ENGAGE Knowledge Mobilization Event Series: Re-imagining from the South: Girls and Women with Disabilities Advocating for Change
In February and March 2026, the ENGAGE Project hosted two events to share knowledge and spark dialogue around disability, gender, leadership, and activism. These events were anchored by an exhibition, Re-imagining from the South: Girls and Women with Disabilities Advocating for Change, featuring artwork, photovoice, cellphilms, and manifestos created by 54 young women and girls with disabilities from Vietnam, India, and South Africa.
On February 26, the first event foregrounded the voices of the ENGAGE Youth Leadership Circle (YLC) directly. Six youth leaders from South Africa, India, and Vietnam, Andiswa from South Africa, Sweety and Aphuja from India, and Em and Panh from Vietnam, joined the online session to speak about their artworks, their journeys, and their visions for the future. They described forming disability-led clubs, demanding respect in the workplace and community, and using art to make others feel what they feel inside.
Coordinated by Linh Thuy Dang with support from local research assistants, the Youth Leadership Circle spent four months, from November 2025 through February 2026, preparing together across three countries. Youth leaders from Vietnam, India, and South Africa worked collectively to establish objectives, identify their audience, surface key themes from their lived experiences and messages, and carefully choose which artworks would represent their communities. This collaborative process was an act of relational agency, one in which young women and girls with disabilities shaped the terms of their own representation and claimed space as knowledge producers within their communities and across borders.
Andiswa, a youth leader from South Africa highlights:
鈥We are all disabled, we all have different disabilities. If there聽are things that聽are聽challenging to me, it聽doesn’t mean that I am a failure.鈥
The second event was hosted as a hybrid gathering at the Participatory Cultures Lab (PCL), McGill University. The panel discussion with the participation of Dr. Xuan Thuy Nguyen (杏吧原创 University), Dr. Claudia Mitchell (McGill University), and Linh Thuy Dang (MA Brock University). Panelists emphasized the importance of centering the voices of girls and young women with disabilities as knowledge producers and leaders in their communities. The discussion also explored how transnational collaboration can support decolonial learning networks and strengthen collective action for social change.
Here are two recordings of the Knowledge Mobilization event series:
Knowledge Mobilization event on February 26, 2026
Knowledge Mobilization event on March 11, 2026