SGISD Professor & International Disability Advocate Valerie Karr featured in UMass Boston News
On International Persons with Disabilities Day, UMass Boston featured a profile of Valerie Karr, SGISD’s associate professor of international development. Karr’s work focuses on inclusive development, education, and human rights for people with disabilities and girls across the world. Professor Karr joined our faculty in 2013 after connecting with SGISD’s founder William Kiernan at an international disability conference in Qatar.
Karr is also president of Inclusive Development Partners, a woman-owned small business that collaborates with the United Nations and development agencies to implement an inclusion agenda. Valerie acknowledges the complexities and nuances of working on inclusion internationally:
“It means inventing a lot of new systems in each country. The US system has done a lot of great work … but we don’t need to spend 50 years replicating it in other parts of the world. In fact, culturally, it’s probably not even going to work if we try to make a carbon copy. So, it’s about what is a good fit.”
