Black Feminist Thought, Unruliness, and the Radical Transformation of Postsecondary Educational Spaces

• In Event: "What's Disability Got to Do With It?" Social Contexts of Education and Its Intersectionalities

Abstract

Philosophies of inclusion often operate on the premise that to be included in larger society, those who are deemed as different from the norm, who are defined as “unruly” must be fixed or modified, “transformed or improved” or rendered “docile” to be embraced as acceptable. In the world of education, students with disabilities are evaluated, assessed, and found wanting; and their bodies and minds are asked/sometimes demanded to be rehabilitated, reformed, regimented, and ruled in an attempt to bring everyone to an agreed-upon center of normal.
The purpose of this presentation is to critically examine this normalizing impact of inclusion in the context of postsecondary educational spaces, by using an intersectional framework that references unruliness as commonality among multiple identities, and that centers the transformative power of Black women’s knowing.
This exploration is not designed to foreground certain identities, like disability, over others, or to assert that it is possible to subsume multiple identities under one umbrella term, like unruly; but to use “existing analytical categories to document relationships of inequality among social groups”( Erevelles and Minear, 2010, p. 9), with a focus on how enactments of inclusion that are shaped by unexamined forces of normalization (racism, ableism, sexism) act to exclude and dismiss specific bodies and minds in education.
I, then, explore the ways in which the body of thought that I refer to here as Black women’s knowing has the potential to disrupt those unidimensional enactments, leading to a potential radical transformation of inclusive educational practice. An exploration of Collins concept of visionary pragmatism, her focus on intersectionality and Hooks description of engaged pedagogy provides an opportunity to explore the ways in which Black women’s critical perspectives can inform and expand disability scholarship and educational practice at the postsecondary level by pushing beyond 2-dimensional ideas of inclusion, by setting up an expectation that within educational spaces lived experience is valued, that encourages an expansion of the imagination and ideas of able and asks educators and students to celebrate resistance to any norm that oppresses or marginalizes. As the concepts of Black women’s knowing and different framings of inclusion are laid out, it will provide a picture of how different critical approaches to inclusion intersect, and how ultimately concepts associated with Black women’s knowing—like visionary pragmatism, intersectionality, and engaged pedagogy—can be used as tools for radically dismantling and disrupting normalizing and exclusionary forces of inclusion.

Author

• Lalenja Harrington, University of North Carolina - Greensboro