Precarious, debilitated and ordinary: Rethinking (in)capacity for inclusion

Abstract

As the effects of high-stakes accountability mandates increasingly impact curricular enactments in schools, careful investigations of the “how” of inclusion may allow the disclosure of its complexity to stretch the ways in which it is currently theorized. Drawing on my prior research, I have extracted three canonical elements of schooling that have remained largely unexamined within curricular theorizing for social justice, namely: the durability of place and time in the discourse of schooling and inclusion; the centrality of learning need within conceptions of inclusion; and, the necessity for agents of change to promote inclusion. Deploying an intertwined theoretical framework that includes critical disability studies, spatial theory, and writings of US Third World feminists, I argue that these elements collectively compel a (re)consideration of capacity within the construct of inclusion that can then evoke alternate imaginings of inclusive practice.