In this podcast episode PhD Candidate Gagan Chhabra explains the term disablism. Discrimination against disabled people is a big problem, but not often talked about.

- Disabled people have been pushed back of the que and marginalized for too long, Gagan explains, it's time to start a dialogue.

Read more:

Aftenposten debatt - La oss snakke om "disablism"Minerva - Ableism – en blindgate i NorgeVårt Land Verdidebatt - Vi er ikke stakkarerDagsavisen debatt - "Ableism" i landet vi elskernewsinenglish.no - Battling "ableism" along with racismPodcast episode - Ask, don’t assume

Transcript of episode

GAGAN CHHABRA:

I'm not your inspirational porn, and I'm not your tragic victim. I'm just a regular disabled person who has similar hopes, desires, dreams, expectations, prejudices, who is at times fragile, who is flawed, who is frail, but at the same time is strong, resilient, hardworking, like you are.

(INTRO MUSIC):

HALLVARD:Du hører på Viten og Snakkis. En podcast fra OsloMet.Welcome back Gagan Chhabra.

GAGAN CHHABRA:

Hi Hallvard, nice to meet you again.

HALLVARD:

You're doing a PhD degree here at OsloMet, and you've also visited this podcast once before. We called the episode “Ask, Don't Assume”. And today we're going to follow up a little bit. Today you’re going to teach me and our listeners, I think for many, a new -ism word. You wrote a little oped in Aftenposten, where I discovered this word and it's abelism. And, it's really interesting that you brought this up now in these, what shall we say, strange times and everything going on, so that's why I thought it was really natural to invite you back and help us understand this in today's context. But first this word ablelism.

GAGAN CHHABRA:

I think that there are lots of words which describe this phenomena, ablelism, disablelism, funkofobi, whatever you want to call it, you know, like Shakespeare back in the day said, you know, that a Rose by any other name would smell as sweet, so this concept of ableism, call it by any other name it's, it's equally abhorent. So the idea of this ableism is that you treat disabled people with less work, less value, just because of the fact that they have a disability, it's based on your abilities, you have misconceptions or spurious assumptions, you other the disabled person, you treat them as a marginal category when you think that you are the norm. So it's all based on prejudices, your conscious and unconscious biases, which you operate in which you say that, OK, this person has a disability and he or she is of less value or perhaps more value than I am. I don't want to treat that person as an equal human being.

HALLVARD:

This smells a lot of what's going on in the US now with the racism debate.

GAGAN CHHABRA:

Oh, yes for sure like precisely. It's cut out from the same cloth as racism or sexism, because the idea is that you don't treat an individual on his or her characteristics, or his or her capabilities and potentiality, but you treat them on this immutable feature perhaps, you know, if you want to call it an immutable feature, if a person has an impairment,  then you instinctively think that, Oh, this person's life would be perhaps absolutely tragic, he or she might be childlike or dependent or might be asexual or how would he or she be living a fulfilling life. I should feel sorry for this person and all these attitudes, you know, which we harbor either explicitly or are implicitly, make us walk on the path of abelism, and we don't even know about it that's the issue.

As you rightly mentioned that I've been writing, like op-eds about this in Dagsavisen, Vårt Land, Aftenposten and also one in English. And, the idea is to bring this concept to the Norwegian vocabulary, to give the Norwegian civil society disabilities activists an opportunity to work with it, because we all encounter these attitudinal barriers, especially I'm talking about people with disabilities,