The inner self-narratives and academic self-perceptions of those with learning disabilities in post-secondary settings

The purpose of this study was to explore the various disabled identities of those with learning disabilities in higher educational settings, and its impact on academic self-worth. The majority of scholarship has essentialized both disabled identity and academic self-perception, fostering the victimization of those with learning disabilities in the pursuit of their education. This study problematized the medical model, viewing disability as an internal and fixed identity, negatively implicating self-worth. In contrast, this study incorporated a critical disability theory, to highlight the social construction of disability, complimented with a postmodernist lens to appreciate the fluidity of identity and perceptions. A narrative methodological approach was utilized to give voice to the experiences and stories of five self-identifying learning disabled students from Ryerson University. The findings of this research suggest that learning disabled student relate to three different types of disability narratives or identities, implicating their academic worth in many ways.

The inner self-narratives and academic self-perceptions of those with learning disabilities in post-secondary settings

The purpose of this study was to explore the various disabled identities of those with learning disabilities in higher educational settings, and its impact on academic self-worth. The majority of scholarship has essentialized both disabled identity and academic self-perception, fostering the victimization of those with learning disabilities in the pursuit of their education. This study problematized the medical model, viewing disability as an internal and fixed identity, negatively implicating self-worth. In contrast, this study incorporated a critical disability theory, to highlight the social construction of disability, complimented with a postmodernist lens to appreciate the fluidity of identity and perceptions. A narrative methodological approach was utilized to give voice to the experiences and stories of five self-identifying learning disabled students from Ryerson University. The findings of this research suggest that learning disabled student relate to three different types of disability narratives or identities, implicating their academic worth in many ways.

Assess, Sort, Classify: “Othering” of Indigenous Students in Manitoba’s Schools

In the province of Manitoba, Canada, there is a gap between the rhetoric of inclusive education and its practical implementation. In the absence of inclusive educational policies and guidelines, deficit-based approaches such as categorical labels for students who are deemed to have a severe emotional and behavioural disorder, segregated classrooms, and self-contained programs are prevalent and change is needed. This paper provides a critical perspective on how the paradigm of special education contributes to the social construction of disability; how, for Indigenous students, it too often positions behavioural difference as disability; and further, why this practice is systemically discriminatory. In our examination, we seek to expose the exclusion (Slee & Allen, 2001) that exists in nominally inclusive schools as a way to promote social change and redirect education toward truly inclusive practices. To that end, we suggest the following strategies that may reduce educational inequity for Indigenous students: (a) developing clearly articulated inclusive educational policies along with indicators of inclusivity; (b) reporting the number of Indigenous students who are identified as emotionally and behaviourally disordered, and segregated in self-contained settings; (c) establishing needs-based models of support at all levels (e.g., province, division, and school); (d) creating new narratives of assessment and pedagogy; and (e) reconceptualizing teachers’ training. We hope that by critically examining the structures and processes of special education that, in fact, disable Indigenous students from educational success, inclusion might encompass more than a provincial philosophy and include transformative educational change.

Bodies in Dependence: A Foucauldian Genealogy of the Americans with Disabilities Acts

The Americans with Disabilities Acts (ADA) of 1990 and 2008 are laws imagined as enacting two goals: enhancing civil rights and reducing sociopolitical discrimination for Americans with disabilities; however, findings from this study strongly contrast with popular assumptions about the ADA. Key findings show how the ADA legitimizes governmental control of disability through discourse to consolidate economic power. The study employs the genealogical method, derived from Foucault, which is used to identify destructive and productive operations of power and identify ambiguities in discursive regimes. The ADA constructs a discursive category of "disability," the results of which are contradictory and problematic, evincing an asymmetrical power distribution between governmentality and people with disabilities. In the ADA, disabled people are conflated with abnormal bodies. The ADA's rhetorical construction of disability suggests that constructing a unified "disabled body" allows for individuals with disabilities to be defined and then controlled en masse. Events and rhetoric surrounding the ADA's passage illuminate how it regulates disabled individuals, described as untapped sources of economic potential. This genealogy uncovers findings indicating disturbing facts. For instance, the ADA articulates disabled bodies in service of capitalistic exploitation rather than human liberation. Similarly, the ADA generates a unique form of discursive hegemony that aims to control the bodies, minds, and perhaps the souls of Americans with disabilities.

Relocating the Freak Show: Disability in the Medical Drama

Through an analysis of various negotiations of disability in House, M.D. and Grey’s Anatomy, my paper discusses the narrative and non-narrative means that make the medical drama such an appealing genre to contemporary audience members. As the most successful medical dramas of the post-millennial era, House, M.D. and Grey’s Anatomy rely heavily on the exhibition of non-normative bodies, the humorous device of re-naming patients, and the narrative construction of disability as unbearable deviance. While Laura Backstrom locates the freak show in non-fictional television formats like the talk show and documentary, my paper illustrates how the medical drama, although at times highly self-reflexive, has become another pervasive relocation of the freak show into contemporary television. In a close reading of Grey’s Anatomy, I further demonstrate how the portrayal of a disabled doctor as a series regular both manifests and challenges some of the normative perceptions of the body that the genre relies on.

Choreographing conjoinment: Side Show’s fleshly fixations and disability simulation

This article aims to amplify disability theory’s impact in performance studies by generating a framework for understanding disability representation in musical theatre. Taking the original and revival Broadway productions of Side Show (1997, 2014) as a case study, I articulate how the musical simulates disability through a ‘choreography of conjoinment’ that relies on the exceptional able-bodiedness of the actors playing conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton. Using disability as a category of analysis reveals how disabled bodies are made to be maximally productive iterations of themselves in musicals. To support this claim, I track the shift from the 1997 production’s co-construction of disability by the actors and audience, which replicates the social model of disability, to the 2014 revival’s grounding in a diagnostic realism typical of disability’s medical model. Side Show’s trajectory generates possibilities for considering the musical as an archive for disability representation and knowledge, bioethical inquiry, and artistic innovation.