (4). https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3871.
—. 2017. Building access: Universal design and the politics of disability. U of Minnesota Press.
—. 2018. “Enlivened city: Inclusive design, biopolitics, and the philosophy of liveability.” Built Environment 44 (1): 77-104.
Imrie, Rob. 2000. “Disabling environments and the geography of access policies and practices.” Disability & Society 15 (1): 5-24.
Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. 2015. The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Puar, Jasbir K. 2017. The Right to Maim. Vol. Book, Whole. Durham: Duke University Press.
Kuansong Victor, Zhuang is a PhD candidate in Disability Studies and Cultural Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Macquarie University. His work centres on the contemporary claims to include the disabled within life in Singapore and examines the biopolitics of inclusion through a reading of various cultural texts.
Day 3 – (May 29, Sat HK/SG time)
Panel 9: Disability, Discourses, Disruptions
1:30-3:30pm HK/SG / 6:30-8:30am BST / 7:30-9:30am CEST / 1:30-3:30am EDT / 10:30pm-12:30am PDT