Notes on:
Boda, P., , Nusbaum, E, & Kulkami S. (2022).
From 'what is' toward 'what if' through
intersectionality: problematising ableist erasures
and coloniality in racially just research.
International Journal of Research and Method in
Education. 45 (4): 356--69. doi
10.1080.17437277X.2022.2054981
[At first glance, this seemed to confirm all
that Pluckrose and Lindsay (2021)said about the
genre of disability criticism. Even after having
cited Crenshaw pointing out that intersectionality
is not a matter of overlapping identity, but a
matter of social positions that coincide to
deliver a double or treble disadvantage, they
still go ahead to attempt to link the concepts of
disability to the concept of Black identity, in
the sense that both are the result of colonialism
and Whiteness in the cultural sense, both are
categories of Otherness.
The analysis begins reasonably enough by noticing
that in lots of the analyses of discrimination and
deprivation, disabled people are omitted. This is
serious enough to warrant a charge of 'erasure'
and its concomitant — that there is some norm of
able-bodiedness even when discussing POC.
But to follow the entirely sceptical account of
Pluckrose and Lindsay (2021), the analysis then
becomes diverted into a restatement of the tenets
of critical race theory: P and L actually
render these as the tenets of post-modernist
Social Justice Theory, which CRT evolved into.
Disability is treated entirely as a social
construct. It is perfectly true that disabled
people are subject to social judgements some of
them prejudiced and discriminatory, but another
thing to claim that disability is exclusively a
social, or specifically, a political matter, to
the extent that racial distinctions are. It is
also obvious that scientific and medical practices
which have been used to define and treat disabled
people are suffused with social and political
judgements about normal bodies, and, for that
matter, who deserves to be treated and who does
not. That does not mean however that this
has arisen from 'colonialism', that there is no
point in turning to scientific and medical
practices to treat physical or mental disability,
especially if the only alternative is a reliance
on community, indigenous or spiritual forms of
treatment. Those are also suffused with social and
political judgements about normal bodies and who
deserves to be treated and who does not, although
they are probably far less clear. There are also
far less likely to become corrigible, and to be
characterised instead by a series of 'ad hoc'
hypotheses to explain failure in the form of
additional explanations that may not even be
consistent
Back to the article itself... I have no
problem with this first bit]
Stanley (2012)
contends that race/racism is not a monolithic
social construct applied homogenously within and
among specific races/ethnicities. He argues that
to embody an antiracist methodological approach
to research, researchers must think about the
conditions that have constructed racist
exclusions and the material realities that
subjects some to vulnerabilities in greater
preponderance and impact than others. In turn,
he unpacked the condition of racism by
describing it as a process leading to
purposefully designed policies in three primary
steps:
(1) 'real or imagined human
difference is selected to mark one group in
relation to another' to signify a racialised and
of people (s)
(2) these racialisations,
marked distinctively by the contexts in which
they emerge, lead to exclusion among 'symbolic,
sociocultural, and institutional circumstances,;
and
(3) when excluded in
representational, structural and political ways
(i.e. Crenshaw 1993), these identities are
subject to very real negative consequences
(Stanley 2012, pages 320 – 321)
They go on to also cite Crenshaw (2016) that
intersectionality is '"less about overlapping
identities, and not primarily about identity"' but
is instead about the '"structures that make some
identities the consequence of and vehicle for
vulnerability"'. Both researchers stress context
that leads to exclusion.
But then they take this to mean the coloniality of
power, drawing upon Mignolo, but this is surely a
very general definition of power,. Colonial power
is indeed linked to 'Eurocentric methodologies and
epistemologies' as a 'normative centre'. [It is
this connection between the exercise of power and
a specifically colonial exercise of power that
must surely be contentious. Is all power colonial
power? If not the central link between race and
disability falls. The same goes for the argument
below]
Mono-categorial research is colonial in the
context of racism and Whiteness. The disabled are
'multiply marginalised' (359). Disbaility
has been erased-- so it must be as a result of
colonialism too: 'much of the study of ableism has
still operated from a colonial lens of
behaviourist assimilation' (359). This follows a
discussion of TribalCrit and the 'liminality of
indigenous voices among racially just
methodologies and epistemologies' (359) and
educational research, and that helps them connect
[very gernerally] with special education
research -- disability has also been erased even
from 'systemic racism enquiries' although it can
'impact researchers'understandings of
racial/ethnic oppression' (360) [That is what
needs to be demonstrated, surely]
Then it gets into general rhetoric about adopting
'many-centred' activism, new patterns of knowing,
an advocacy of '"past-present-futures that we may
not be able to imagine but hope for"' (citing
Pillow) (360).Disability has been 'consistently
overlooked' but it is 'crucial for understanding
injustice as a form of difference subject to
similar social positioning and systemic oppression
as race' [but not applying only to Black people?].
[Then a bit on Mignolo]. Scheurich is also
mentioned. The key again is the colonialist notion
of power, via an episteme '"both science and
intellectual configurations about systemic
knowledge"', while '"doxa is a kind of knowledge
that the very conceptualisation of episteme needs
as its exterior"' [ Mudimbe apparently, cited by
Mignolo]. It is the connection between the two
that seems important and shows how we can delink
from the colonialist year of power through 'Border
gnoseology' [must look this up — Mignolo
2012] which is a critical reflection on
knowledge production from the interior borders,
bringing apparent opposites into relation,
implying a disobedience to coloniality.
Apparently they're going to use this sledgehammer
to challenge whiteness in their field in order to
avoid narratives of self and other using
monocategories, citing Collins, and adopting an
intersectional approach instead. Race is not a
monolith, not a binary. It is when embedded in
academic hegemony, however — 'single axis
enquiries for ease of clarity or in favouritism
[sic] to formalised publish or perish doctrine'
(361). [Not really racism at all then but academic
bureaucracy is their enemy?]. Mignolo says this
values Western colonial subordination and its
divide and conquer strategies, but epistemic
disobedience means we must problematise all these
mono categorical enquiries. In particular we
should crosspollinate 'race and other markers of
difference' (362) and in particular make
disability visible
Instead, disability and educational research has
proceeded separately from studies of race. There
have been parallels. The colonial mentality has
employed epistemic power to silence 'multiple
marginality'. In the past, disabled individuals
have been managed using behaviourist and
interventionist logics attempting to erase
racialised disability [examples?]. The focus has
been on individuals with disabilities rather than
on disability itself 'as a frame of identity,
expertise and knowledge' which can produce
deficits. Scholars and experts have been
privileged.
'Whiteness has been interwoven with coloniality
and disability' (363) [This might be so -- the
White ideal as the able-bodied male etc, but
prejudice against disability is still not
determined by Whiteness alone] and this has led to
'very real violent material realities based on
exclusion of disability… Disciplinary centres and
deficit labelling'.
There has been 'the ontological erasure of
disability', but stressing this risks isolating
disability away from race and the general listing
of categories of difference against each other.
Instead, methods that are 'disability just' need
to exist in tandem and in intersecting ways
[weasel] with racially just and anticolonial
epistemologies, using an intersectional approach.
Disability studies could even serve as a platform
to think through the whole program of oppression
and discrimination centred on the body [not a bad
idea] , and to focus away from a centred
epistemology to horizons — what Pillow calls
'epistemic witnessing'(364), alternative
possibilities, that which was previously
inconceivable and invisible. It is from this
perspective that we might understand exclusionary
practices in school, for example.
There is such a thing as Disability Critical Race
theory or DisCrit which has produced diverse
methodological and epistemological research to
show the ways in which ableism and racism are
co-constructed. [Ref to Annamara et al] This
has largely focused on learning disabilities and
emotional disabilities so far, but the approach
looks more suitable for generalisation.
Overall we need far more emancipatory revisions,
transformative enquiries and moral authorities to
resist oppression [citing Denzin] to inform our
future research… Lived realities even if less
valuable in academic terms, contexts rather than
mono categorical enquiry, disobedience. Naming
sites of oppression and multiple marginalisation.
We should research for example how teachers enact
justice how they are themselves multiply
marginalised, using counter stories, how cultures
of exclusion are generated among teachers unions
and community members with and without
disabilities, how this is done 'by design through
hegemony' (365) especially with indigenous
populations. This needs to be a future way to
disrupt whiteness, to hold space for these
enquiries.
The piece ends with a series of what ifs [play
John Lennon's Imagine as you read
them]: value difference, support
self-determination, pursue justice, follow dreams,
don't be afraid of publishing or perishing, fulfil
bodies and minds and spirits.
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