Building capacity or enforcing normalcy? Engaging with disability scholarship in Africa

In contemporary South African academia, “community engagement” is a valued commodity. My work as a nondisabled white man with disability activists and as editor of the African Journal of Disability is viewed as good for my career, and as an appropriate form of engagement and empowerment. In this article, I engage critically with the question of the extent to which capacity building is simply about increasing capacity. I ask whether capacity building inevitably involves elements of disavowal of the experience and competencies of less powerful people. I compare capacity building to the enforcement of normalcy, a process which disability scholars criticize with justification. I ask whether it is possible in unequal social contexts to engage with the politics of voice without imposing a hegemonic narrative on nondominant voices. I suggest links between the politics of engaged scholarship and processes of domestication of troubling bodies and minds.