Alternative Explanations: Disability and Inclusion in Africa

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This collaboratively conceived project will establish the Disability and Inclusion in Africa network. Working across disciplines, the project will engage Arts and Humanities research to enhance disability inclusion in international development.Discourses of disability are often created by medical professionals, social scientists or development agencies, and most often in the global north, quite removed from the realities experienced on the ground. This project focuses on the central theme of 'alternative explanations' for disability in African contexts to invite discussion of a range of beliefs and attitudes towards disability, which may include assumptions and misconceptions, traditional beliefs, religious beliefs, medical determinism, supernatural or witchcraft-related beliefs. By increasing awareness of the impact of these alternative explanations, the network will contribute to understandings of the ways in which approaches to inclusion in international development programmes and strategies can be enhanced.Building on new and existing partnerships, the Disability and Inclusion in Africa network will forge international dialogue between researchers and stakeholders at a series of events and exhibitions in Nigeria, Cameroon, Tanzania, South Africa and the UK. The project not only responds to gaps in scholarship, but the culturally-informed research that will emerge from the project aims to bring about a step-change in the way in which disability studies is approached within and beyond Africa, and in the way in which disability is understood by stakeholders in communities, civil society and international development.