Transnational history of Disability: Reflections
Résumé
Transnational history is a research perspective that has been widely legitimized and popularized over the past decade, but few disability historians have adopted this approach to date. This article aims to review the first transnational studies in the history of disability, highlighting the interest of such a historiographical approach, its benefits and disadvantages. The approach to transnational history continues to be promoted mainly by young historians working in non-Western fields (Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa) or with a global approach. This innovative historiographical approach generates considerable contributions in terms of knowledge and research perspective. It offers a new reading of history, less nationalcentric and Western-centric, by shifting the focus to other countries in the world whose experiences in disability public policy must not be ignored by Western historians. It highlights the role of NGOs, private foundations, transnational activist networks, intergovernmental organizations, and new figures (international experts, missionaries, etc.). It thus requires recognition of the foreign contribution to the construction of domestic norms and realities, and thus the hybridity of policies pursued at the national level. It also leads to relativizing the singularity of national social movements and national public policies, by pointing out convergences (and divergences) with other national realities. The adoption of such an approach also leads to situating local or national experience in a more global historical context (international or regional scale), thanks to a better knowledge of the "field of possibilities" of disability policies at the international level.
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