Disrupting Amnesia, Arousing a New Representational Imagination: Disability in the 21st Century

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

The purpose of this session is to disrupt traditional conceptualizations and studies of disability intersections with other marked categories, such as gender, race, social class, language background, and sexual orientation. An experimental format will be used to engage interdisciplinary scholarship that transcends the study of individual variables (e.g., cognitive factors, poverty status) or institutional factors (e.g., school size, community or school poverty) to more fully understand the inter-workings of individual, social, historical, and social forces and their consequences for educational opportunity. We aim to disrupt the deficit-oriented framing of traditional research with its attendant oversimplification or flattening of disability intersections. The session will advance two interdisciplinary themes recently articulated by Artiles (2017) to inform the future generation of this scholarship, namely the need to rely on a historical epistemology and the importance of advancing a program of scholarship grounded in collages of alternative representations of the problem.

Sub Unit

• AERA Presidential Session

Chairs

• Alfredo J. Artiles, Arizona State University

• Beth A. Ferri, Syracuse University

Participants

• Rachel Adams, Columbia University

• Susan Burch, Middlebury College

• Karolyn D. Tyson, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill