Emerging Discourse of Disability in the Contemporary World

Nidhi Goyal – our founder and executive director – gave a lecture as part of the International Conference on Disability and Inclusion, organised by Bhumika Trust. The session was titled “Emerging Discourse of Disability in the Contemporary World”, and was conducted online via Zoom on December 3rd 2021 (Day 3 of the conference). She began by establishing the fact that conversation around disability rights as an issue is in itself missing from most mainstream spaces, and how this invisibility affects this marginalised group – especially those persons with disabilities standing at various intersections. She stressed on how it was important to bring various movements together in a way that identities don’t slip between the cracks, and to make sure that persons standing at these intersections are in leadership positions. “The disability rights movement needs to work on extending and collaborating, and working with other movements”. She also stated that it is imperative that we look at gender as a cross cutting issue within conversations of access, mobility, employment, education, technology etc. “We need to go beyond the definition of disability inclusive work spaces, and talk more about gender-disability inclusive work spaces. The same goes for inclusion in education, access and so on. If we don’t act on this, we will continue to make women invisible within our movements” – she noted.