Interweaving disentangled: Korean American students with autism go to college

ABSTRACT

This study explores the intersectionality in the educational experiences of Korean American students with autism as they navigate the transition from high school to college. For these students, dis/ability status alone does not shape the pathway to adulthood: dis/ability is tightly bound with other social categories, such as race, language, and immigration status, impacting everyday experiences of the students, including preparing college applications, deciding where to apply, and then selecting a major or course of study. Using intersectionality theory, we disentangled the intersections of multiple sites of marginalization and interwove the social dynamics of transition trajectories. We also discuss these findings in the context of transition services and suggest directions for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Intersectionality
• autism
• ableism
• racism
• linguicism
• immigrant

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. We intentionally used the term dis/ability rather than disability to avoid a deficit only connotation of the term. As discussed by Annamma, Connor, and Ferri (2013), we acknowledge that the term embraces both ability and disability. However, disability is still used in this study to reflect common understanding of the classification.

2. In this paper, we used ‘minoritized’ to refer to the conventional terms, such as racial/ethnic minorities, in order to shed light on the social process of minoritization rather than signifying inferiority or the subsidiary of subgroups followed by other scholars like Gillborn (2010) and Benitez (2010).

3. We follow the definition of the terms used by Pew Research Center for ‘first generation’ and ‘second generation’ and the definition offered by Rumbaut and Ima (1988) for ‘1.5 generation.’ According to a report by Pew Research Center (2015), ‘first generation refers to the foreign born,’ and ‘second generation refers to people born in the U.S. who have at least one immigrant parent.’ (p. 3). The term 1.5 generation has been defined as ‘they are those young people who were born in their countries of origin but formed in the U.S.’ (p. 22).

4. Exact names of the cities in the demographic description were not provided to protect participants’ confidentiality, as written in the informed consents.

5. When we refer to U.S. Census or national statistics, we followed the racial/ethnic terms used by the original sources because their definitions for the quantitative data collection can be different from the authors’ conceptualization of the groups.