The Epistemic Labor of Disability and the Criminalization of Black Students in Public Education

• In Event: Imprisoning Disability: (Re)Conceptualizing the Role of Disability in the Criminalization of Youth of Color

Abstract

Objectives/purposes: Disability has historically been the category of difference that continues to linger at the boundaries of critical discourses on inequality in educational contexts; regarded as the category that ought to undergo epistemic erasure for the other categories of difference to attain their liberation (Erevelles, 2011, Annamma, Connor, & Ferri, 2013, Bailey & Mobley, 2019, Schalk, 2021). Concurrently, the everyday practices of inequitable schooling that includes sorting, testing, and labeling and its corresponding carceral practices of surveillance, exclusion, and punishment thrive on a logic that deploys disability as the determining category that enables the dis-location of students into “special” classrooms, alternative schools, and juvenile detention centers. The response of critical scholars of race, class, gender, sexuality, and even of disability has been to theorize disability as an “outlaw” ontology” whose very recognition calls for an immediate expulsion/deconstruction of disability at the site of educational inequality/epistemic violence.

Author

• Nirmala Erevelles, University of Alabama