‘What’s Disability Got To Do With It?’: Crippin’ Educational Studies at the Intersections

Abstract

This is the introductory article to a special issue that foregrounds the centrality of an intersectional and enmeshed disability studies as an analytical framework in educational studies. The guest coeditors note that there has been a paucity of articles published in this journal that engage critical disability studies. This has occurred despite the fact that disability, as a pivotal analytic, is deployed in educational contacts to often simultaneously disrupt and reproduce the everyday workings of the settler colonial state that are simultaneously anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, anti-immigrant, antitransgender, antiqueer, antipoor, and also antidisability. And yet, notwithstanding its pivotal location, educational studies scholarship continues to enable the erasure and invisibility of disability in discussions of transformative educational praxis. The authors of the articles in this special issue break with this tradition and, instead, offer diverse and compelling analyses that critically engage disability at the intersections of race, sexuality, immigration/refugee, gender, class, and gender identity. The guest editors discuss the critiques and possibilities that enable/disenable critical disabilities studies at the intersections and enmeshments of social difference. The introduction describes how the articles included in this special issue explicate the problematic: What’s disability got to do with educational studies? Drawing on Robert McRuer’s (2006) conceptualization of “cripping as a paradoxical and transgressive act of talking back to discourses of compulsory normativity, the guest editors hope this special issue encourages readers to continue the critical work of crippin’ educational studies.