The Place of “Disability” in AERA Conference Themes: Still Seeking a Place in Justice-Oriented Calls

• In Event: Toward Educational Renewal: Individual and Collective Conference Access

Abstract

Purpose
Following a symposium panel presented at the 2024 annual conference (Miller, 2024), and a paper which articulated the ways that accessibility and disability have been responded to over time (Author et al. A), this paper will highlight how “disability” is conceptualized, present, and/or erased in conference theme descriptions of the American Education Research Association (AERA) over the last five years (2021-25). Analyzing the place of disability within and across conference theme descriptions responds to the question of “what are the ways in which AERA leadership describe and ask critical and intersectional questions about disability within justice-oriented annual conference calls?” And further, “in what ways does this allow us to understand the place of “disability” within social justice-oriented research promotion within the organization?”

Methods
Content analysis (Schreier et al., 2019) of published conference theme narratives housed on the AERA website was conducted in order to understand the ways that organization leadership have placed disability within conference themes over the last five years. A hermeneutical approach was used– meaning, “...a text can only be understood as the sum of its parts and the individual parts can only be understood if you understand the whole text” (Kuckartz, 2014, np). This approach to analysis required that I first reflect on preconceived assumptions and my own history with regard to advocating for greater accessibility efforts within the organization over the last decade plus. Following this initial and ongoing reflexive work, each conference theme was read individually, to identify the ways in which the conference theme was taken up across contexts and topics. Next, the presence and/or absence of disability and its intersections was noted within these contexts and topics, in individual conference theme narratives, resulting in initial codes that were revised as across-document analysis occurred. The across-document analysis allowed me to expand and collapse codes, and to understand the place of “disability” in conference narrative descriptions over a five year time period.

Significance
Historical efforts aimed at increasing accessibility practices and addressing ongoing access issues across AERA have been documented (Author et al. A). This paper aims to bring to the forefront the ways in which organizational leadership have, over time, placed (or not) conceptions of disability within social justice-oriented conference theme descriptions. As scholars have previously noted (c.f. Connor, 2012; Gabel & Connor, 2009; Author et al., B), disability has remained absent and/or at the periphery of justice-oriented, critical, and intersectional dialogues in education research and practice. I conclude by offering the ways in which “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” related to this positioning of “disability” as a valuable tool for knowledge production within AERA conference theme descriptions. I also argue that this analysis, which demonstrates a largely absent-presence (Dolmage, 2017) of disability within critical assertions in conference theme descriptions serves as “visibilizing” project and an assertion of the necessity of disability inclusion as a form of epistemic, political, and personal reclamation.

Author

• Emily A. Nusbaum, University of California - Berkeley