Disability Intersectionalities in Cultural-Historical Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Model

• In Event: Boundary Brokers at the Intersections of Disability Studies in Education and Special Education: Toward a More Radical Conceptualization and Enactment of Inclusive Education

Abstract

I situate my research interests and scholarly trajectory in the context of my own experiences as an immigrant who lived and worked in three developing nations before arriving in the US. My experiences in those contexts heightened my awareness about notions of difference, power, and positionality, sometimes due to nationality, other times because of differences in the use of Spanish (accents), yet other times because of gender and social class. My scholarship focuses on the intersections of so-called high incidence disabilities with race, ethnicity and language. This is a sizable proportion as it is estimated that the prevalence of disabilities around the globe, at 15%, represents more than one billion people (WHO, 2012), while there is growing international attention to social and educational inclusion in the midst of global interdependent markets, widening income gaps across countries and groups within societies, and massive and constant flows of populations across national borders.

The available paradigms to engage this problem, namely medical, disability studies, and sociocritical approaches have proven increasingly limiting to engage with the complexities of this longstanding predicament. I identify in this discussion the core premises and limits of these paradigms with special attention to theoretical insights from the social sciences and humanities (e.g., biocultural turn, inclusion and diversity paradigms, boundary work, intersectional and post identity models). I use these interdisciplinary insights to articulate a framework for future research with attention to identity intersectionalities, the interlockings of power/space/history/ biology/culture, and globalization. I discuss the framework in the context of future inclusive education research given the global visibility and importance of this movement. This is particularly timely since inclusive education theory and research have been articulated with the vision of a fragmented person in which the historical weights of other identity dimensions (e.g., race, class, gender, language) are pushed to the background (Bell, 2011; Davis, 2013) (for exceptions, see Artiles, 2013; Connor & Ferri, 2005; Erevelles, 2011; Ribet, 2010). These are surprising oversights considering the disproportionate representation of marginalized groups in disability categories around the word (e.g., racial minorities, poor learners, linguistic minorities, foreign students) (Artiles et al., 2011). A major consequence of this state of affairs is that research knowledge is thus constructed with incomplete understandings of the multidimensional and complex nature of the human condition and experiences. Consequently, professional practices are limited when grounded in such knowledge. The proposed framework will respond to these critical contemporary needs and will suggest a new generation of questions for inclusive education research.

Author

• Alfredo J. Artiles, Arizona State University