Haunted Trauma Narratives of Inclusion, Race, and Disability in a School Community

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

Abstract

The purpose of this presentation is to conceptualize haunted trauma narratives as a school-wide practice of freedom-dreaming. Intertwining narrative vignettes from an ethnography with theoretical literatures from critical disability studies, hauntology, and trauma studies; I explicate relationships between haunting and transgenerational trauma with specific attention to the role of narratives in transformational possibilities.

By typical definitions in the special education world, inclusion would not be recognizable as it exists at Memorial Elementary. Memorial is responding to a widely documented trend in public schools: over-representation of students of color, particularly Black and Brown students, in high-incidence special education categories, including emotional and behavioral disabilities (EBD). I conceptualize EBD as unacknowledged suppression of hauntings from transgenerational trauma—legacies of institutional racism, poverty, and attempts at dehumanization.
I argue that haunted trauma narratives affirm and reconstruct the personhood of students of color with ghosts of trauma. Through narrativizing, students of color and educators rebuild inclusion from difference-as-allowed toward Martin Luther King Jr.’s (2001) “beloved community” (p. 458)..” Thus, haunted trauma narratives affirm and reconstruct the personhood of students of color with ghosts of trauma. That is, Memorial has redesigned school structures, educators’ beliefs and practices, interactions with children and their families, and other aspects of everyday systems to be organized around d the intersections of race, trauma, identity, and community. Though dreaming is undeniably difficult, Memorial also illustrates the transformative power of affective forces from ghosts that demand hope, justice, and healing.

Author

• Irene H. Yoon, University of Utah