Sunday, July 30, 2006
Thursday, July 27, 2006
HYD paper thoughts
disability law is becoming a household concept for alternative lawyering and in disability activism circles in india. if one looks at the discourse around disability in india in recent times one gets caught up in the catch-22 that surrounds the legal lingo and the public discourse. does disability become an official category because it is visibly a public issue or does it become a public issue (or pretend to be one) because there is an official discourse of disability?
this panel primarily focuses on the issue of disability and law in india from a human rights perspective. in my view, this prejudices any empirical study of disability as a discursive subject in india, because it forecloses the possibility of engaging with disability's fraught career in india by categorically announcing it as a concept with human rights dimensions. considering that the special theme for this conference is hinged on the troubled colonial legacy bequeathed to indian law, it is relevant that we direct our critical gaze to the birth and constitution of certain legal categories that we have come to receive in a taken-for-granted manner. so by beginning at the end and working backwards to the beginning or beginnings as the case may be, it is possible that we clarify the study of the study of the subject we are assuming already exists.
disability is now a legal category. disability is an important subject in the latest avtar of the development project. affirming the legal category status of disability is as important a process for the development project as is the process of establishing disability as a development category by making it legally viable .
this panel primarily focuses on the issue of disability and law in india from a human rights perspective. in my view, this prejudices any empirical study of disability as a discursive subject in india, because it forecloses the possibility of engaging with disability's fraught career in india by categorically announcing it as a concept with human rights dimensions. considering that the special theme for this conference is hinged on the troubled colonial legacy bequeathed to indian law, it is relevant that we direct our critical gaze to the birth and constitution of certain legal categories that we have come to receive in a taken-for-granted manner. so by beginning at the end and working backwards to the beginning or beginnings as the case may be, it is possible that we clarify the study of the study of the subject we are assuming already exists.
disability is now a legal category. disability is an important subject in the latest avtar of the development project. affirming the legal category status of disability is as important a process for the development project as is the process of establishing disability as a development category by making it legally viable .
Monday, July 24, 2006
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
paraskeue
The way I see it nothing should stop me from going all out and writing now. I have a few ideas, I think I know how to flesh them out and I have no logistic problems anymore, considering the new acquisition. I keep thinking of how Lenny said that most writers blocks are blocks in thinking, they are the expression of conceptual fuzziness. And yes I buy that. I suppose one issue is, while I am all enthusiastic to put down my ideas, I am not as efficient to write out the blocks in my thinking. If I don’t put them down I don’t have to deal with them, they don’t exist, and it’s a defense mechanism. The thinking cannot free itself because it fails to acknowledge the route that it will take to free itself. We are watching the third one dayer between India and the West Indies. We have just lost the ninth wicket. I have a very low gambit that is sinking lower in its cane chair. He has had quite a few long minutes of crowding his moustache into his mouth where the punishing teeth almost lose bite of them. The score is 245 for 9. This is the match that saw Rahul get out for naught as we took to bat on winning the toss.
Thursday, March 09, 2006
a glenn question
Why is there a discourse around disability in India?
What is the template that allows for an understanding/ intelligibility of disability as a concept in India, if as a term (therefore concept) its chronology can be traced to very specific turns in the development project?
What is the template that allows for an understanding/ intelligibility of disability as a concept in India, if as a term (therefore concept) its chronology can be traced to very specific turns in the development project?
spelling it out
if the intent of policy and other NGO ventures is to protect disabled people from different kinds of discrimination and ensure their rights then there has to be a clear understanding of what disability means and how a disabled person is identified. what is discrimination? can we assume that discrimination of disabled persons is a universally consistent phenomenon or experience?
Thursday, February 23, 2006
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
hermeneutics and archeology
Hermeneutics tries to find what meaning lives beneath the sentences that have been written, if not by God, at least by the past. We are to relive the past to see what can have been meant. Archeology is quite the opposite; it wants not to interpret the texts but to display the relationships between the sentences that explain why just these were uttered and others were not. (Hacking, 93)
chapter inklings
QUES: How is disability constituted in discourse in India and what does its genealogy look like?
1) profile the changing face of the discourse and so also what the concept has come to mean/ imply.
- Its long existence as an official category
- the NGO rhetoric and rights lingo
- its mobilization in the legal debates as a category of 'reservation' (quota to the Americans): education and employment issues
2)the relationship between development narrative (/project) and the current disability discourse. invocation of policy/ movements in the west- org reports, both international and local.
3)further reflection on point 2 will inevitably lead to the colonial links to the disab. discourse (inextricably linked to education discourse)
1) profile the changing face of the discourse and so also what the concept has come to mean/ imply.
- Its long existence as an official category
- the NGO rhetoric and rights lingo
- its mobilization in the legal debates as a category of 'reservation' (quota to the Americans): education and employment issues
2)the relationship between development narrative (/project) and the current disability discourse. invocation of policy/ movements in the west- org reports, both international and local.
3)further reflection on point 2 will inevitably lead to the colonial links to the disab. discourse (inextricably linked to education discourse)
and Hacking (HISTORICAL ONTOLOGY)
Discourse is, then, to be analyzed not in terms of who says what but in terms of the conditions under which those sentences will have a definite truth value, and hence are capable of being uttered. Such conditions will lie in the "depth" knowledge of the time. The vision leads us far from material conditions of the production of sentences. (Hacking, 79)
...attempting to understand how objects constitute themselves in discourse must be a central topic, not exactly of the theory of knowledge, but of what I would call historical ontology. (Hacking, 98)
...attempting to understand how objects constitute themselves in discourse must be a central topic, not exactly of the theory of knowledge, but of what I would call historical ontology. (Hacking, 98)