No abstract

A brief history of the emergence of the inclusive schools movement demonstrates its reliance on the pathologizing paradigms that are both the foundations and frameworks of traditional special education. Throughout this recent history, the utilization of a positivist approach to research and practice for autistic students, both those who are segregated and those who have access to mainstream classrooms, has maintained a person-fixing ideology. Instead, a neurodiversity framework adopts an integrative approach, drawing on the psychosocial, cultural, and political elements that effectively disrupt the systematic categorization of alternative neurological and cognitive embodiment(s) and expressions as a host of threatening “disorders” that must be dealt with by cure, training, masking, and/or behavioral interventions to be implemented in the classroom. Centering the personal, lived experiences and perspectives of autistic and otherwise neurodivergent activists and scholars affiliated with the U.S. neurodiversity movement offers an emancipatory lens for representing and embodying neurological differences beyond traditional special education’s deficit-based discourses and practices. This emphasis on political advocacy and cultural self-authorship effectively challenges unexamined, universalizing assumptions about whose bodyminds are “educable” and under what auspices “educability” is conceptualized and written into special-education curricula.

Academic spaces in the United States remain exclusive and toxic for those who embody multiple marginalized identities. There is hope, however, as subversive practices and resistance to systemic oppression and hostility continue to infiltrate academia through the work of socially engaged scholar-activists. In this paper, we—four sick, disabled, and Deaf women and non-binary educators of color—come together to discuss our paths to understanding ourselves and our places within academia. Through the methodology of activist ethnography, we explore the diverse and complex ways we embrace Disability Justice in our teaching, research, scholarship, and activism. Collectively and through interwoven storytelling, we disrupt and challenge ableism, racism, settler colonialism, cis-hetero-sexism, classism, and other intersecting forms of oppression within academia by (re)centering and amplifying our lived experiences and disabled, Deaf, and chronically ill epistemologies. Simultaneously, through a Disability Justice praxis, we work to imagine and create educational spaces that build and support radical love, accessible kinship, and healing.

Knowledge extraction and the absence of reciprocity between scholars and grassroots practitioners in mainstream disability research are topics of concern for scholar-activists committed to disability justice in cultural and social studies research. Critical methodologies such as praxis-oriented research and scholar-activism in disability studies have sought to decenter Euro-American notions of expertise and nondisabled expert knowledge by centering disabled grassroots knowledge and leadership in all aspects of the disability experience. Overall, the literature demonstrates that emancipatory methods such as scholar-activism and praxis-oriented research have had a liberatory effect on disability studies inquiry. It also suggests that nondisabled researchers in other areas have yet to critically examine their role in perpetuating systemic ableism in their research practices. This article builds upon and extends the existing literature by considering disability studies scholars’ methodological interventions in traditionally dominant fields such as anthropology and policy studies. To keep with a praxis-oriented approach to research, the article uses a contemplative inquiry approach to discuss these interventions. Concluding remarks discuss the political significance of praxis-oriented research and its role in subverting unbalanced power dynamics between academic researchers and disabled grassroots practitioners, thus enabling a move toward a liberatory disability politics.

No abstract