Search

The purpose of this article is to engage crip theory in a critical analysis of the calls within elementary education for a return to normalcy. I seek to question the ways COVID-19 has reinforced orientations towards normalcy by asking where normalcy went and how the calls for its return reveal the fundamental limits of inclusion within schools. Uses of the terms normalcy, normal, and normative within the context of this article refer to the mythical white, male, able-bodied, middle-class, heteronormative figure that remains hegemonic as well as widely resisted, questioned, and critiqued within critical disability studies. Through the application of crip theory and cripistemologies, I contend in this article that calls to return to normally engage in a persistent effort to erase and exclude disabled children and youth from a potentially transformative and necessary conversation about how we might pursue conceptualizations and enactments of inclusion outside of its current adherence to normative neoliberal aims and objectives. Rather than accepting the conditions of inclusion (i.e., the sustaining of normalcy) in its current neoliberal iteration, in this article I invite educators to crip calls for inclusion and crip calls for a return to normal.

In order to trouble the rhetoric of caring spaces like home that are taken for granted in schools, I consider how the western neoliberal subject remains tethered to normalcy in ways that sustain practices of conditional inclusion. My aim is to persist in questioning normalcy, while also endeavouring to reimagine distinctly different relational encounters amidst embodied differences. The first part of this paper will consider how current inclusionary school practices sustain normalcy by both refusing to confront, while also concealing, the ways public education was shaped by the eugenics movement. The second part will explore the works of Michalko [2002. "The Difference That Disability Makes." Philadelphia: Temple University Press] and Yergeau [2018. "Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness." Fordham: Duke University Press] and the ways narratives situated within disability have sought to resist the hegemony of normalcy while also provoking the possibilities of reimagining our human relations both within and against western colonial logics. The last section of this paper will consider how narratives told and embodied through disability, might pursue foregrounding disorienting intersubjective encounters as a necessary move intended to amplify the possibilities of displacing normalcy while reimagining what it means to be human with each other.

Black Racialization and Resistance at an Elite University by Rosalind Hampton University of Toronto Press, 2020, 215 pages ISBN 9781487524869 Black Racialization and Resistance at an Elite University offers an [...]

This paper aims to foreground the persistent ethical conundrums within the process of engaging children labeled with intellectual disabilities in the research process. I consider what happens when researchers are embedded within and committed to sustaining relationships with disabled children? I explore the possibilities of the enactment of consent as an ongoing negotiation between researcher and research participants. I contend that resisting and transforming unbalanced relations of power within research take seriously the importance of remaining mired in the ethical conundrums of the constant negotiation of research relationships that include making space for participant refusals throughout the research process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper applies crip theory (McRuer, 2006, 2018) as well as other key conceptual tools from disabled childhood studies (Runswick-Cole et al., 2018) and disability studies in education (Cousik & Maconochie, 2017) as a tactic intended to question and resist the story of overcoming as it manifests itself within the discourses and practices of self-regulation in early learning classrooms. This paper offers a brief overview of the range of self-regulation strategies enacted within educational settings in Ontario, Canada, that purport to support young children in overcoming themselves on their way to normalcy. This paper also engages in crip theory as a strategy to both question and disrupt the taken for granted assumption that self-regulation entails a return towards or a sustaining of the efficient and productive neoliberal individual in school systems. Finally, this paper considers how we might not only invite but embrace the disruptions that occur when embodied differences refuse to be overcome by demands to self-regulate. Ultimately, a key aim of this paper is to resist how discourses and practices of self-regulation in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) establish the overcoming narrative as a means to cure, fix or exclude embodied differences while contemplating the vibrant possibilities embedded within learning with and from disabled childhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]