On the 18th June, 2020, Maharaja Agrasen College, University of Delhi, invited founder and executive director, Nidhi Goyal, for a webinar on “Impact of Popular Culture on Self and Identity of Women with Disability” . Alongside Nidhi was fellow disability rights activist and a renowned academic, Anita ghai, professor at Ambedkar University. The conversation centered on the power of popular culture, particularly cinema and television, and the influence these media have over people’s beliefs. Both panelists spoke in depth about the harmful, real-world repercussions of negative representations of persons with disabilities as well as cyclic nature of such representations as they often are a result of the deep-rooted beliefs people continue to hold about persons with disabilities but also contribute to influencing these beliefs. The panelists also weighed in what access, or the lack access, to these media, physical and digital and how it has very direct consequences for representations of people with disabilities.
