Pushing Against Boundaries: Proposing a Mad Turn in Disability Studies and Education

• In Event: Consilience-ing, Self-Study-ing, Radical Love-ing at the Boundaries of Disability Studies in Education and (Special) Education

Abstract

Responding to ongoing conflicts between special education research and scholars looking at Disability Studies and education, this paper proposes a Mad Turn in scholarship and research around ways in which disability, and madness, play out in the broad field of education.

Traditional special education research, rooted in positivist methodologies, has been in conflict with Disability Studies scholarship seeking to explore ways in which disability plays out in education, along methodological and ideological lines. This conflict has been expressed by traditional special education practitioners, rejecting their own inherent, ideological biases, in what would otherwise be described as ad hominem attacks on Disability Studies education scholars. These attacks have, at times, resulted in significant and unwarranted setbacks to individual careers and lines of research.

Mad Studies is an emerging field, exploring ways in which madness, and Mad people, fit (and mostly don’t) in neoliberal, psychiatrized, therapeutic culture. Powerfully influenced by Disability Studies as a field, Mad Studies scholarship draws on the work and life experience of Mad-identified activists and scholars. Mad Studies scholars offer alternatives to traditional approaches to research and scholarship in the social sciences, humanities, and education, ones that are outside of sanist approaches to nominal and taken-for-granted onto-epistemological structures.

Following recent work in post-humanist, post-materialist, post-qualitative, and post-structural conceptions of research in education and the social sciences (sometimes referred to generally as the “posts”), and drawing on opportunities afforded by Mad Studies theory regarding the nature of research and scholarship in general, this paper proposes a Mad Turn in educational and social science scholarship, as one way to move beyond the failure of positivist, neoliberal research methodologies.

Using a Mad poetic, entangled in Deleuzian thought, and following the arguments of scholars including Gallagher, Lather, and St. Pierre, this work proposes scholarship regarding Madness and education that involves “thinking without method” (St. Pierre, 2017, p. 37). Centered on Mad conceptions of anti-research approaches, following on the work of Ingram, LeFrançois, Menzies, and Reaume (among others) this paper proposes a Mad Turn in Mad and Disability Studies scholarship in education, one rooted in the work and life-experience of marginalized Mad activists and scholars, and opposed to the professionalized discourses entrenched in current social science conceptions of research.

The Mad Turn in educational scholarship offers a way out of neoliberal, behaviorist, and psychiatrized approaches to educational and social science practice and onto-epistemologies. Such a Mad Turn lies outside traditional positivist ways of understanding and representing the world, one that draws on thinking that is too often seen as not-thinking, illogical, and irrational.

The Mad Turn in Mad Studies and Disability Studies scholarship in education offers a way out of ableist, sanist, hierarchical ways of understanding disability and madness in schools, and, more broadly, social sciences in general.

Author

• Philip Smith, Eastern Michigan University