Politicising Polio: Disability, Civil Society and Civic Agency in Sierra Leone

by Diana Szïntï

Overview

This book examines disability in post-war Sierra Leone. Its protagonists are polio-disabled people living in the nation’s capital of Freetown, organizing themselves as best as they can in a state without welfare. There is little concrete support for people with disabilities in a country where the government is struggling with the competing requirements of the international community, demanding - in exchange for its support - good standards of democracy and the maintenance of a free market economy. To what extent is the Human Rights framework of the disability movement effective in protecting the polio-disabled and what are the limitations of this framework? Diana Szántó’s detailed ethnography reveals, through many real-life examples, the vulnerability of disabled people living in the intersections of poverty, informality and disability activism. At the same time, it also tells about the many ways the polio-disabled community is transforming vulnerability into strength.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789811361104
Publisher:	Springer Nature Singapore
Publication date:	11/15/2019
Edition description:	1st ed. 2020
Pages:	313
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Diana Szántó is a cultural anthropologist, independent researcher and activist. She worked for more than 20 years as the leader of a Hungarian-based NGO, creating opportunities, channels and incentives for intercultural understanding, learning and co-existence. Her research focuses on urban anthropology, migration and social movements, and the intersection of international development, social justice and health. In recent years she has been teaching medical anthropology and qualitative research methodology at the Health and Community program of the School for International Training.

Table of Contents

Part I: Staging a play (A Critical Ethnography of Disability)
1. The Set: Parallel Worlds (Sierra Leone on the World Stage)
2. The Cast Onstage and Off: Polio and Beggars on Wheels
3. Writing the Play: Creating Disability and DPOs
4. Scripts about disability. Stories from the polio-houses
Part II: After the Play? (An Ethnographic Critique of Project Society)
5. Discrimination as Structural Violence
6. Perceptions, representations and coloniality
7. Expulsions: Disability, Power, Land, and Citizen’s Rights
8. Hope.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“This is an author who knows how to unsettle the basic meaning of a condition and to invite us to rethink what we think we know. Brilliant work. And deeply unsettling even when confronted with beauty.” (Saskia Sassen, Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, author of Expulsions)

“So much more than a study on disabilities. Szántó takes us deep into understanding urban poverty and the local workings of the international humanitarian aid regime. Rich in detail and insight, a rare and profoundly human book that ought to be read in wider circles than just by the specialists.” (Mats Utas, Professor in Cultural Anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden)

“This is a detailed, anthropological exploration of polio and its aftermath in Sierra Leone, that covers so much – disability, institutionalisation, development charities, self-help and radicalism – and reads like a novel, it is so endlessly fascinating. I wish it has been available to read before I went to Freetown!” (Tom Shakespeare, Professor of Disability Research at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine)