3 Review(s)

This book provides unprecedented critical and interdisciplinary explorations of the complex dynamics, transitions and intersectionalities operating between disability and poverty, with a special focus on rural areas- a relationship too often simplified and misunderstood. Reporting on long term ethnographic work in Guatemala and prioritising the voices and knowledge of disabled people and their families, the text offers a refined critical analysis and theoretical repositioning of the disability/poverty/rurality nexus. Employing a broad theoretical framework including Critical Disability Studies and Postcolonial theory, the book opens up discussions on a broad range of interconnected themes traversing conceptual, spatial, historical, embodied, spiritual, racial, sexual and gendered terrains. These include among others: disability and poverty definitions and discourses, relationships, disabled families, livelihoods, education, health and rehabilitation, bodies, community, migration, (post)conflict, colonialism and geopolitics. It challenges established (often imposed and rarely questioned) discourses and practices emerging from the global North and contests issues of (re)presentation and coloniality including within 'development'. The book contributes new and seldom charted reflections for further debate, indispensable to the emerging disability and development discourse, research and practice.