Sally Tomlinson's Conflict Analysis of Special Education: Grounding, Application, Impact, and Repurposing

• In Event: Sociology of Education, Race, Class, Ability, and the Global Economy: The Research of Sally Tomlinson

Abstract

This paper is organized in four parts. The first part metatheoretically grounds Sally Tomlinson’s acclaimed body of sociological research on class, race, and disability in radical structuralism, focusing on her relative location in this paradigm of social scientific thought by comparing her work to that of other critical social theorists working on these issues from this perspective. The second part of the paper explicates Professor Tomlinson’s Marxian/Weberian conception of conflict theory, the main analytical approach of radical structuralism, and reviews the key lines of argument in her various conflict analyses of social, political, and economic determinants and sources of struggle and resistance in the development and expansion of special education in Britain and the United States. The third part of the paper considers the impact of theoretical criticism of special education on the field’s research, policy, and practice over the 35 years between publication of Professor Tomlinson’s seminal book, The Sociology of Special Education (1982), the first conflict analysis of special education, to her most recent book, A Sociology of Special and Inclusive Education: Exploring the Manufacture of Inability (2017), a conflict analysis of special and inclusive education under the neoliberal logic and practices of global capitalism. It first considers the influence of external theoretical criticism (from outside the field), including that of Professor Tomlinson and other modern and postmodern critical social theorists working from radical structuralist, radical humanist, interpretivist, and functionalist perspectives, and then the influence of internal theoretical criticism from special educators, much of which was inspired by Professor Tomlinson’s critique. The final part of the paper is a discussion of the current state of affairs in special education: Although external theoretical criticism bred the sophisticated internal theoretical discourses of “critical special education” and then “disability studies in education,” neither the external discourse nor either of the internal discourses has been able to appreciably change the field’s acritical appraisal of itself and its conventional research, policy, and practice orientation. This part concludes with an argument for and outline of a conflict analysis of the social, political, economic, and ideological struggle between conventional and critical higher education special education faculty members for the future of the field (or an alternative), drawing on the work and sterling example of Professor Tomlinson.

Author

• Thomas M. Skrtic, The University of Kansas