ABSTRACT
Using an ethnographic case study of a family on welfare, I examine the adverse consequences of welfare reform policy on children and its intersection with school as a gate-keeping dispensary of identities of disability. I argue that the “disabling” of children of poverty begins long before they enter school, sparked by conditions created by macrolevel factors, such as harmful public policies, and not by characteristics innate to the child. The study examines the economic and educational structures wherein disabilities are hatched, and the policies that underwrite the power of those institutions to ascribe policied identities to children of poverty. This study challenges the distributive notions of social justice and welfare that frame current discourses of disability and undergird practice.
