This article examines the World Bank’s disability and development projects in rural South India and illuminates neoliberalism’s dangers for social work theory and practice in the Global South. Based on a multi-year ethnographic study involving participant observation and interviews with multiple stakeholders, it critically examines the individualized model of empowerment promoted by self-help groups in light of the structural and cultural realities of rural disability. It highlights the dangers of individualization and responsibilization of self-help group interventions and traces how disabled subjectivities are shaped in line with neoliberal governmentality. Foregrounding disability and global south perspectives on neoliberalism – often overlooked in social work scholarship – this article contributes an intersectional and transnational perspective to social work.
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