Friday 18 October 2019 (15:30-17:00)

University of Amsterdam

Roeterseilandcomplex (REC) B3.09

Disability provides a useful window through which to examine divisions that have emerged in feminist/gender/sexuality scholarship in the last forty years over equality, difference, and intersectionality. On the one hand, the disability movement has fought for equal rights and same treatment as citizens before the law. More recently, disability scholars and advocates have argued for disability as difference, which must be recognized, and hence, for the need for a more interactive, interdependent, and intersectional theory. Using international documents on disability by disability scholars and advocates, Barbara Arneil examines the standard exclusionary definition of disability as articulated by key modern political thinkers as well as the emerging alternative to these binaries which require us to rethink disability in relationship to the principles of equality and difference.

Barbara Arneil is Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She is interested in the areas of identity politics and the history of political thought. She has published a number of books including John Locke and America (OUP, 1996), Feminism and Politics (Blackwell,1999), and Diverse Communities: the Problem with Social Capital (CUP, 2006). Most recently she published a book entitled Domestic Colonies with OUP (2017), which won APSA’s 2018 David Easton Prize and CPSA’s 2018 C.B. MacPherson Prize and  BCPSA’s 2018 Weller Prize for the best book in political theory from each organization. Prof. Arneil is currently President of the Canadian Political Science Association.