Building capacity or enforcing normalcy? Engaging with disability scholarship in Africa

ABSTRACT

In contemporary South African academia, “community engagement” is a valued commodity. My work as a nondisabled white man with disability activists and as editor of the African Journal of Disability is viewed as good for my career, and as an appropriate form of engagement and empowerment. In this article, I engage critically with the question of the extent to which capacity building is simply about increasing capacity. I ask whether capacity building inevitably involves elements of disavowal of the experience and competencies of less powerful people. I compare capacity building to the enforcement of normalcy, a process which disability scholars criticize with justification. I ask whether it is possible in unequal social contexts to engage with the politics of voice without imposing a hegemonic narrative on nondominant voices. I suggest links between the politics of engaged scholarship and processes of domestication of troubling bodies and minds.

KEYWORDS:

• Community engagement
• disability
• empowerment
• normalcy
• South Africa

View addendum:

Engagement in practice: Introduction to a special issue of Qualitative Research in Psychology

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the anonymous reviewers of this article for helping in refining and clarifying his thoughts. He is grateful to the special issue editorial team, especially David Anstiss, for their help and patience. Jacqueline Gamble, as always, provided invaluable technical help. Thank you also to Gubela Mji for her ongoing support.

Notes

From 1 January 2018, Dr Charlotte Capri will be taking over from me as editor-in-chief. As founding editor I shall continue to serve in an advisory capacity.

1. There are many contestations about terminology in the disability studies field. In the United States, for example, what is termed the “people first” approach is favored, with use of the term “people with disabilities,” and this usage has spread widely. Prominent proponents of the British “social model” of disability, however, have argued for the use of the term “disabled people,” with this usage emphasizing social oppressive forces which disable people with impairments.

2. Churchill was not known for his support of disability rights—quite the contrary. There is, therefore, some irony in his dictum about scientists being used by disability activists.

Additional information

Funding

This work is based on the research supported in part by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (Grant-specific unique reference number (UID) 85423). The Grantholder (LS) acknowledges that opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in any publication generated by the NRF-supported research are that of the authors, and that the NRF accepts no liability whatsoever in this regard.

Notes on contributors

Leslie Swartz

Leslie Swartz is a clinical psychologist and a distinguished professor of psychology at Stellenbosch University. He has a long-standing interest in issues of disability and mental health in the African context, as well as in the politics of what is known as “capacity building” in low-resourced contexts.