you can hear me through the mic okay so ready sha okay all right hello everybody I'm Dr Melisa Christie I'm director of women and gender in International Development here at Virginia Tech at the center for international research education and development Shia over there in the corner and you may have gotten emails from is the graduate assistant who supports this discussion series she's a graduate student at the school of engineering at Virginia Tech so welcome to the hybrid women and gender in I
nternational Development discussion series we have people on zoom and people in the room here and we're happy that you could all join us virtually or in person for today's discussion featuring Dr ni Ariel Canal as guest speaker so I'd like to take a moment to thank our sponsors for today's event so our co-sponsors with CED that's how we say our Center for international research education development are the women's and gender studies program the department of English and the C College of liberal
arts and human Sciences diversity equity and inclusion so we've organized today's discussion with Dr sua Bia please stand up for a moment who's actually the organizer of her visit of our speaker's visit and she is an assistant Dr Bia is an assistant professor of rhetoric and professional and technical writing at Virginia Tech she specializes in transnational disaster studies feminist rhetorics non-western rhetorical traditions and Community engagement so this event is a part of several things s
o we're part of um women's month so I actually would like I know Bonnie's there director of women's and gender studies here just stand up for a second because like everybody's here okay there's women's and gender studies and then Anna Lam mascal the co-director of women Center is here and this is part of women's M that they organize so a lot of events the whole month um and you can find that online and it's also a special event for the Virginia Tech principles of community week which is this wee
k and I'd like to read okay people on Zoom please mute yourself so we don't hear noise in this room thank you Andria of each person to express thoughts and opinions freely we encourage open expression within a climate of Civility sensitivity and mutual respect we affirm the value of human diversity because it enriches our lives and the university we acknowledge and respect our differences while affirming our common Humanity we reject all forms of prejudice and discrimination including those base
d on age color disability gender gender identity gender expression national origin political affiliation race religion no no I'm going political affiliation yeah race religion sexual orientation and Veteran status we take individual and Collective responsibility for helping to eliminate bias and discrimination and for increasing our own understanding of these issues through education training and interaction with others and finally as Virginia Tech we pledge our Collective commitment to these pr
inciples in the spirit of the Virginia Tech motto UT prum that I may serve so um and I believe shria you were putting that link in the chat for people on Zoom okay so all right now so additionally this week this discussion is just a few days before the start of Virginia Tech first accessibility awareness week which will be next week and I would like to draw attention to that so sha can you put the link to that also you already did she's ahead of me always okay all right so just from their first
section of their website says the inaugural Virginia Tech accessibility awareness week is scheduled for March 18th through 22nd 2024 modeled after global accessibility Awareness Day the goal of this week is to provide learning opportunities and resources that Engage The Campus Community to think discuss learn and take action regarding digital and physical accessibility so they have an amazing calendar of events for next week okay now I always like to say who's registered because it's kind of fun
so as of this morning we had 133 people registered for today's event so in addition to many diverse folks in the United States we have people who join us from other countries including it's long list Nepal Australia Bangladesh Mongolia Sri Lanka Switzerland Kenya and Zimbabwe besides students faculty and staff from Virginia Tech we have folks joining us from lots of other universities like Katmandu University Trion University Cornell University DACA University Etc and NOS like beautiful hearts
women's development innovators emerge care Nepal and more welcome to all so please know that our event will be recorded the zoom event will be recorded and available on our website later takes us about a week sometimes two to get the transcription and then it'll be a permanently on Virginia Tech VT works on the library site so um for the participants on Zoom If You by staying on now you're consenting to be recorded but you can turn off your camera if you don't want your image to be recorded okay
so next before introducing the speaker I'd like to invite you to reflect on Virginia Tech's land and and labor recognition so I'm going to read the short version but it is a longer version is available online also and that'll be um also in the chat so the land acknowledgement Virginia Tech acknowledges that we live in work on the talo monan people's Homeland and we recognize their continued relationships with their lands and waterways we further acknowledge that the moral land grant College Act
of 1862 enabled the Commonwealth of Virginia to finance and found Virginia Tech through the forc removal of native nations from their lands in California and other areas in the west okay our labor recognition Virginia Tech acknowledges that its blackburg campus sits partly on land that was previously the site of the Smithfield and Solitude plantations owned by members of the Preston family between the 1770s and 1860s the Prestons and other local white families that own Parcels of what became Vi
rginia Tech also owned hundreds of enslaved people in SL black people generated resources at Finance Virginia Tech's predecessor institution the Preston and Olan Institute and they worked on the construction of its building okay now some brief housekeeping notes this is going to last approximately 45 minutes our speaker presentation will be 20 to 25 minutes followed by about 20 minutes of discussion and Q&A with the audience all the participants will be muted and actually don't know if we have t
he ability to do that um so please try to keep yourselves muted um I know we can mute one on one by one but it's not a webinar it's actually set up as a zoom meeting so um as always in order for a discussion to be as rich as it can be we need everyone to be respectful and treat all participants with kindness and respect and without discriminatory Behavior so after our speaker's presentation people can raise their hands and by that I mean on Zoom can raise your hands or or here in person um for f
or to ask questions of the speaker and people joining via Zoom you can raise your hand through virtual buttons and we'll ask you to unmute yourself however you can at any time during the talk write in if you're on Zoom write in your question in the chat and we'll be transferring those to a Google Document and then I can read those at the end and in the order that they came in unless one person ask 10 questions and then I skip around but um okay so please wait your turn to speak so we can avoid i
nterruptions and maintain netiquette so again this is being recorded so you will have access to it on our website in advance I'd like to ask you to please fill out the survey that will take you two minutes at the end it really is helpful and now finally what you actually want Dr ni arel Canal is an assistant professor at tribon University in Nepal she's a passionate educator feminist maybe you need to be here feminist researcher and activist with over two decades of experience she Blends activis
m research and teaching with a focus on social justice her research spans gender and disability armed conflict motherhood violence against women and reproductive Health notably her work on gender-based violence and women with disabilities informs policy advocacy in Nepal today she will talk about Nepal's transition from a least developed to a developing country and how the plight of women and girls with disabilities there remains unchanged her presentation will explore how their experiences are
shaped by ableism patriarchy and intersecting barriers despite Nepal's ratification of International Convention these marginalized groups continue to be overlooked in legislation and policies Dr Canal's research activism spanning two decades highlights issues such as gender-based violence reproductive health and systemic barriers faced by these individuals and I I want to say that there was a great article written u based on interviews with her that just came out the day before yesterday in BT n
ews so um thank you for participating in those that interview so the title of her talk today is intersections of vulnerabilities multiple marginalized experiences of women and girls with disabilities in Nepal so please welcome Dr ni AR can thank you very much for a very very warm welcome am I audible to you all so it's it's a great honor and privilege for me uh you know uh women academic teaching in a public university in a developing country Nepal having this platform in world's one of the lead
ing academic institutions it's I feel very emotional that I am standing here today so thank you all who have joined physically and also who have joined virtually and I would like to take this moment also to thank Dr G Maria Alisa bnie uh Dr Meara from sociology department and all the ADN staff like a lot of people are behind this to make it possible that I here today so I thank each and every one of you to make this possible so uh I am a teacher who teaches very long classes in Nepal my classes
starts at 6:30 a.m. and I teach until 10 a.m. sometimes the class is continuous so Maria Alisa has told me she would give me some heads up so that I keep it within the time because it would be very valuable also to have more interaction from you so I'm very much looking forward to your questions because this presentation that I making is happening at such an opportune moment that I am planning to write a book based on my two decades of continuous research in this area and I have been meaning to
write this book since last 10 years but I kept on getting into other things never happened so this talk making this talk here at Virginia Tech is like ultimate push that I needed like okay this is a priority so it I'm very excited so I'm going to start so today I would be talking about my positionality and I would be talking a little bit of contextualizing um women with disability and disability issues in Nepal but I will keep it very very short but I feel it's important that we understand the c
ontext so my talk would be organized around three area of research that I have done on women with disability in different point of time so I take my research that I have done over these years as a reference point to uh Advocate also the issues and also present what findings that I have generated so while I am saying these things I not making a claim that I have done this work singlehandedly because I have been very which I'll be talking in positionality that how I fit into the whole picture of t
his activist research or work that I consider myself doing and then I'll be talking about the way forward so this is very important for me to share that I come from a family with disability I wouldn't elaborate that story too much because it's not the time in the place so having that story as a part of my life always pushed me to understand the issues of disability because while growing up I saw so much stigma and suffering associated with disability so when I was 18 19 years old together with m
y young friends studying in college in Katmandu we started volunteering for blind organization our job was like we would bring out the bulk of books uh we would read it out uh record it in the casset and give it back to the blind people because in those days the technology of audible books and you know talking technology was not ready available so that is how I started uh getting engaged with a persons with disabilities so that entry point as a volunteer also made me connected to disability comm
unity in Nepal as a you know a very strong part of the community so that also opened up opportunity for me to work as a in enumerator for some very bner beginning initial research that was being done by other people International organizations in very early 2000 so right at the cops of me wanting to write a thesis on something catchy something that is deliver me a job what happened was 18yearold young women with partial uh visual impairment she shared about her story of continuously being violat
ed by her head teacher in for six years in a residential school uh inclusive School so having heard that story and having met her and I searched for the research you know whether there are any studies that is being done on women with disability and their experience of violence so I didn't find any there was some formative research being done in Nepal during 1997 1998 but disil women's were not participants and the discussion of that disabled women can be uh you know victimized or victim of gende
r based violence was not yet registered so I then found a topic that I really wanted to do research on and that also made me engaged in the process of Seeking Justice supporting being as part of a team led by other women with disability friends we went to the courts we were writing petitions we were going places so this has been like my work with women with disability is very much best on the personal friendships and collaborations and over the years we have become you know very close and I have
found myself in a position of a researcher who I see my main work is to develop the evidence for the issues of activism raised by the women with disability Community because for the activism you need evidence as a backup so I find often myself in that position so after this I'll quickly share about Nepal I would keep it very very short Nepal or most of you would know it's in between India and China it's a very small country sandwich between two growing economies of you know Asia so and and Nepa
l is a very Multicultural country 142 ethnic groups and this is important to remember also because experience of disability is very much shaped by also the different identities other than the disability and women in Nepal despite the progress we have done still considered secondary citizens why because women cannot still confer directly their citizenship to their children it's important that you know they they have father and despite active contributions that we have women have made in all major
social movements when it comes to sharing the power you know getting the fruits of those movement often they are left out so but having said that it doesn't mean Nepal hasn't had made progress in gender issues at all like if we see especially in an area of politics we have made a huge leap since 2008 by reserving at least 33% of seats for women so that has brought us a really remarkable number of 41% of local rep uh uh 31% of women elected representatives in the local government so in my abstra
ct I talk about the LDC graduation why because Nepal until now is considered a low uh least developed country least developed country so it is in its Preparatory plan for graduating from LDC category to DC category and it is based on certain indicat s that I show in slides and when I look at the lives of the marginalized people in Nepal especially a community like women with disability I am concerned because this graduation is happening without addressing the persisting social inequalities and I
also believe that the set quantitative indicators that has been set for the graduation criteria is incomplete with should consider also whether the country has been able to reduce the inequalities or not in order to consider it so that is the reason why I brought the issue of DC category because Nepal is going to lose a lot of privilege in terms of Aid funding in terms of support in terms of also the privilege for the trade uh benefits for getting lower tariffs for you know imports and exports
so it's a bit of a concern conern for me as a you know researcher that this DC category is just happening in it very limited set indicators and I feel that Nepal is not yet there yet so disability in Nepal I would quickly like to say that the numbers reported has been consistently low and it is very much different from how disability Community Nepal in Nepal claim their because often disability community in Nepal based on the wh reference that in lower income countries where there's high level o
f poverty it is more likely that there will be 50% of the total population as disabled but census is Nepal consistently we see that the lower uh report seems to be happening so one of the reason I think is very much related to same and stigma associated with with disability and also there's a diverse estimate in terms of number of women with disability in male the official statistics so that the number of uh uh women uh is uh you know lower than the men but Global Studies shows that in lower and
middle income countries it women are more likely to be disabled and there are also gender related factors like for instance issues of gender best violence and all that that can increase the prevalence of disability in women than men but again the data tell a very different story so that also brings us to the point to have a very good reliable sensus data there's so much work that needs to be done in that area so talking about women with disabilities in Nepal I see that you know uh being a count
ry with patriarchal ideology and practice and also shaped by very much other intersectional identities which I'll be talking a little bit more elaborating on my findings related studies and Nepal has ratified convention relating to disability as well that guarantees the right of people with disability and Nepal also has ratified s which guarantees the rights of women so in terms of ratifications and commitment to the global Community Nepal has been able to do that and also in National policies N
epal has been able to make good progress in revising the law to make it disability friendly and women friendly and gender sensitive but in practice and in implementation there's still a lot of Gap going on which is very much what my research is about so women with disabilities uh so I argue that they're one of the most marginalized and vulnerable group and my initial experience with engaging with research relating to women with disability when in early 2000 came with the experience of being it's
it was a left out issue on both factors so Women rights organizations were not engaging with disability issues and disability organizations were not engaging with the uh you know uh gender issue so it was a neglected issue so now as I mentioned I will be focusing on three different areas of my research so first area of my research is gender based violence experienced by by women with disability and I've done three research in that area I've also done other little research but based on those thr
ee research I want to share with you what uh I want to share and again I won't be able to cover all the findings I'm just going to give a very short snapshot of uh that only so because I worked on the issue of my first research the thesis I wrote was on sexual violence and one thing I encountered was very much of the notion of asexual image of women with disability women with disability in Nepali Society was seen as someone who has no sexuality or who has no sexual need or and then B was that ki
nd of understanding among people that sexual violence was very much Associated by attractiveness bodily attractiveness so because of the asexual image women with disability were not recognized and considered as a you know priority areas for all kind of activism that was going on to combat the gender based violence so in my research you know I uh looked into the lifetime experience of sexual violence among blind women I had gone to interview in a residential hostel where women from different part
s of Nepal were living in the central you know capital city of Nepal they were studying there learning music so they were my participants so I asked them about their lifetime experience of violence and 70% of them reported that they had experienced and the disturbing factor and not so so uh unknown for us as we all work working in the area of gender based violence know that it is from the people who are closest to women it's within the family it's within the community so many majority of the per
petrators were people who were known to you know women themselves so and majority of the instances of violations are actually happened in the school like the case I talk to you about and also there was also a violence that was committed by Blind Men but it was there was a sense of discomfort and difficulty to talk about because it would be considered as you know maybe not so good thing to talk about as it would create a problem within the movement so sometimes some leading figures within the dis
ability movement themselves where the perpetrator so it was a challenging situations so another study that I did uh I did this study with the Nepal disabled women's Association I was also accidentally their first program officer they had received a small amount of funding they were just setting up their office and uh we had received some funding and I was also doing this research and I was also serving as a program officer and it was a very fascinating time for me to do this research now this st
udy also showed that the prevalence of violence is very very high and later I would be talking about that when we talk about the women with disability and gender based violence it is required that how we Define the violence has to be bested on the women's experience because it's a different kind of experience so what we see as a Act of a violence can can be different from for women with disability so that is why for instance you know issues such as being denied for the basic needs from the famil
y being denied from the education so that kind of pattern of violence was very very visible and Family Violence was very very visible so this study I did as a part of a multicountry study that was happening in Bangladesh India and Nepal we were looking at three categor stories of women women with disability we were looking at also sex workers we were looking at uh lesbian women so I was looking at the data from Nepal on women with disability and this work I was engaged because of my prior resear
ch experience in that so you can quite see that the nature of violence that uh diversity of violence is very also very much there so uh emotional violence seems to have the very highest level of reporting and then physical violence and then the sexual violence so sometimes the reporting of the sexual violence in research can be very much shaped by the context very much shaped by the positionality of the researcher how much of the trust is between the participant and the researcher so consistentl
y the level of sexual violence is always reported consistently low everywhere So based on these resource I argue that when we look into the gender based violence and women with disability we will need to redefine what counts as a violence against women because the emotional abuse that we generally understand could be a very different kind of experience for women with disability like I tend to find in my research mostly about being isolated being ignored verbally attack and physical abuse very mu
ch prevalent in family family is Ultimate Safety Net in country like Nepal where we don't have a very strong welfare system where government is not very strong enough to provide uh be a guardian for those marginalized so family is the ultimate saf n but sadly for you know women with disability it is the family that they are not safe in because of the same and stigma associated with disability so often they can be restrained deprived of food and water sometimes they are tied you know so and also
sexual activities and I talk about Force sterilization because especially in Nepal unfortunately I have never done very deep research on women with intellectual disability but every time I've done gender based violence because because of my challenge of doing resar and having because my methods are more more interview bu but I have done interviews with parents and caregivers of intellectual disability so it's a huge problem there is a force sterilization of women with intellectual disability bec
ause it's you know parents often take that decision without consent to avoid any possible pitfalls that could arise out of sexual violence and unwanted pregnancy and the same associated with it so now I'm talking about the second area of my research here I have got a quote from a very inspiring young uh women leader named Sarita lisani she heads an organization that I often collaborate with uh we do a training together workshop together and I'm going to quickly translate what she writes over her
e so she says that uh the sexuality of women with disability is s to be seen very differently from normal women it is seen as if women with disability does do not have any sexual needs or if they express it it is as if it is a disaster for the society or something so I find this very powerful because you know there's a very thriving advocacy currently going on in Nepal about sexual reproductive health so in 2013 when I finished the research project when I wrote a grant proposal sometime 2012 I s
aw a lot of advocacy on sexual and reproductive Health rights that the women with disability were really leading but we didn't have any data to push the advocacy push the policy change so I collaborated with them and then said what if I do research in this area and then we can bring something out of it so that is how I happen to uh get this Fellowship that allowed me some time and research resources to do research on sexual and reproductive health of motherhood experience of women with disabilit
y so the context of that was in 2009 a National Organization working with women with disability in Nepal called ndwa they had filed the public interest litigation uh on the grounds that women with disabilities are denied from right to reproductive health so then Supreme Court also issued a directive orders to ensure that the reproductive Health Services in the hospital has to be disability friendly so after that the main struggle was to help us understand first also train the healthcare workers
how we can give uh disability friendly services in one hand the issue was very much about the physical accessibility but on the other hand as a sociolog sociologist I saw the deeper problem very much was about about how motherhood was seen in relation to women with disability because the position of dis people women with disability or people with disability is very much someone who needs to be care for right their position in the society someone who needs care cuz they are unable because of the
discourse of you know ableism defines them as somebody who is not able to care for themselves so they need to be cared for and then I saw that when women with disability started getting married you know and they wanted to embrace the motherhood as well and then there was a lot of resistance from the medical community there was lot of discriminatory the stories of discriminatory behaviors was coming about because at that same time the friends that I had started working in 2000 they had gotten mar
ried they were having babies so they were my very friends who were going to the hospital and coming back with stories that the doctor said to me that why you have to be a mother how you can take care of a child I mean you are not able to take care of yourself I mean you know you should rethink this decision so those kind of stories were coming in so I did this research blend of both quantitative and qualitative approach and I had a lot of stor of women sharing the stigma of not being considered
a good Mothers or not being able to be a good provider because of this concept of abolism so one of the major data that came out of my research was that the disability friendly infrastructure best on experience of women with disability was majority like that and in Nepal it is still like that I wouldn't say it hasn't been progress we have had uh now we have made a directive for the health care providers about the disability sensitive you know healthc care Behavior but in terms of the change it's
still very slow and there's still so much work that needs to be done now the final area of research I hope I still have some time left so institutional and policy barrier so I engaged in this area of research um in the midst of the corona I started this 2021 study the whole year while the covid was going on we did mostly the work through virtual medium and then 2022 so this both of the studies were actually commissioned to me by two leading disabled women organization one was blind women Associ
ation of Nepal I also wrote the funding together so that you know we we get that funding and then the second one one was commissioned by Nepal disabled women's Association the the part of the both research was very much based on the policy analysis so which later I would be talk about why I call it a institutional and uh policy barrier so I would like to take a bit of a Time first to talk about the barriers because one of the thing that I want to talk about is also the barriers are very much int
ersectional so the very definition of uncpd which is like the main International Convention that frames the disabilities It Centers the definition of barrier connecting with the disability it is not the physical aspect of disability that makes people disabled but the physical aspect interacting with the barriers that are out there that creates the disability experience so I'm going to be a little bit uh faster so that we respect the time so barriers can be both visible and invisible So based on
This research I have identified four main barriers so social barriers are basically about the prejudices and stereotypes and discriminations that people feel physical barriers are more invis more visible than social barriers it's very much about the natural and man-made environment and the another one which I found fascinating to work on during this experience of doing this research is communication barrier how we communicate how we put out the information online offline face to face and how acc
essible it is and then last but not the least institutions uh institutional and policy barrier so that was the area of my research the third area of research that I'm presenting on so I argue that um these barriers don't work in isolation there barriers are deeply connected to one another so in order to visualize it together with my student we worked very hard to create this infographic that helps us to understand that how it intersects and interact with one another so and also while analyzing t
he policy I was driven by my main question was who makes the policy or women with disability who sit on the table that makes the decision on women with disability that was the driven question that I helped me push on that study and I realize you know it's never women with disability in Nepal have never been in that position in the table to make policy themselves which I'll be telling you where are the gaps so my main argument is that all kinds of policy on people with disability persons with dis
ability are working on intersection of ableism and patriarchy patriarchy part I would skip it because we all are well versed in it but aism I would like to take some time to explain so it is very much about an ideology that saves people's thinking that persons with disability are less than P person without disability so four main categories are there so because how we Define normal and natural and another is person with disabilities are not seen as a ideal citizen how citizenship is defined and
another is that the idea of uh independent which is a very much of an irony that humans are never independent you know humans are interdependent nobody can live their life independently so this idea that the independence the definition of Independence is very much shaped by the eism and the force separation So based on this perspective I in the policy barrier I mean one way of my data generation was very simple what I did was I simply did the word search on policies that were made for gender equ
ality and also I did the word search and policy that was made for persons with disability and I came across a very interesting finding because when I looked at the policy that is designed for the gender equality to fer gender equality women with disability were mostly invisible and I find it important because if you don't name it in the policy it's never going to come up in the implementation they have to be named they have to be identified otherwise the logic usually given when we talk about th
ese kind of issues it's mean for everyone but it's not like that so that is why I think or another thing quite interestingly is that there's still no commission and I looked into the representation of women with disability in all major policymaking uh you know missions that work on the policies no representation at all there's not a single representation on very newly formed National inclusion commission not a single person with disability not a single per women with disability so now I'm going
to finish it so I think we all working on these issues in Nepal we really need to push towards formation of commission on persons with disability very much ensuring the active participation of women with disability from diverse background and introspection all representations on different commissions and last but not the least in theal we have had a very long experience of dealing with cist discrimination I would say the problem hasn't solved entirely but now it's more uh you know easier to deal
with it because it has been criminalized through the through the uh introduction of the act because any Act of cbas discrimination is now a criminal act that you can report to the police and they can be arrested so one of the recommendation I also have suggested is that the discrimination against persons with disability also needs to be criminalized because there's so much discrimination that they face so thank you all very much for listening to the talk and I look forward to the question quest
ions and the comments thank you thank you so much so okay um away okay so we have two mics here I don't have access to the zoom so I can't see if there's been any no message okay so um if people would like to speak this room is miked so people on Zoom will hear you without the microphone but if you don't have loud voice it will help other people in the room here if you're using the microphone so um please raise your hand and we have plenty of people here to have a Q&A this this is a discussion S
eries so it's not just questions it's discussions so please I look forward to hearing we have a lot of people here interested in this topic so um are you raising your hand no no you're just pointing okay here we have somebody okay and maybe say say your name or something so okay sure I'm gonna you can thank you hi thank you thank you for the talk that was very interesting uh my name is Roa Sharma I just have a simple question since you mentioned um disability is or disability discrimination is n
ot criminalized in Nepal what about the uh persons with Disabilities Act are they what does the law say when you discriminate against somebody uh let's say an employment you did not hire somebody um based on their disability a little bit louder I'm not you don't hear meing okay I'll repeat my question so U my question is is are there the law the persons with Disabilities Act of Nepal does it not punish individuals or let's say employers when they don't hire people based on their disability like
what is what what is the criminal action against those individuals so thank you so much very important question so I we uh I one to quickly summarize your question you wanted to know about the provision for the employment for the people with disability and also the Discrimination associated with the employment sure yes okay so um there are provisions and also there are Provisions in the disability related act and also there's provision in the Civil Service Act and also the uh act relating to uh
educ ation uh there is a provision that persons with disability are given reservation like there's a currently a 5% reservation that people with disability can compete for the Civil Service examination so some of my friends have now gone and becoming you know the government officers but there are still some Provisions that are in the Employment Act or economic act which I have done in my report which I'm happy to share that there are certain Provisions in which persons with disability disability
resulting out of while doing the job they could lose the job because there is a criteria of physical fitness that can exclude people with disability still for certain professions like that was a time where women with disability students with disability who are women cuz nursing is very lucrative uh subject to study in Nepal women with disability May denied entry in nursing schools because of the criteria of the physical fitness so even with a very minor impairment for instance a slight limp in
the leg or maybe minor Vision related they were denied entry because there's a clause that says that the students studying nursing should be physically fit so there are still discriminatory positions that you know Works to exclude people yeah thank you for the question thank you I just want to go ahead and read one of the comments on the chat so one person um responding to something that you had said I think we'll all know what she's talking about said I had that happen to me too my provider off
ered a hisy direct to me and I'm only 22 um I think I think have a loud watch hi uh my name is pitra um I was kind of curious to know um you kind of include the disab disable women in your research um what what was the criteria of the disability in your research just just include the physical disability or you touch base on a little bit on the intellectual disability too but what about other major disability like mental disability and other and I have heard in some of the during during my childh
ood in the uh Village that um majorly disabled women uh with mental disability have uh some um kind of story about the sexual harassment so have you included those women's in your research and how hard it was to um you know take an interview with their parents or that there there could be lots of errors in answer of course but how did you handle with that how did you deal with that thank you very interesting question uh depends on different resarch that I have done but like I said earlier in my
presentation despite you know wanting to be very inclusive I acknowledge my bias that I always had difficulty accessing uh women with intellectual disability uh some studies were very much specific on a particular Community like I shared that my thesis was just on the blind women only but other forthcoming research I had done on women with visual impairment also the hearing impairment and the physical disability so I struggled best on you know the type of disability with the ground women because
I had a very good uh friendship and all that it was easier with the de Community it was a little bit hard but especially the research that I did on sexual and reproductive health I learned a lot in terms of inding techniques I was doing focus group with a deaf women we were sharing stories about their experience of assessing reproductive Health Services while they going on to deliver their babies so we had a sign language interpreter so process was very very slow uh but it was very deeply engag
ed a communication because I realized we so much rely only on the verbal communication right so with the the community the nonverbal cues the body language the facial expressions were also the thing that I could learn to decipher and then over the years we developed really very good friendship like they invited me to a their the program where they were having some you know Dance Competition among the death women they were not hearing music they were dancing so I think I I learned because the mai
n thing I realized working with any kind of marginalized Community the main thing is as a researcher respect that is the main connector I think I rest of the thing if you have that if you're respectful the technicalities I think you will learn over the time you know so for me always uh having that respectful behavior and also uh because we developed friendship over the time it was not just the researcher researched relationship it it was more like of two friends coming together to have a convers
ation so that helped ease my you know uh interviewing and all that so there were certain challenges relating to disability to navigate that but thank you for asking good afternoon my name is Audrey Reeves I'm based in political science here thank you very much for your talk my question has to do with um the relationship between what you observed in Nepal and what the research Community globally has found on the intersection of gender and disability in your research have you found anything that c
hallenges or complicates broader understandings of gender and disability as it's understood like globally thank you thank you thank you thank you very much uh I couldn't talk about it here because I discovered very lately the perspective of ableism and I wanted to feel that in today but I found perspective of feminist critic of disability quite power powerful uh in the way that kind of brings basically in disability when we do research like two main model seems to be very much in contestation wi
th one another one is very much of a biological or medical model that sees disability as a pathology or some kind of a physical defect but the social model is very much about looking at the social constructions of the disability so first IST critic kind of brings in analysis of uh you know the Dual marginalization of women with disability so I found that quite powerful to look into but lately I've discovered this perspective of ableism because I found it very interesting that everything that we
the people without disability when how we think how we behave is very much shaped by ableist perspective so often there a lot of unconscious bias that could be exercised even by ourselves against the community so I thought bringing that into discussion with intersection of ableism and patriarchy also could be one of the model that we could look into you know uh situation of women with disability yeah thank you so much for your work this was an incredible overview of what you've been doing for fo
r a long time um I'm Christine uh I'm in women's and gender studies and I think just um thinking with this Audrey's question um and I I apologize I don't have a perfectly formed question but I'm thinking about motherhood and the reproductive sort of um dimensions of disability and the ways you were talking about disability a disabled person is a sort of failed Citizen and and in some ways in many ways they're also those sort of failed mothers right um or failing or will fail um and so I'm just t
hinking about queer women and in the context of intersectionality um if you could just talk a little bit about what you know or have observed or learned um about clearness in in your context and H how and whether it functions as at all liberatory because it can be outside of some of these other heteronormative spaces but I imagine is also quite intersectionally compounded intersectionally um harmful or difficult yeah thank you but is something that I very much want to explore in my book so that'
s a very really good question that I need to Del deer in 2013 study I had a unique challenge like the activism needed data and reproductive Health Services is theability but my prior experience of research and motherhood I was very much interested in the social construction of motherhood and how it plays out in experience of women with disability so I tried to blend a little bit of both and the way that I've done was uh bringing in the narratives of motherhood experiences of women with disabilit
y uh how they see themselves as a mother so I think it's very much shaped by the Notions of motherhood in Nepali context South Asian cont next motherhood there is a notion of compulsory motherhood because everybody every women still you know it's the ultimate life path is like you're born you get young you get married and then you have babies it's like straightforward path right there so having married means everybody expects you're going to have baby someday but with women with disability again
there's a lot of it's very much connected deeply connected with the sexuality of how sexuality of women with disability is viewed as well so in terms of motherhood that dual identity of being cared for and caregiver and also I think our way of looking at motherhood as something that is singlehandedly done by a single mother the way we understand the caring responsibilities of motherhood at sole responsibility of mother alone so we don't see mothering as a shared responsibility within the family
it is again the ultimate responsibility of the women themselves and when it comes to women with disability needing support to do that everybody needs a support to take care of children whether you're disabled or not but then that our ideology that it has to be done solitary by yourself you should be capable to do that that our understanding of capability is very much also at play there I think but I would love to unpack this because thank you for giving me food for thought so I want to official
ly end this meeting because the zoom it's exactly 130 so um but I want to let the people in the room know that we have the room for another half hour so you're welcome to come up but thank you very much Dr Canal for an amazing presentation okay so and then we are sharing a short survey as I mentioned earlier it's really amazing we usually get like 3% response come on you guys let's change it this time do it it helps us raise money for this discussion series which we've had going for at least the
17 years that I've been here but we we we have to show that people care about it so our next event is going to be a special session looking at masculinities and women's empowerment in development projects that'll be on April 11th uh you'll hear about it you'll get an email about it um and it'll be a virtual presentation so everybody can join on Zoom check out our website for more information and take some bagels on the way out if you're in the room I'm sorry those of you on Zoom cannot have a b
agel but um thank you all so much so
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