Reimagining ability differences though a proleptic epistemic culture

• In Event: Historicizing Los Angeles : Envisioning New Educational Futures in Latinx Radical Imaginations

Abstract

Alfredo J. Artiles disrupts the hegemonic ideology of ability differences that homogenizes Latine communities and reads them through a prism of deviance. We must unforget the origin story of how the intersections of language, race, ethnicity, social class, and gender have been coded as deviant ability in Latine communities (Artiles, 2019). The rich interlockings of Latine subgroups shaped by generational status, transnationalism, diasporic belonging, ability differences, languages, national origin, and migration status (Georgiou, 2013; Retis, 2021) are used to document the urgent need for a proleptic epistemic culture (Artiles & Gutiérrez, under review). Legal cases and research findings illuminate how the equity remedy of special education that protects the educational rights of people with disabilities can be unwittingly used to marginalize and reduce educational opportunities for Latine students, sometimes creating "subsidized isolation” (Ash, 20112, p. 33). In addition, the analysis makes visible how an intersectional aversive logic creates liminal zones in which policy regulations and compliance requirements are bent and due process is obliterated–this is akin to what Grandin (2011) described as “Katrina time,” when thousands of people were arrested after Hurricane Katrina, and myriad accounts of abuses and illegal procedures were reported about these arrests. “Prisoners who went through [these] ordeals coined the phrase ‘Katrina time’ to describe the period after the flood when due process went the way of the levees” (p. 27). This is painfully illustrated, for instance, in the Franco v. Holder class action lawsuit that denied legal representation to hundreds of detainees with severe mental disabilities (and thus, were unable to represent themselves) facing deportation hearings. This and other recent cases as well as research findings illustrate how the assemblage of policy protections and equity safeguards across legal, education, health, and immigration sectors miss the inherent heterogeneity of these individuals. These paradoxes of equity (Artiles, 2011) require us to imagine a new approach to research knowledge production and policymaking that engages the nuances of identity intersections, disrupts ideologies of ability differences, and foregrounds cultural historical storylines about Latine communities (Artiles & Gutiérrez, under review).

Author

• Alfredo J. Artiles, Stanford University