Merging critical disability theory with Post-Colonial hybridity theory: a widened lens and implications

This article will briefly introduce the traditional disability studies project through the social model of disability and how its inherent theoretical limitations became the impetus to perpetuate a need to adopt critical disability theory (CDT) to expand the intellectual arsenal of the discipline. Being a reflexive inquiry that resists domination that oppresses people with disabilities, CDT’s reach produced work in conversation with other areas of critical social thought and inspired this paper to explore how post-colonial work–particularly Homi Bhabha’s hybridity theory–can be incorporated into CDT’s paradigmatic views of power. This paper concludes by addressing some of the debates and cultural implications that stem from conceptually merging CDT and post-colonial hybridity theory to frame how it can reimagine the possibilities and trajectories of a global disability movement.