ABSTRACT
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak notes in Death of a Discipline (2003), that a simple splice in the example of comparative literature and cultural studies/multiculturalism will both “work” and “not work” given the existing politicized background of this ongoing effort. Spivak recognizes that these fields are in politics (emphasis in the original), and thus her call to depoliticize suggests a move away from a politics of hostility, fear, and half-solutions. Such an analysis is significant in the example of the nascent field of disability studies in education where conversation among those in general education, education foundations, and special education may well prove, as Spivak noted, no simple splice. Disability studies, although relatively new to education, is an area of interdisciplinary scholarship that draws from the humanities and the social sciences, and as such, holds profound implications for understanding the relation between education and society. In the broadest sense, disability studies is defined and refined by scholarship that interrogates ableism1 and the certainty that encloses the pursuit of “normalcy” throughout society and its institutions. Disability studies scholarship encourages a departure from exclusively medicalized meanings of disability to offer instead, understanding disability as a “lens” that affords radical analyses and insights about the body, society, and culture. Informed by a wealth of interdisciplinary perspectives, this scholarship interrogates historical/inherited interpretations of disability and in as much, aims to reclaim and reimagine disability as more than a medical/biological event rooted to pathology lodged deep within the individual. Of particular relevance to this chapter, disability studies writ large, provides the intellectual tools to challenge the
hegemonic ideological impulse of special education and its assumed, exclusive rights to author K-12 educational experience for disabled and non-disabled children and youth.
