The Civic Scholar: Sally Tomlinson's "Irresistible" Invitation to Critique

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

Abstract

This paper considers the significant contribution to civic society of Sally Tomlinson’s scholarship and its effects of ‘pricking the consciousness of the public’ (Zola, 2003, p. 10) and of ‘causing people to think about what is going on’ (Tomlinson, 2014, p. 9). Tomlinson’s counter-narratives to those that ‘dehumanize’ (Bogdan & Taylor, 1989, p. 146), but which nevertheless comprise a ‘horribly fascinating tale’ (Tomlinson, 2012, p. 4), are analysed and their effects considered. The particular impact of Sally Tomlinson’s interruptions of ideology at work within the field of disability, through demonstrating the dominance of medicalised attention to defect and diagnosis, the protection of the interests of those exercising deterministic and ‘intractable causation’ (Hargreaves 1972, cited in Tomlinson, 2014, p. 27) and the consequential - and ‘irresistible’ (Tomlinson, 2012, p. 267) - expansion of special education, is examined. A number of lessons to be learned from Sally Tomlinson’s scholarship are elucidated. These relate to civic aspects and concern (i) the craft of writing in order to speak back to power; (ii) developing and enhancing disability studies in education through sociological and historical analyses and (iii) the potential risks and consequences for scholars, especially those entering the academy, of critique of this kind. Sally Tomlinson’s work appears to be all the more important today, at a time when, as she herself has observed, within the rhetoric of inclusion there is simultaneously greater demonisation of the poor, immigrants and disabled people and the power of the former makes it even more difficult to speak against the latter.

Author

• Julie E. Allan, The University of Birmingham