Meyers, StephenHuang, Shixin2022-07-142022-07-142022Huang_washington_0250E_24284.pdfhttp://hdl.handle.net/1773/48731Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2022This dissertation unravels the globalization and localization of disability rights through the lens of disability associations in China. Current studies conceptualize global rights discourses as a set of normative ideologies or politico-legal institutions and suffer from a top-down, formalist bias. In contrast, I argue that disability rights are contingent social practices that are subjected to the interpretation, negotiation, and contestation of social entrepreneurs on the ground. Based on ethnographic and documentary research, I unravel how disability associations translate the global visions of disability rights and generate claims and approaches that situate in the social, political, and economic relations in China. The dissertation accounts for the evolutions of disability associations and disability subjectivities in China as a co-construction of the global diffusion of the cultural and institutional forces of disability rights, as well as the authoritarian state’s formation of disability and social governance policies. The rights model of disability imposed a narrow envisioning of rights, focusing on affirming the civil, political rights of citizenship, targeting the state as rights violator and duty bearer, and deploying legal mobilization and civil society empowerment as the primary repertoire of strategies. The transplantation of this international model fissured from the local realities of economic precariousness and authoritarian politics, which unexpectedly silenced the voices and concerns of both people with disabilities and disability rights activists in local contexts. This dissertation presented two case studies of the diverse practices of disability rights as invented and exercised by disability rights entrepreneurs. Delving into the collective actions of two community networks in China’s COVID-19 outbreak, I argue that care and affect were turned into the site of disability rights and solidarity practices, which expanded the visions of disability rights by generating interdependent social relationship and public ethics of care. Another case study unraveled the politics of fundraising as a site of rights claiming and examine how disability associations appropriate the market mechanism to advance their social visions of disability rights. These empirical findings inform a broader understanding of the vernacularization processes of global rights discourse, disability as a comparative, cross-cultural construct, and state-society relationship in China.application/pdfen-USnoneChinaDisability RightsGlobalizationState-society RelationDisability studiesAsian studiesThesis