DisCrit Expanded

This sequel to the influential 2016 work DisCrit—Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory in Education explores how DisCrit has both deepened and expanded, providing increasingly nuanced understandings about how racism and ableism circulate across geographic borders, academic disciplines, multiplicative identities, intersecting oppressions, and individual and cultural resistances. Following an incisive foreword by DisCrit intellectual forerunner Alfredo Artiles, a diverse group of authors engage in inward, outward, and margin-to-margin analyses that raise deep and enduring questions about how we as scholars and teachers account for and counteract the collusive nature of oppressions faced by minoritized individuals with disabilities, particularly in educational contexts. Contributors ask readers to consider incisive questions such as: What are the affordances and constraints of DisCrit as it travels outside of U.S. contexts? How can DisCrit, as a critical and intersectional framework, be used to support and extend diverse forms of activism, expanded solidarities, and collective resistance? How can DisCrit inform and be augmented by engagements with other critical theories and modes of inquiry? How can DisCrit help to illuminate agency and resistance among learners with complex learning needs? How might DisCrit inform legal studies and other disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts? How can DisCrit be a critical friend to interrogations involving issues of citizenship, language, and more?

Book Features:

• Expands the discussion on DisCrit to include issues of language, citizenship, postsecondary education, and more.
• Presents a robust engagement with DisCrit that reaches across disciplines, geographies, and temporalities.
• Highlights the lived experience of people with disabilities as knowledge generators fighting against the collusive power of racism and ableism.
• Recognizes that disability is complex and multifaceted, and that Black people, Indigenous People, and other People of Color should not be bound by labels in educational experiences and throughout their lives.
• Further explores the discussion on DisCrit while encouraging disability scholars to substantially integrate racism into their analyses, and for race scholars to do the same with ableism.

Subini A. Annamma is an associate professor at Stanford University and has served as a special education teacher in public schools and youth prisons. Beth A. Ferri is a professor of inclusive education and disability studies at Syracuse University, where she also coordinates the doctoral program in special education. David J. Connor is professor emeritus of the Learning Disabilities program at Hunter College, City University of New York.

“ DisCrit Expanded: Reverberations, Ruptures, and Inquiries delivers uncompromising analysis from start to finish. It is a rigorous and inspiring collection of essays that speaks across disciplines.”

—Teachers College Record

“In this expanded version of DisCrit, editors Annamma, Ferri, Connor, and their contributing authors convince us that the concept of ability makes possible a unifying grand theory of social relations and the potential for transformative change across race, gender, and culture. Anyone interested in education for critical consciousness would benefit from this update of a perspective that is clearly impacting how educators think about normalcy, intelligence, and special education.”
—Zeus Leonardo, University of California, Berkeley; author of Race Frameworks: A Multidimensional Theory of Racism and Education

“DisCrit not only speaks to our current unique moment in time, but also helps explain how we got here and how we can advance a more just and equitable future. In this latest DisCrit volume, the editors and contributors expose many forms of racism and ableism and how they intertwine to uphold whiteness and white, able-bodied norms across the world. At the same time, the contributors extend DisCrit to consider a variety of intersecting marginalizations and to offer considerations for how it can be critically applied to a variety of contexts and pressing issues. Finally, this book highlights the resistance and innovations of multiply disempowered communities, providing a guiding light for shifting paradigms, policies, and practices. In the concluding chapter, the editors say that they have always hoped DisCrit would be ‘a living framework’ and this volume illustrates just how alive (and necessary) it is.”
—Hailey Love, assistant professor, Department of Rehabilitation Psychology and Special Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Contents

Foreword: The Future(s) of Disability: Of Complementary Representations, Heteroglossic Communities, and Moral Leadership ix

Acknowledgments xix

Introduction: Reflecting on DisCrit 1
Subini Annamma, Beth A. Ferri, & David Connor

PART I: OUTWARD INQUIRIES 11

1.  Toward a DisCrit Approach to American Law 13
Jamelia N. Morgan

2.  Collusive Symbiosis: Notes on Disability as White Property in Higher Education 31
Lauren E. Shallish, Michael D. Smith, & Ashley Taylor

3.  Disrupting Dominant Modes of Expression: Illuminating the Strengths and Gifts of Two Disabled Girls of Color 45
Amanda Miller, Sylvia Nyegenye, & Rose Mostafa-Shoukry

4.  “It Feels Like Living in a Limbo”: Exploring the Limits of Inclusion for Children Living at the Global Affective Intersections of Dis/ability, Language, and Migration in Italy and the United States 62
Valentina Migliarini, Chelsea Stinson, & David I. Hernández-Saca

PART II: INWARD INQUIRIES 79

5.  Does DisCrit Travel? The Global South and Excess Theoretical Baggage Fees 81
Tanushree Sarkar, Carlyn Mueller, & Anjali Forber-Pratt

6.  Identity Politics: Exploring DisCrit’s Potential to Empower Activism and Collective Resistance 96
Joy Banks, Phillandra Smith, & D’Arcee Charington Neal

7.  A DisCrit Call for the Abolition of School Police 112
Christina Payne-Tsoupros & Najma Johnson

8.  Perfect or Mocha: Language Policing and Pathologization 129
Jennifer Phuong & María Cioè-Peña

PART III: MARGIN TO MARGIN 145

9.  LatDisCrit: Exploring Latinx Global South DisCrit Reverberations as Spaces Toward Emancipatory Learning and Radical Solidarity 147
Alexis Padilla

10.  Unveiling the Intersections of Race and Disability in Students with Significant Support Needs 163
Nitasha M. Clark, George W. Noblit, Charna D’Ardenne, David A. Koppenhaver, & Karen Erickson

11.  Theorizing the Curriculum of Colonization in the U.S. Deaf Context: Situating DisCrit Within a Framework of Decolonization 179
Gloshanda Lawyer

Conclusion 199
Beth A. Ferri, David J. Connor, & Subinni A. Annamma

About the Authors 211

Index 219