International Disability Rights Advocacy: Languages of Moral Knowledge and Institutional Critique

This book explores the disability rights movement and its influence on the global power apparatus of disability-related knowledge. It demonstrates how disability advocacy shapes the way we categorize, classify, distribute, manipulate, and transform knowledge. It also shows how the movement criticizes attempts to streamline it while relying on and contesting the authority of international human rights infrastructure.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 198 pages
Publication date: 26 September 2022
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

This book offers valuable insights into the interconnected disability rights community and its political endeavors in the present day. By examining the ways in which disability rights activism contributes to the formation of a global power apparatus centered around disability-related knowledge, it sheds light on how disability advocacy shapes our understanding, classification, distribution, manipulation, and transformation of knowledge. By delving into the mutually constitutive relationships between practical moral knowledge held by international disability advocates and formal disability rights norms codified in international treaties like the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), the author demonstrates that the disability rights movement is primarily critical of attempts to streamline it. At the same time, cross-cultural disability rights advocacy necessitates the portrayal of uniformity to establish its global legitimacy among international stakeholders and maintain a shared meta-code that clearly identifies its objectives and methods. As an epistemic community, disability rights advocates simultaneously rely on and challenge the authority of international human rights infrastructure and its language.

Proving that disability rights advocates play a significant role in shaping a global culture that establishes what is deemed morally and legally "right" and "wrong," thereby influencing the human body and the body politic, this book holds immense interest for scholars and students engaged in critical disability studies, sociology of knowledge, legal and linguistic anthropology, social inequality, and social movements.

Weight: 328g
Dimension: 155 x 234 x 17 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780367686444