Gendered Colonial Disability

Presentation of a research project as part of the "Jeudis de la Maison Suger", a residents' research seminar.

This session will welcome Rosemary Nakijoba, the Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities at Muteesa I Royal University, Uganda, for a presentation of her research project on gendered colonial disability. Drawing on archival materials from Senegal, Cameroon, and Madagascar, she will examine how colonial categories shaped both the representations and lived experiences of disabled people.

"By reading archival records alongside their silences, I examine how colonial systems organised bodies through categories of capacity, dependency, labour, and social role. Disability was consequently entangled with a colonial distinction between productive and dependent bodies, a distinction also shaped by gender and other social and colonial hierarchies. Disabled men could become visible through military service, labour, injury, veteran status, or compensation, while disabled women could appear through family, motherhood, agriculture, care, education, or assistance. These roles were not fixed or mutually exclusive, but they shaped how administrators recognized disability. Conventional classifications can therefore obscure disabled lives, particularly women’s, whose experiences may survive indirectly in records of family, agriculture, motherhood, caregiving, and domestic work. Reading these traces reveals histories of visibility, power, and belonging while recognizing that archival silence does not itself prove absence.  I used a care-grounded approach that enabled me to read fragmented evidence critically and ask how institutional assumptions shaped disability, dependency, gender, and social roles. History is therefore not separate from policy: it reveals whose experiences institutions have recognised, whose they have overlooked, and which assumptions have shaped systems of support and inclusion. Understanding these histories requires contemporary policy to scrutinize inherited assumptions and recognise disabled people as knowledge-holders whose lived experiences should inform the policies and services that affect their lives. Ultimately, I ask: what are we still failing to see, and whose voices must inform what comes next?."

Rosemary Nakijoba is the Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities at Muteesa I Royal University, Uganda, where she also coordinates Research and Graduate Studies. She holds a PhD in Development Studies from the University of the Western Cape and a Master’s degree from Uganda Martyrs University. She previously served as Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Victoria University, Uganda. Her research centers on Gender Justice and Disability Inclusion, addressing structural inequalities in contemporary societies.