Abstract
The academic discipline of disability studies resulted in the establishment of a new paradigm, with Western scholars problematizing disability as discrimination rooted in personal, interpersonal and institutional processes of exclusion and oppression, which is endemic to any society. Theoretical approaches to disability have engaged in critically unpacking structures of categorical exclusion in the form of ableism, normalcy and construction of disabled people as the other. Thus, interdisciplinary disability studies continuously attempts to unravel different ways in which disability is conceptualized and its impact on the daily lived experiences of disabled people at the community level. The introduction to this volume endeavours to lay out the debates around disability and the ways in which disability studies as an academic discipline have addressed the concerns of disabled people. Further the chapter tries to weave together the papers in this volume by examining the relevance of the Western perspectives on disability in contextualizing the concept of disability from the vantage point of social, cultural, political and legal discourses in India that have an impact on the way in which disability is defined, interpreted and experienced.
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Ghosh, N. (2016). Introduction: Interrogating Disability in India. In: Ghosh, N. (eds) Interrogating Disability in India. Dynamics of Asian Development. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-3595-8_1
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