Disability studies and development geography: Empirical connections, theoretical resonances, and future directions

Scholarship that jointly considers disability and development has advanced over the past decade to include greater attention to the shared histories of colonialism, racism, and the disability category and the relationships among developmental states, ideas about disability, and development projects. A handful of geographers have also directly addressed disability and development or disability in the “developing world” context. This paper reviews current scholarship and highlights three areas where disability studies and development geography share under‐explored empirical connections and theoretical resonances: the disability–poverty nexus, interventions in the name of improvement and cure, and mobility and migration. Yet bringing greater attention to disability in development must be done carefully, given the fraught nature of the disability category. As such, this paper also considers how development geographers might contribute to the literature while accounting for the ways in which ideas about what constitutes “disability” and what constitutes “development” emerge through sets of processes and relationships.