Abstract
Disability scholars in sociology and disability studies have sought to 1) understand disability in the context of the global South and 2) center the body in disability research. Yet, despite a growing interest in sustaining these efforts, there continues to be a paucity of research on disability in Haiti, a low-income country in the global South.
With this in mind, the current qualitative research study was conducted by adopting a phenomenological perspective coupled with an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to address the following research question: What is the lived experience of Haitians with a physical disability acquired from the earthquake of 2010? Twenty-five Haitian earthquake survivors shared their stories during in-depth semi-structured interviews.
The study’s findings indicate that acquiring physical impairments (through crushed injuries, infections, and limb amputations) from the disaster changed the research participants’ experiences of time, space, relationships with others, and the taken-for-granted understanding of the lifeworld and the built environment. Moreover, these experiences appeared to have complicated the participants’ ability to navigate local environments (social and built), which were fraught with barriers, violence, and hostility to disabled people. Nevertheless, participants managed their everyday life and relied on their social networks of friends and family for support.
By centering the body as a site of knowledge production, this study explores the biographies of disabled bodies in a low-income Caribbean country and offers a glimpse at the reciprocal relations between bodily experiences of disability and the effects of the social and physical environments.