[Book Talk] Not Without Us: Perspectives on Disability and Inclusion in Singapore

18 Oct 2023

By Michelle Lee

On 18th October, the Department of Communications and New Media had the pleasure of receiving Dr. Kuansong Victor Zhuang for a talk on his book, Not without Us: Perspectives on Disability and Inclusion in Singapore (2023). Dr. Zhuang is currently a Visiting Fellow, Discipline of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney and concurrently, International Postdoctoral Scholar at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University. In his book talk, Dr. Zhuang shared more about the editorial process, the emerging field of disability studies in Singapore, and delved into selected chapters from the anthology.

A key topic of Dr. Zhuang’s talk was the nascent nature of disability studies in Singapore. He situated the book within the context of an gradually emerging disability studies discourse in Singapore, as well as within the evolution of his own thinking and writing about disability.

In tracing how the book came to be, Dr. Zhuang shared his perspective as a non-disabled disability scholar and reflected on how his writing has evolved. Reflecting on his 2007 dissertation, he described his approach as “problematic”, viewing disabled people as objects of study. According to Dr. Zhuang, at the time there was a lack of critical discourse about disability in Singaporean academia. Despite being approached to edit a special issue on disability studies for the multi-disciplinary journal s/pores in 2010, it took eight years to bring the issue to fruition, during which he worked on disability policy at SGEnable.

“As a group, we weren’t ready to critically approach the study of disability,” Dr. Zhuang shared. He contrasted the surprising lack of academic disability studies with the significant role that Singapore played in the history of the international disability rights movement.

To Dr. Zhuang, Not Without Us thus represented “a way of reflecting upon what it means to do disability work and disability studies in Singapore”. The anthology was co-edited with Dr. Meng Ee Wong (NIE), whom Dr. Zhuang described as the only other disability scholar in Singapore, and Dr. Dan Goodley (University of Sheffield). A key objective in putting together the volume was to prioritize the voices of disabled people talking about their lived experiences, in contrast to other works of disability studies dominated by the voice of academics. In the final anthology, a majority of contributors identify as disabled. Dr. Zhuang shared how this choice impacted their choice of publisher; as academic publishers had concerns about whether the book was sufficiently academic in tone, the editors ultimately worked with the popular publisher Ethos Books.

Dr. Zhuang ended the talk by delving into three of his favourite chapters from the book, highlighting the chapters contributed by Dawn-joy Leong and Cavan Chang, Tan Siew Ling, and Sherry “Elisa” Toh. He shared the ways in which working with the authors of each piece provided him with more insight into the disabled experience. He concluded by reaffirming the importance of the expanding field of disability studies in Singapore, sharing that it allows us to recognise the inter-dependencies that connect all humans.

“Understanding disability allows us to see and understand society. It allows us a lens to examine what constitutes normative society, and that’s important. It’s a very different lens to other disciplines in that sense.”