New project: Engendering Disability-Inclusive Development (EDID)
The seven-year EDID project, led by Guelph University professor Deborah Stienstra, pools the strengths of scholars and students, governments and multilateral agencies, as well as disabled women’s and other disabled persons’ organizations in four countries (Canada, Haiti, South Africa and Vietnam) and at the global level. Combining participatory research, capacity development and advocacy, the project aims to understand and challenge the attitudes, policies and practices that keep disabled women marginalized in many contexts. It builds on global norms like the Convention for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), rooted in the principle of “leaving no one behind”. It also seeks to strengthen the rights-based advocacy of disabled women in different contexts.
Professor Dominique Masson
Professor Stephen Baranyi
Women and girls with disabilities have long been among the poorest, most excluded and vulnerable persons worldwide. COVID-19 is aggravating their vulnerability. Yet even before the pandemic, disabled women mobilized for policy and change at many levels – on the ground in Canada and in countries like Haiti, in regional fora and at the United Nations. Building on their research into the activism of disabled women, professors Dominique Masson of the Institute for Feminist and Gender Studies and Stephen Baranyi of the School of International Development and Global Studies will provide significant contribution to this participatory action research project designed to understand, contest and ultimately transform those dynamics of exclusion.
Along with their students, Professors Masson and Baranyi will play key roles in two components of the project: collaborating on research and policy engagement with state and civil society partners in Haiti; and contributing to the comparative and transnational dimensions of the overall research element. The latter will include studying the in/exclusion of the diversity of disabled women’s voices in transnational policy processes related to the CRDP and the SDGs, why, what their policy outcomes have been and how positive outcomes could be enhanced.
"We are proud of Professors Masson and Baranyi’s contributions to this SSHRC funded study." said John Sylvestre, Vice-Dean of Research, at the Faculty of Social Sciences. "Their contributions demonstrate the critical importance of social sciences perspectives in multi-disciplinary research, to address the considerable challenge facing our fellow citizens living with disabilities."