This exploration takes a look at how students in higher education are disempowered through regimes of social power that are always already extant and ubiquitous within educational regimes. Moreover, this exploration pays particular interest and attention to students in higher education because in many cases throughout relevant research, these student populations are conceived as being the most empowered students within a broad educational landscape, which this piece foundationally challenges. Fundamentally, this article uses a Camusian or Absurdist notion of power and social identity to make sense of how students in higher education take up space within seemingly disempowered educational spaces only to insistently and futilely call to themselves and other students as empowered, although such insistences are empty fallacies of specific social humanities hailing towards their only perceived means of ‘valuable’ social interaction defined by modern conceptions of humanity always already within power relations.
In this article, there is a cripped arugmentation towards and away from performance as curricular. In other words, what we are trying to more fully grapple with is how curriculum within the school and otherwise becomes and is embodied within the body as a performative action towards and away from “dis”ability as a means of essentializing, normalizing and reifying means of “dis”ability as disability—curriculum as a way of interpreting and enacting “dis”ability within the social as a continual re-performance of normed accesses and “real”ity. Moreover, this argumentation is not only about a curricular and performative connection within the realm of “dis”ability and the like, but in a more robust determination, the article is an issuance of “dis”ability itself as performance, as construction, as imposed “real”ity, rather than something that is simply empirical and taught to “others” for some sense of understanding. Further, such determinations of “dis”ability as performance and as curriculum within educational spaces and outside of them are intimately intertwined with crip theory and a constant questioning of regimentations of power that are subversive and insidious—unspoken, unseen narrativizations of “real”ity that instantiate reality in hegemonizing ways continually and differently.
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