No place like home? – Care and disability in the inclusive elementary classroom – A consideration of the Ethical Conundrums amidst disorienting intersubjective encounters

ABSTRACT

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. I 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.

KEYWORDS:

• Disability
• inclusive education
• race
• social theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maria Karmiris

Maria Karmiris recently completed her PhD in the Social Justice Education Department at OISE/UT. She has been a practicing elementary school teacher since 2002. Her areas of research interest include: critical disability studies, inclusive education, post-qualitative research methods, postcolonial studies and decolonial studies. She is currently a part-time instructor at Ryerson University and a part-time elementary school teacher.