DefectCraft: A Critical Cultural-Historical Framing of Disability Intersections

• In Event: Toward Equity-Oriented Special Education Through Empowering Minoritized Communities

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to theorize the notion of disability and its intersections with other markers of difference, and explain how processes I describe as DefectCraft intensify the stratification of marginalized groups—e.g., by virtue of their race or language—by adding defects and deficiencies to their identities. I illustrate the affordances of DefectCraft through a critique of the research on racial disparities in disability identification.

The notion of DefectCraft was inspired in part by the seminal contributions of RaceCraft (Fields & Fields, 2012), though other theoretical ideas complement this work. DefectCraft entails othering processes and practices that peg deficits and deficiencies to already stigmatized individuals and groups (Artiles, 2011, 2019) and muddle the underlying power dynamics involved in the formation of intersectional differences. This notion is grounded in the assumption that disability has a dual nature, as an object of protection and a tool of stratification (Artiles et al., 2016). DefectCraft is informed by sociological scholarship on inequality, Critical Race Theory (including intersectionality), ethnic studies, social studies of science, and disability studies.

I present a critique of recent research on racial disparities using the notion of DefectCraft. I summarize DefectCraft’s analytic guidelines used in the critique of this scholarship. A DefectCraft perspective envisions research as a sociocultural practice and thus, it approaches the analysis of racial disparities from a situated perspective.

My analysis shows how DefectCraft justifies racial disparities in subjective disabilities due to the disproportionate poverty rate among students of color. In this way, DefectCraft biologizes race and sanctions a deficit mindset about racialized bodies. DefectCraft uses the ideology of colorblindness to obfuscate the structural weight of race and the cultural-historical conditions that racialized groups experience, while scapegoating the cultures of racialized groups (e.g., bad parenting, inadequate linguistic practices). However, Benjamin (2017) reminds us that “cultural explanations for disparate outcomes is an ever-ready lexicon with deeply racist roots” (p. 228). Stated differently, DefectCraft construes racial disparities in disability rates as detached from considerations regarding unjust access to opportunities, discriminatory infrastructures, historical wealth disparities, racial segregation, and stratified access to health care and food delivery systems (Darity, 2011; Metzl & Hansen, 2014). A perverse consequence of DefectCraft is that it naturalizes disproportionality in subjective disability rates—e.g., high poverty rates and inadequate home cultures in communities of color explain racial disparities in disability rates.

Understanding the mechanisms of DefectCraft makes visible how racial disparities are structurally constituted. DefectCraft flattens people’s intersectional identities (e.g., disability-race) giving primacy to single identity markers—e.g., is race or poverty the cause of disability identification? In addition, DefectCraft elides the influence of cultural-historical contexts and spatial factors by using aggregate evidence at broader scales. Finally, social mechanisms perpetuate the inequalities of racial disparities, which are particularly visible in school responses to remedy policy mandates.

DefectCraft contributes to the evolving body of work on social, cultural-historical, and critical approaches to disability (Artiles, 2003, 2011, 2019; Bal, 2016; Banks, 2018; Cioe-Peña; 2021; Connor et al., 2016; Leonardo & Broderick, 2011; Padilla, 2021) and enhances the analytical perspectives to debunk the longstanding problem of racial disparities in special education.

Author

• Alfredo J. Artiles, Stanford University
  Presenting Author