Crafting Disabilities: A Critical Examination of Disability Identification for Multicultural Learners in South Korea

• In Event: Bordering Difference and Reimagining Inclusive Futures: Global Struggles Toward Intersectional Justice

Abstract

Objectives
Disability identification is often framed as a neutral, technical process that relies on precise diagnoses and categorical labels to grant students access to services and supports. However, this technical framing masks the sociopolitical dimensions of identification, particularly the ways disability has been historically entangled with race, language, and other markers of difference (Artiles, 2011; Baynton, 2001). This paper challenges the presumed neutrality of disability identification by examining how special education processes in South Korea operate as “DefectCrafting” mechanism (Artiles, 2019). Specifically, it investigates how disability is constructed, interpreted, and institutionalized for students from multicultural families within South Korea’s education system.

Theoretical Framework
This study draws on Artiles’ (2019) concept of DefectCraft, which illuminates how disability is constructed as natural and objective categories through bureaucratic, diagnostic, and educational practices that obscure the historical, sociocultural, and political forces shaping classification. DefectCraft enables a critical interrogation of how institutional processes translate difference into perceived defect, particularly through racialized, monolingual, and ableist logics (Tefera et al., 2023).

Methods
We employed a multi-stakeholder case study design to investigate how disability is constructed for multicultural students within the South Korean special education system. This approach allowed for an in-depth, contextualized analysis of various actors’ perspectives, including caregivers, general and special educators, and diagnostic specialists involved in the disability identification process.

Data Sources
Data for this paper are drawn from a larger multi-phase qualitative study conducted over fourteen months (April 2024 to May 2025) across urban and rural regions of South Korea with growing multicultural student populations. Participants include two caregivers of multicultural students with disabilities, eight special education teachers, two general education teachers, and two diagnostic specialists. Interviews, observation notes, and institutional documents were analyzed using multi-cycle thematic coding methods (Saldaña, 2016) to examine how disability is interpreted and enacted in practice.

Results
Findings reveal that disability identification processes in South Korea are deeply shaped by nationalist, monolingual, and ableist logics. Standardized assessment tools, normed on monolingual Korean populations, systematically misrecognize multilingual development as cognitive or developmental deficit. Migrant mothers are often positioned as lacking the capacity to support their children’s normative development, reinforcing racialized and gendered assumptions. These processes reflect DefectCraft, wherein bureaucratic systems are weaponized to frame differences as perceived defects. Caregivers face epistemic exclusion in navigating special education systems without adequate linguistic support. Educators reported delays or misidentifications due to diagnostic uncertainty and institutional hesitation.

Scholarly Significance
This study transnational lens on global inclusive education by examining how disability identification in South Korea is shaped by intersecting ideologies of race, language, and nationalism. By centering the experiences of marginalized caregivers and educators, it challenges dominant diagnostic paradigms and reconceptualizes disability as a sociopolitical construct. Aligning with AERA 2026’s theme, the study “unforgets” the historical legacies of exclusion and their ongoing impacts on inclusion, access, and equity for students with disabilities and their families, imagining justice-centered futures through global, intersectional analysis.

Authors

• Dosun Ko, Santa Clara University

• Yehyang Lee, Syracuse University

• Jane Y. Jeong, University of Texas at Austin

• Byul Yim, Independent Scholar