Intersectional Consciousness: Transnational Lessons on Disability Justice

• In Event: Disability Justice in (Special) Education Futures: Exploring Critical, Intersectional, and Social and Emotional Dimensions

Abstract

This paper explores how transnational collaborations can expand intersectional consciousness and deepen understandings of disability justice. Situated as a U.S.-based scholar, this paper underscores the necessity of reflexivity in navigating global collaborations. Specifically, the researcher engaged the educational contexts in Colombia, Kenya, and Nigeria. In Colombia, work with the Wayuu people illuminated both the resilience of communities striving to sustain Indigenous language and culture and the striking absence of disability within national education policies. This absence highlights the entanglement of colonial and state histories in shaping who is recognized within systems of schooling. In Kenya and Nigeria, disability justice emerges in strikingly different ways: accessibility is embedded across teacher preparation programs and educator practices, positioning inclusion as foundational rather than supplemental. At the same time, these contexts confront significant challenges in advancing research infrastructures within complex linguistic, ethnic, and sociopolitical landscapes.


The U.S. carries its own colonial, racialized, and ableist histories that often universalize Western frameworks of disability and special education. Engaging transnationally demands attention to these dynamics, as well as recognition of the intellectual, cultural, and pedagogical resources generated outside dominant centers of knowledge production. Lessons from Colombia, Kenya, and Nigeria call for reimagining disability justice as globally interconnected, locally grounded, and historically situated—beyond narrow, technocratic models of inclusion.

Author

• Mildred Boveda, Pennsylvania State University