From the Personal to the Global: Engaging with and Enacting DisCrit Theory Across Multiple Spaces

ABSTRACT

This article serves as the introduction to a special edition of the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Education (REE) dedicated to Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit). We begin by sharing the seven tenets of in DisCrit, acknowledging our indebtedness to scholars of color who originally developed theories of intersectionality. Next, we discuss ways in which, from its original publication in REE (2013), DisCrit has gained traction as a theoretical tool that is increasingly used in research and practice. Then, we briefly summarize and comment upon the eight featured articles in this special edition. Each article has been purposefully selected to reflect a broad scope of interests – from empirical research to theoretical papers seeking changes within schools, communities, teacher education programs, research practices, and global connections. All contributions are from the USA as a way to consider ways in which DisCrit is being utilized in one country, while encouraging further intra-disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and global conversations.

KEYWORDS:

• Theory
• DisCrit
• intersectionality
• interdisciplinary
• Global South

We are indebted to the Race, Ethnicity & Education for publishing our original article Dis/Ability Critical Race Studies (DisCrit): Theorizing at the Intersections of Race and Dis/Ability almost a decade ago (Annamma, Connor, and Ferri 2013).¹ Dave Gillborn as editor, and the incredibly thoughtful reviewers he found, were willing to envision a theoretical framing that had not yet existed. With their support, we articulated the value of using a framework grounded in the assumption that racism and ableism are mutually constitutive and collusive – always circulating across time and context in interconnected ways. By racializing ability, and debilitating race, we sought to add a shared sibling that connected Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Disability Studies (DS), fields in which we simultaneously located our own interests, work, and scholarship. In initially articulating DisCrit, we were seeking a theoretical framework that would help to surface the interdependent nature of race and disability, particularly in (but not limited to) educational contexts. We decided to craft this framework in a series of tenets that we believed would prove useful in advancing this necessary and intersectional work. Those seven original tenets are as follows:

1. DisCrit focuses on ways that the forces of racism and ableism circulate interdependently, often in neutralized and invisible ways, to uphold notions of normalcy.

2. DisCrit values multidimensional identities and troubles singular notions of identity such as race or dis/ability or class or gender or sexuality, and so on.

3. DisCrit emphasizes the social constructions of race and ability and yet recognizes the material and psychological impacts of being labeled as raced or dis/abled, which sets one outside of the western cultural norms.

4. DisCrit privileges voices of marginalized populations, traditionally not acknowledged within research.

5. DisCrit considers legal and historical aspects of dis/ability and race and how both have been used separately and together to deny the rights of some citizens.

6. DisCrit recognizes whiteness and Ability as Property and that gains for people labeled with dis/abilities have largely been made as the result of interest convergence of white, middle-class citizens.

7. DisCrit requires activism and supports all forms of resistance (Annamma et al. 2013, 11)

Within each of these tenets, we acknowledge DisCrit’s intellectual lineage as one that stretches back over a century from the work of Anna Julia Cooper ([1892]2017) and W.E.B. DuBois (1920), to the litany of black feminist scholars, particularly Kimberlè Crenshaw (1989), Patricia Hill Collins (2002) and Audre Lorde ([[1980] 2020]), to more recent theorizing connecting racism and ableism in education by scholars such as Theresa Glennon (1995), Alfredo Artiles (2013), Leonardo and Broderick (2011) who influenced our thinking in profound ways. Aware of the longstanding concern about the intersection of race and ability/disability, we also saw its potential to illuminate longstanding inequities within education in the USA and, by extension, society at large (see, for example, Ferri and Connor 2005; Annamma et al. 2013). However, we were also mindful of the critiques about the absence of race and disability in both DS (Bell 2006) and CRT (Delgado and Stefancic 2001), prompting us to foreground these markers of identity particularly, but not necessarily exclusive of other forms of oppression and marginalization.

The encouraging response to that initial article in REE motivated us to publish an edited book (Connor, Ferri, and Annamma 2016), along with several journal articles and books that either individually or collectively extended our first articulation of DisCrit (Annamma 2018; Annamma and Handy 2019; Annamma, Ferri, and Connor 2018a; Connor et al. 2019). In addition, our original DisCrit article was reprinted in the canonical collection, Critical Race Theory in Education: Major Themes in Education (Dixson et al. 2017). As part of our own work, we have continued to document how DisCrit has traversed numerous spaces, crossing disciplinary boundaries and geographic borders (Annamma, Ferri, and Connor 2018a), broadening inquiries, expanding interdisciplinary work, to rupture the forces of racism and ableism in schools and society (Annamma, Ferri, and Connor 2018b; forthcoming).

DisCrit also developed far beyond our own work and in ways we originally could not have imagined. In a recent critical literature review, we discovered, for example, DisCrit has increasingly been used in doctoral dissertations and interdisciplinary journals that cross disciplinary boundaries and geographic borders (Migliarini 2017); critically analyze Positive Behavioral Intervention and Supports (PBIS) in classrooms (Adams 2015); integrate simultaneous issues of race and ability into teacher education for White teachers (Beneke 2017) and teachers of color (Kulkarni 2015), and; that center the voices of disabled scholars of Color (Cannon 2019; Hernández-Saca 2017). Moreover, it has been used as a tool to better understand, and address concurrent issues of racism and ableism in early childhood education (Love and Beneke 2021) and k-12 schools (Friedman, Hallaran, and Locke 2020; DeMatthews 2020). In tracing this growth, we are struck by the ways DisCrit has been taken up, expanded upon, and used as a starting point for further creative articulations and investigations in ways race and ethnicity impact education. The ongoing expansion prompted us to propose this special issue of REE to capture some of the ways in which DisCrit is evolving.

A note on our theme

For this special issue, we wanted to feature various ways DisCrit is currently being used and adapted by scholars in critical fields of educational inquiry around issues of race, ethnicity, and disability (along with other markers of identity). In sending out a Call for Proposals, we reviewed and selected submissions with an eye toward scope, ultimately selecting from deeply personal pieces to projects seeking changes within schools, communities, teacher education programs, research practices, and global connections. Hence, our title From the Personal to the Global: Engaging with and Enacting Disability Critical Race Theory Across Multiple Spaces. Having all contributions hail from the USA is a purposeful choice. Our intention is not to limit a US-centric approach to this work, but rather consider the ways in which DisCrit is being used in one country that is undoubtedly shaped by its history of racial and disability divisions that are still manifested in all aspects of society. That said, the last article titled Global Conversations: Recovery and Detection of Multiply-Marginalized Bodies by Iqtadar, Hernandez-Saca, Ellison and Cowley can be seen as an invitation for further dialogue and exploration of the complexities of using an intersectional approach from the Global North to address issues of race, ethnicity, and disability in the Global south. This important context has begun to be addressed by several scholars from the Global South, including Padilla’s original LatDisCrit (In Press) and Sarkar, Mueller, and Forber-Pratt (In Press) cautious, thoughtful approach about the dangers of countries around the world uncritically importing Western theory without sufficiently considering their own cultural, social, historical, philosophical, and legal contexts. In sum, while we are pleased and humbled by seeing the growth of DisCrit, we are also mindful of its limitations.

In this special edition, we selected eight articles that highlight ways in which DisCrit has been taken up, expanded upon, and used as a springboard for further creative articulation, reflecting its role in fostering transgressive spaces that generate critical questions. These spaces range from the microintrapersonal, to the mesointeractional, to the macrosociopolitical, purposefully reflecting a range of authors, from established academics to emerging scholars, all of whom demonstrate ways that DisCrit has been engaged with via multiple perspectives and various positionalities. In the remainder of this introduction, we briefly comment upon each contribution, highlighting a selection of issues they raise, before ending with a series of questions designed to stimulate thinking about further possibilities of expanding DisCrit.

From the personal to the global

We begin this special edition with two highly personalized articles. In the first, Becoming, Belonging and the Fear of Everything Black: Autoethnography of a Minority-Mother-Advocate and the Movement Toward Collective Justice, Lydia Ocasio-Stoutenburg describes why it is impossible to compartmentalize race, ethnicity, disability, gender, and social class, within her lived experiences, and how specific intersectional viewpoints can be summoned to provide penetrating insights into our culture. Her autoethnography is that of a parent advocate, serving to counter-narrate the dominant, deficit-based discourses on race and disability she experienced in medical and educational settings as a Black mother of a child with a disability. Using ‘A Black Story’ to tell the ‘A Back Story’ of ‘The Birth Story,’ the author reveals how having her son led her to question a host of educational, professional, and societal norms. The centerpiece of her narrative traces her transition from being an astute observer of societal norms to becoming a fierce parent advocate. Her transformation is fueled by knowing how valuing her son – a Black male with a disability – ran contrary to widespread fears of him not fitting into prescribed norms. In rendering this self-portrait, Ocasio-Stoutenburg reveals the complex, challenging reality of being a multiply marginalized parent, spotlighting the adversarial forces that ultimately serve to galvanize her role as a parental activist, a role she also embraces in her scholarship (Harry and Ocasio-Stoutenberg 2020; Ocasio-Stoutenberg and Harry 2021).

In a second deeply personal article titled, Sobreviviendo sin Sacrificando (Surviving Without Sacrificing)–A Intersectional DisCrit Testimonio from a Tired Mother-Scholar of Color, Lisette Torres invites us into her world. By exploring Torres’s location at the intersections of race, disability, and gender in the context of the neoliberal academy, she describes fears of how having a non-visible disability plays into stereotypic notions casting scholars of color as lazy and incompetent. She reveals how stereotype threat, imposter syndrome, and racial microaggressions are daily challenges that exacerbate the symptoms of her chronic impairment. Torres writes a powerful critique of the ‘baby penalty’ that continues to disadvantage females in the workforce, the culturally based and family-related expectations of Latinas, and the labor-intensive neoliberal expectations for scholarly productivity of academic institutions. Interestingly, she also writes of the difficulty in embracing the social model of disability, with its primary emphasis on disabling attitudes and barriers, when her chronic condition involves ongoing pain that requires, at least in part, a medical response. Torres’s use of testimonio allows her to step outside of the expectations of traditional research, providing an opportunity to address both the concept of sacrificio (sacrificing self-interest as a female), while simultaneously identifying multiple, powerful forces that actively disable her, including standard practices within educational institutions.

Maintaining the theme of race, disability, and parents, in Black Families’ Resistance to Deficit Positioning: Addressing the Paradox of Black Parent Involvement, authors Hailey Love, Courtney Wilt, Sylivia Nyegenye, and Subini Annamma call attention to how Black parents and their children experience marginalization within normed expectations of school-parent dynamics. They do this by problematizing traditional conceptualizations of parent involvement, illustrating ways in which school expectations and practices are based on White, middle-class norms that actively marginalize Black families. In discussing experiences of the Black parents of daughters with disabilities participating in their research, Love et al. reveal ways in which these parents resist school practices that position them and their children in deficit ways. Advocating that schools provide meaningful support rather than harsh and inappropriate discipline practices is a key priority that arises from school personnel misunderstanding or ignoring disability-related considerations, thereby unnecessarily exacerbating their child’s struggles. By emphasizing support-centered versus disciplinary-centered approaches to resolving commonplace occurrences – such as a student being absent or late due to diabetes-related considerations – Black parents reframe deficit-based perceptions of their daughters with disabilities to include varying cultural considerations, including behavioral norms.

In DisCrit at the Margins of Teacher Education: Informing Curriculum, Disciplinary Integration, and Visibilization, Saili Kulkarni, Emily Nusbaum, and Phillip Boda take on the polarized nature of teacher education. Whereas traditionalists tend to center core practices, they illustrate how justice-oriented scholars center ideologies that become embedded within their practices. They assert that both ‘positions’ must consider how ideologies and practices can operate interdependently to disrupt inequities and cultivate agency among all students. Using DisCrit, they argue that practices (and the ideologies they embody) can be problematized by examining ways in which racism and ableism operate to support the normative center of schooling. In brief, the authors unpack what DisCrit’s theory affords critical teacher education in general, while specifically looking at individuals with complex support needs, and the application of DisCrit in the disciplinary case of science education. In pushing the current boundaries of DisCrit, the authors initiate a critical conversation about the relationship between DisCrit, silenced perspectives of populations unaddressed in equity-focused teacher education, and new disciplinary possibilities of what they mean by justice-oriented applications of theory and practice.

In Extending DisCrit: A Case for Universal Design for Learning and Equity in a Rural Teacher Residency, Beth Fornauf and Bryan Mascio focus on a program that prepares teachers to work in ‘high need’ rural schools in the United States. The authors specifically offer a counter-narrative to the commonly held deficit lens applied to schools in rural communities. Framing work using theory and research on DisCrit and Universal Design for Learning (UDL), they share their experiences as rural teacher educators foregrounding UDL to help preservice teachers disrupt assumptions about rurality, socioeconomics, race, ability, gender identity, and privilege. Troubling aspects of UDL, the authors show how the effects of teacher influence can either sustain or challenge norms that are harmful to so many children. The authors describe how their gradual incorporation of the tenets of DisCrit helped re-think UDL and improved their own ability to support pre-service teachers’ critical examination of structural inequities within school practices, including norms associated with race, ability, and rurality. The authors end by offering insights into their ongoing use of DisCrit as a model, admittedly a work-in-progress, for how teachers can cultivate a transformative and liberatory framework.

In Traerás tus Documentos (You Will Bring Your Documents): Navigating the Intersections of Disability and Citizenship Status in Special Education, Rachel Traxler, and Lilly Padia focus on undocumented youth within special education programs. They investigate the experiences of two high school students – Fernanda and Daniel – at the intersection of disability, ethnicity, and immigration status, as the students and their families negotiate the interplay of fear, schooling, and language in their desire to pursue higher education. The authors use DisCrit to help locate historical patterns of citizenship to trace the ways in which racism and ableism, coupled with documentation status, continue to shape which bodies – verified and authenticated by which papers – are rendered deserving of access to educational opportunities. In their research, Padia and Traxler reveal ways in which students at the intersection of immigration status and disability are met with care by teachers and schools while remaining unsupported in other domains. To complicate matters, when graduating from K-12 public school systems, the support and services students were entitled to under the law cease, leave them ‘eligible’ for similar support and services in college, but without any guarantees of service. The authors note how even well-intended mechanisms to provide students with information about re-acquiring support at the college level for their disability can have the opposite effect when ‘documents’ to prove disability are confounded with documents proving citizenship.

The aforementioned articles focused on using DisCrit to capture individual disability-related experiences of scholar-authors of color, parents of children with disabilities, current limitations, and possibilities for focusing on race and disability within teacher education, creative classroom practices to engage all students, and supports for undocumented students to transition to college. The following two papers incorporate DisCrit in ways that directly resonate with these communities, albeit in very different ways.

In Bringing DisCrit Theory to Practice in the Development of an Action for Equity Collaborative Network: Passion Projects, Tammy Ellis-Robinson shares how she, as an academic activist, took DisCrit into her local community as ‘a tool and lens’ to ground critical conversations about race and disability within an interprofessional collaborative network comprising educators, community providers, and community stakeholders. The author describes building a series of collective inquiry sessions with a diverse constituency to examine issues of (in)equity. By sharing their experiences in the context of institutionalized practices in educational and community settings, participants discussed aspects of their minoritized identities including disability, race, ethnicity, language, immigrant status, gender, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status. This collective knowledge of multiple aspects that constituted each other’s identity was then used to inform planning for working with pre-service teachers’ and supporting their practicum experiences. At its center, Ellis-Robinson’s action-research disrupts and reduces inequities while building opportunities for expanding cultural competence and culturally responsive teaching as informed by larger and more inclusive communities of practice. Describing various community-based ‘passion projects’ developed by the group, all interconnected by a driving interest in cultivating equity within schools, the author exemplifies how to utilize a DisCrit approach for practical purposes to impact the lives of students, practitioners, and community members.

Finally, in Global Conversations: Recovery and Detection of Multiply-Marginalized Bodies, Shehreen Iqtadar, David Hernandez-Saca, Bradley Scott Ellison, and Danielle Cowley invite us to contemplate, in the form of a loving critique, the virtual absence of global intersectional disability politics in both fields of Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory. To counter this paucity, the authors advance a more global and humane, liberatory theoretical positioning of DisCrit by analyzing the human rights discourses employed by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (UNCRPD). In citing DisCrit’s emphasis on ‘the social construction of race and ability … which sets one outside of the western cultural norms’ (Annamma, Connor, and Ferri 2013, 11), Iqtadar et al. seek to push DisCrit further as a theoretical framework to account for the impact of western cultural norms and ideals as applied to non-western contexts and, in turn, local contexts within those contexts. Additionally, the authors call attention to the problematic binary between the Global South/Global North becoming further reified, generating the global racist and ableist hierarchy of western cultural norms that dominate international discourse, neglectful of the pervasive violence identified within human rights discourses.

Some concluding thoughts and questions

We would like to thank all authors in this special edition of REE who were able to contribute to this project during the challenging conditions of a global pandemic. Each article represents diverse ways in which DisCrit is being utilized in one or more areas of practice, theory, policy, and research. We close our Introduction by posing some open questions to readers, in the hope that the featured articles are not only are finite works in and of themselves but can also serve as springboards to help us think creatively about centering race and disability in our teaching and scholarship. For example, how might the irrefutable power of personal experience and the insights of life at the intersections of race, disability, and parenthood, as demonstrated by Ocasio-Stoutenberg, be included in all teacher education programs? What insights of Torres about the intersectional realities of being a Woman of Color, disabled, with the cultural demands of sacrificio can inform hiring practices and support offered within coveted and still overwhelmingly White academic spaces? How can Love et al.’s observations of the dissonance between school and community cultural norms be brought to the attention of school leaders and Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs) in ways that require an honest sharing of perspectives and experiences with a view to supporting multiply marginalized students, parents, and teachers? We suggest Ellis-Robinson’s approach, a form of academic activism at the grass roots level, offers one compelling way forward. Culling from Ellis-Robinson’s community-based collaborative experiences to date, what are other ways to connect our commitments to research, community service, and teaching? In teacher education, Kulkarni et al. raise important issues about a DisCrit grounding in the content of Science, prompting speculation about what it might look like in Math, English Language Arts, Social Studies, Art, Physical Education, and so on. It might also prompt us to ask about the relative absence of critical disability scholarship in our content- and curriculum-focused journals and publications. By critiquing a lack of attention paid to disabled students of color with complex needs, Kulkarni et al., prompt us to ask in what ways can DisCrit be leveraged to expand and improve multiply marginalized students’ educational futures? Likewise, Traxler and Padila’s focus on another underrepresented group in the literature – undocumented immigrant students at the interstices of disability, ethnicity, and language – asking us to consider ways in which some of the most vulnerable children and youth can be supported in maximizing their educational opportunities? At the classroom level, Fornauf and Mascio remind us of ‘universals’ we must be mindful of, including considering DisCrit’s applicability to all spaces, including rural ones, and the importance of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to craft learning experiences in all settings. Their article also prompts us to ask: What might a closer look at UDL, particularly from a DisCrit perspective, look like? Likewise, what happens if we apply DisCrit to other familiar concepts? Finally, Iqtadar et al. call attention to the lack of intersectional politics of race and disability in global educational contexts. They remind us of the need to critically evaluate Western ideas that are often uncritically ‘imported’ to global contexts in ways that can possibly hinder more than help (see, for example, Possi and Milinga 2017). Scholars who draw on DisCrit in their international work, such as Elder and Migliarini (2020), have taken up this sensitive task by sharing inclusive pedagogical methods used in the West while actively attempting to resist new forms of ideological colonialism. Prompted by Iqtadar et al., we therefore ask, how can we jointly create more shared and dialogic spaces between the Global North and South, concepts that by their very existence reify hierarchies? And how can DisCrit can be placed in service of addressing existing inequities without enacting an imperialist gaze?

In closing, we hope readers of REE will find this collection of articles to be engaging and generative. Likewise, we hope this brief constellation of questions serves as stepping stones leading to DisCrits’ future growth, whether that growth is marked by depth or breadth, complexity or refinement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We acknowledge that Critical Deaf Theory – DeafCrit – was originated by Eugenie Geertz (2003), calling attention to audism, that is, discrimination against people who are Deaf or hard of hearing by people who are hearing. Research has been published on living at the intersections of race and Deafness (along with other markers of identity) and the complexities that involve (see, for example, Stapleton 2015). We note this distinction as in the family of ‘Crit’ theorizing and scholarship, DeafCrit and DisCrit evolved separately, and with different foci. While a discussion to compare both fields of study is merited, it is beyond the scope of this article.