My work here seeks to understand the way disability is employed to work towards the construction of normative subject-making in the field of International Experiential and Service Learning and Global Citizen Education (IESL and GCE). I theorize the way disability is constructed and responded to in IESL and GCE programs through interventions in the lives of disabled people. I explore how certain bodies are imagined as needing protection, care and interventions and other bodies are imagined as entitled to do that labour. I argue that these pedagogical processes reproduce certain subjectivities under Capital, and I query the ways in which the imagined Southern disabled body is integral in constituting Northerners' able-bodied global citizenship identity.

 

This study takes up two broad fields of inquiry. Firstly, I ask how disability is utilized in the broad mainstream neoliberal field of IESL and GCE programs as a depoliticized and individualized fixed identity embodied in an imagined Southern othered body that can be cared for, intervened on and helped to constitute the imagined able-bodied, caring, benevolent, and helping global citizen from the North. I then work through alternative ways of imagining the Southern disabled other, through interviews with Northern student participants and mentors.