ABSTRACT

People with disabilities are the largest, most marginalized and resource-poor social group in the world, and the majority live in rural areas of the Asia Pacific region (WHO and WB 2011). Despite this reality, people with disabilities continue to be invisible within Southeast Asian discourses of poverty, regional integration and theories of development. This chapter examines how the economic integration of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) into a single regional market – and into global markets, networks of production and trade – intersects with specific forms of disability-based disadvantage in the region. These globalizing and neoliberal economic transformations are characterized by insecurity and material hardship for many workers (Wilton and Schuer 2006, 188). In the global South there is little knowledge of the impacts of these changes, particularly on people with disabilities (Eide and Ingstad 2011). We do know that industrial capitalism and contemporary economies are geared toward an able-body-mind norm, however, and that this has resulted in the systematic exclusion of people with disabilities (Gleeson 1999). Critical geographies must examine how ASEAN economic integration, as an example of globalized and neoliberal regional development, can provide people with disabilities with a living wage, job security, dignity and meaningful social inclusion.