Impossible Spaces: Trauma and Navigating Deficit Ideologies Within Higher Education

• In Event: By Being HUMAN: A Collaborative Self-Study of Intersectional and Emotional Disability Narratives Within Higher Education

Abstract

This paper uses narrative inquiry about “doing” disability studies within traditional, special education spaces in various institutions of higher education. I identify the space between the positivist paradigms that inform traditional ways of knowing about disability and those that are fluid, interdependent, vulnerable, and personal, the place where trauma occurs—enacted both actively/reactively, and through repeated resistance and refusal, resulting in the erasure of disability and disabled bodyminds from spaces outside of traditional special education(Author 5).

“Trauma can be stored within us—imprinted in our bodies, carried within our cells. It walks with us into classrooms, meetings, and campus spaces. It moves in our lives as faculty, shapes our interactions with our colleagues and our students despite efforts to mask and hide the public self we put forward” (Session Authors, in-press). My narrative will explore the forms of trauma I have experienced in education and the metaphors and theoretical concepts I attempted to find meaning in and (if ever) closure.

“The hegemony of traditional special education and the repeated collisions between the positivist paradigms that inform this field and those that exist within disability studies is where epistemic violence becomes personal. Collective and individual resistance to alternative ways of knowing about disability—beyond those limited and limiting ones shaped by traditional special education—has effectively erased certain kinds of bodies and minds from many educational landscapes” (Session Authors, in-press). This impossible space between the positivist paradigm and my own—a paradigm that is rooted to something more organic, fluid, and unfixed—remains a space of self-exploration to find possible meaning and to prevent trauma from being experienced again.

“I have come to expect some of the institutionally sanctioned abuse I have experienced in traditional, special education spaces, from mobbing behavior by students in the classroom, to bullying by senior colleagues. I haven’t figured out yet which is worse—treatment that is more active and obvious, or when it comes in the form of repeated, ableist microaggressions said with a smile and offered as a joke. I do know that I always prepare myself—wait for it to reactivate the imprint of previous trauma. It is epistemic violence that becomes personal (described to me by a colleague as “murder of the soul”), when inflicted on another to preserve the paradigm-as-metaphor that given meaning to a profession grounded in positivism or generated by deep and unacknowledged discomfort with concept of disability” (Session Authors, in-press). This extends from fear and discomfort about an identity shaped primarily by deficit and pathology, resulting in a limited and limiting understanding of disability as a valued way of being. Heshusius’ (2004) citation of Vanier (1998), describes unacknowledged emotions that are at the root of exclusionary practices: “. . . We are all so frightened of losing what is important for us, the things that give us life, security, and status” (p. 73). In other words, to remain distant—to live in a paradigm that maintains the self/other construction—is to live with fear and with deeply grasped attachment to the images that we hold of ourselves.

Author

• Emily A. Nusbaum, Mills College