Dis/ability, Agency, and Context: A Differential Consciousness for Doing Inclusive Education

Abstract

In any sociocultural context, efforts to promote inclusive education may evoke trajectories of change that are as unpredictable as they are inexhaustible, stimulating the production of a range of disability subjectivities, performances, and constructions. This article unearths such local constructions by focusing on the experiences of nongovernmental organization educators and families of students with disabilities in Chennai, India, as they collectively engaged in inclusive education activity. Using the framework of differential consciousness (Sandoval, 2000) I explore the oppositional agency of participants in securing equitable opportunities for students with disabilities in mainstream settings. My aim in doing thus is to animate the links between local practices and global concepts of inclusive education. Even though the narratives of participants index “place” as the predominant signifier of inclusion, their decision making within hugely inaccessible contexts discloses their compulsory movement through multiple, sometimes contradictory, positions to achieve equitable schooling. I subsequently draw on these narratives and more broadly on U.S. third world feminist scholarship to suggest a few lines of inquiry that can serve a transnational theory of inclusive education.

Notes

Notes

1. While the use of third world within “U.S. third world feminism” may index a more fluid conception of peoples and spaces privileging an experience rather than geographic location, I use North/South deliberately to denote specific geographical contexts that are distinguished by differential access to resources. “Northern” scholarship therefore refers to literature that has emerged from affluent nations and communities.

2. Pseudonym. The names of all participants in this study have been changed.

3. It must be noted here that all students who participated in this study uniformly regarded their location within “normal” settings as unquestionable (Naraian & Natarajan, in press). Some families noted that their children were unwilling to return to Shiksha for visits even though they missed the climate of acceptance they had experienced there. Interviews with students and observation in their schools indicated their complete immersion in efforts to build relationships with peers, their satisfaction in being in a “normal” school, and their determination to appear as “normal” as possible to their peers.

4. At the time of the study, Shiksha alumni operating from this office were active participants in consultations at the national level to revamp the Persons with Disabilities Act, 1995.

5. The notion of legal capacity subscribes to models of supported decision making rather than substitute decision making (implied in legal guardianship) and is premised on presuming the competence of all individuals to make life decisions regardless of the severity of their disability (Dhanda, ).