Now What? Where Have We Arrived? Perambulating Around the Historical Boundaries of Disability Studies in Education

• In Event: 34.072 - Disrupting Boundaries of Disability While Reimagining Educational Justice Landscapes: Contentions in Disability Studies in Education

Abstract

Objectives: Building upon the current dialogue about the future of DSE, we reassert the importance of revisiting the historical evolution of the field, the critical and disruptive epistemological foundations of DSE, and our own tensions, disconnections, and liberations while revisualizing the futures of DSE. In our personal and scholarly conversations we have explored the following questions in an attempt to answer the broader question reflected in our paper title (Now what?-- where have we arrived?): What is needed to ensure DSE does not become stagnant, more narrow, conflated with things like ‘inclusive education,’ or contained solely within Ivory Tower? How can DSE continue to evolve and expand without losing its identity as a field? How can DSE rebuild its partnership with disability justice and the disabled community?

Theoretical Framework: To explore these questions, this paper utilized a post-structuralist framework and its emphasis on rejecting the notion of an absolute objective single reality or “truth.” Instead, there are multiple meanings and realities that are simultaneously co-constructed during the process of interpretation.

Method: This paper used duoethnography, a critical co-dialogic process of examining the field of DSE from each of our social locations. This methodological approach requires that lived experiences, ideologies, and individual ways of knowing the self/others are interrogated and challenged to share different ways of knowing that may not be readily accessible by the individual researcher (Chang, 2008; Sawyer & Liggett, 2012). In particular, we used mapping approach (Annamma, 2018) in order to “create dialogic transactions (between others and within themselves) in the pursuit of critical tensions, insights, and perspectives. The goal is to surface critique, and reconceptualize our perceptions of the borders” (Sawyer & Liggett, 2012, p. 630).

Data Sources: This study uses the following artifacts: individual’s reflective writing and mapping, and collaborative dialogue across individual data sources. As is the case in all duoethnography, the researchers are also the participants and vice versa. All the data sources were analyzed through a comparative method that emphasizes collaborative, reflexive, and retrospective analysis (Glaser & Strauss, 2000).

Findings: This paper highlights the tensions, disconnections, and liberations that both authors have encountered within their individual academic lives in DSE and during their shared exploration of how they were shaped by the critical history of DSE. Collectively, from each of their social locations and positionalities, we offer an overview of the shifting within the field of DSE.

Significance: This paper offers a critical and pivotal moment for each of us (authors and sessions attendees) to return to the critical foundations of DSE as a way to both disrupt and stretch the boundaries and futures of the field. We want our shared conversation- in the form of a duoethnography- to nudge each of us who claims DSE to use this history as we reflect on our individual and shared praxis. And ultimately we hope that our dialogue facilitates further intersectional conversations rooted in disability justice in educational settings.

Authors

• Emily A. Nusbaum, University of San Francisco

• Holly Pearson, Framingham State University