Humanizing Essence and Existence: Emotion, Behavior, and Disordering in Special Education Research

• In Event: Disability Justice in the Classroom: Disability Politics, Pedagogy and Poetics at the Intersections of Multiple Identities

Abstract

Through a systematic literature review of contemporary special education research pertaining to emotional/behavioral disorders in school, I examine the controlling images (Collins, 2009) and formula stories (Loseke, 2007) of emotional/behavioral disorders as they are used in research to characterize students proscribed as having emotional/behavioral disorders. I propose that the juxtaposition of an irrational child against those that are “rational” is both antithetical to the spirit of disability law in education, and yet an integral and relied-upon function of the underlying research upon which cultural processes of special education in practice rests. Through Critical Whiteness Studies (Leonardo, 2002; Nyack, 2007), Disability Studies in Education (Baglieri, Valle, Connor, & Gallagher, 2011; Erevelles, 2000; Reid & Knight, 2006), and Neo-Institutional theory (Arum, 2000; Voulgarides, 2019), I make special education research the object of this inquiry to ask what “humanizing” (Paris & Winn, 2010) special education research may mean for disability justice in schools.

Author

• Nicky Coomer, Indiana University (IUPUI)