Engaging girls with disabilities in Vietnam: making their voices count

Abstract

This article addresses a theoretical and methodological intervention in support of inclusion for girls with disabilities in Vietnam. Drawing on an internationally collaborative project, Monitoring Educational Rights for Girls with Disabilities in Vietnamese schools, we critically engage the politics of inclusion and exclusion of girls with disabilities in education. Using a critical methodological framework that foregrounds the lived experiences of 21 girls with disabilities in Vietnam, we ask how we might strengthen participatory knowledge production through the work of monitoring rights in order to inform practices and policies related to disability and education. Through a preliminary analysis of the visual data emerging from our participatory visual methodologies, we demonstrate how these methods can contribute to constructing more inclusive practices and policies for girls with disabilities in both the Vietnamese and the global contexts.

Keywords:

• girls with disabilities
• education
• participatory visual methodologies
• rights
• Vietnam

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Anita Harris in her book Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-first Century (2004) offers a discussion of the definition of ‘girl’ in relation to the question of ‘who is a girl?’ and the problematics of age range. In order to avoid confusion between referring to the women recruited to be facilitators (some of whom could be classified as young women) and the older participants (who could also be classified as young women), we have chosen to use the term ‘girl’ throughout the article. However, because of the wide age range of participants (11–25 years old), we acknowledge that the phrase ‘girls and young women’ would also be appropriate, particularly in relation to referring to the participants who are as old as 25.

2. We identified the socioeconomic conditions of participants through the information that participants shared about their families’ socioeconomic conditions in the individual interviews. We also gathered information from parents, relatives, or caretakers of the participants to confirm this information. For example, a girl who comes from a working-class family is someone who has either or both of her parents participating in the labor force but having some form of socioeconomic difficulties in their lives. By contrast, a girl from a poor family is someone whose parents have had significant financial and economic hardship and has lacked access to social, political, and cultural participation.

3. In this article, we use pseudonyms to maintain the confidentiality of the participants.

4. We use the term ‘legal barriers’ to refer to the ways in which the law constructs barriers to inclusion for people with disabilities. For further reading on disability legal studies, see Rioux (2003) and Kanter (2010).

5. Anti-illiteracy is an educational campaign within the Education for All movement in Vietnam. An anti-illiteracy class refers to a form of continuing education reserved primarily for adults and children who have never been in school to help them pursue basic education.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council [Insight Development Grant 430-2013-000979].