On Disability: Ableism, Development and Selective Solidarity

Tue 10 February

Newnham College

Please join members of the Margaret Anstee Centre for Global Studies for our latest event. In a wide-ranging lecture, Professor Maha Shuayb will reflect on the question of disability in theory and practice. She will explore how disability continues to be a marginalised field of study and politics, and how ableism persists as an unacknowledged axis of oppression, reinforced historically through eugenics, the medical model, and the complicity of the social sciences and humanities.

Drawing on personal narrative, and her decades-long educational and development research and work in Lebanon, the talk examines how different spaces reproduce ableist frameworks, and makes the case for disability justice as a transformative framework grounded in interdependent and intersectional coalition-building.

Prof Shuayb is based at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. She is a sociologist of education interested in investigating education inequalities and the politics of education reform. For the past 12 years she has been studying the evolving discourse around education of refugee children such as emergency as well as the education of refugees in longer-term settlements.

Prof Shuayb has conducted various and quantitative and qualitative longitudinal research. As a director of a research institute in the global south, she has become increasingly interested in understanding equitable research partnerships, knowledge production and research ethics between academic institutions and scholars in the global north and south.

Other areas of research interest include disability studies as well as history and civic education. She co-founded the Lebanese Association for History and the Disability Research and Advocacy Hub which are housed at the Centre for Lebanese Studies. Both initiatives aim to create collectives that bring together academics, practitioners and policy makers to work together on these themes. She is also a member of the Research for Equitable Access and Learning (REAL) Centre, University of Cambridge and the Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement.

All are welcome!

Cost: Free