Speech Sounds: Unsettling the Relationships Between Disability, Racism, and Colonialism in the Pedagogy of Speech

• In Event: 14.044 - Roundtable Session 1
  In Roundtable Session: 14.044-16 - Being and Becoming Critical: Developing Teacher Identities in an Era of Surveillance

Abstract

In this paper, I will use a critical disability perspective to theorize processes of discipline that speech undergoes within two classrooms. First, through my experiences at Bloorview Mcmillan Kid’s Rehabilitation Hospital; secondly, through the speech correction classes I received from grades 2-4 at a Canadian public school using speech pathologist’s reports. I argue that this discipline affirms a politics of difference between “normal” modalities of speech and ones that are dismissed as “problems,” work through ableist, racist, and colonizing frameworks. I work to situate the disciplining of speech within the re-production of colonial taxonomies of difference between “the human” and “the Other human” (De Silva 2007).

Author

• Fiona Cheuk, University of Toronto