Introduction

The Introduction opens with the stories of a Black parent and a Black student who were victims of the school-to-prison pipeline and their journeys to racial justice organizing. These experiences and these stories ground the emergence of the movement to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. The Introduction then recounts the author’s own journey to awareness of the school-to-prison pipeline and describes the development of the community engaged research project upon which the book is based. It recounts the author’s traumatic experiences in the field witnessing the abusive treatment of students and parents of color, and it discusses the challenges faced addressing the author’s privileges and positionality as a white, male professor partnering with and studying organizers and leaders of color based in low-income communities. It ends with an overview of the book and its chapters.

Implications for Conducting Special Education Research Drawn From the Reflexive Accounts of a Deaf With Disabilities Professor and Three Student Researchers

A Deaf with disabilities (DWD) male professor, 2 hearing female teacher candidates, 11 parents (4 of whom were immigrants), and 6 DWD children sought to better understand the experiences of parents of DWD children by conducting an ethnographic study (Singer, Kamenakis, Shapiro, & Cacciato, in press). The research team recorded reflexive journals as a way to analyse their methodology. In this essay, we reflect on 3 themes developed from the reflexive journals: (a) researcher positionality, (b) negotiating power in research, and (c) language variation in practice. We discuss our experiences and contextualise these accounts within relevant scholarship, attempting to locate some amount of resolution to the very human experiences upon which we reflect. We provide key takeaways for doing research with and among people with disabilities in special educational settings, particularly focusing on people who communicate in nonnormative ways. We conclude with a culminating discussion of the significance of creating emancipatory special education research.

Are judges influenced by legally irrelevant circumstances?

Judges should not be influenced by legally irrelevant circumstances in their legal decision making and judges generally believe that they manage legally irrelevant circumstances well. The purpose of this experimental study was to investigate whether this self-image is correct. Swedish judges (N = 256) read a vignette depicting a case of libel, where a female student had claimed on her blog that she had been sexually harassed by a named male professor. The professor had sued the student for libel and the student retracted her claim during the hearing. Half of the judges received irrelevant information - that the professor himself had been convicted of libel a year earlier, while the other half did not receive this information. For the outcome variable, the judges were asked to state how much compensation the student should pay the professor. Those judges who received information about the professor himself having been convicted of libel stated that he should be given significantly less compensation than those who did not receive the irrelevant information. The results show that the judges’ decision was affected by legally irrelevant circumstances. Implications for research and practice are discussed

One flew over the duck pond: Autoethnography, academic identity, and language

Autoethnography is about studying a community through the author’s personal experience. I offer my autoethnography of moving from a Finnish-speaking business school to a Swedish-speaking one in Helsinki, Finland. This is my story as a Finnish speaker who works in English, develops a sense of lack and guilt for not contributing in Swedish, and enacts an identity of an outsider in his community. My ambivalent identity work as a privileged yet increasingly anxious white male professor elucidates connections between identity, language, and power, and it may enable me to see glimpses of what those who are truly marginalized and excluded experience. I argue that academic identity is based on language, and once that foundation is shaken, it can trigger self-reflection that helps to show how language is inevitably tied in with complex power relations in organizations. I offer my story as an invitation to discuss how we learn to deal with the complexity of identity work and language. My story lays bare how autoethnographies by the privileged, too, can be useful if they show the vulnerability we all experience in contemporary universities.

Professing the Liberatory Power of Womanism

Narrating his journey toward becoming a black male professor of feminism, in this chapter the author identifies himself as a “black male outsider.” He writes about how his study writings by black/feminists of color helped him to accept his difference as a male who grew up on the margins of the “black community” in which he lived. Not only does he credit Alice Walker’s idea of womanism as personally and politically self-transformative for him, he also acknowledges bell hooks’s belief that men can be feminist comrades. In the chapter, he focuses on experiences teaching course-work on “writings by radical black/women of color” in departments of English and women’s studies at the university where he teaches. He employs autocritography as a genre that interweaves memoir with social criticism to express his commitment to the practice of womanist pedagogy.

Consistent "feminization" and "aphasia"

The paper draws attention to the similarities between feminist pleas for ?women?s visibility in the language? (the demand to consistently include gender indicators into professional names and titles) and a particular type of aphasia. This is namely the so-called ?similarity disorder?, whose symptoms were analyzed and systematically described by Roman Jakobson. This type of disorder becomes manifest as a more or less impaired capacity for selection and substitution of linguistic signs, which on the one hand have equal values, while on the other, they are different. The tendency to consistently (nominally) differentiate by sex (?gender?) professional titles and names corresponds to a situation when an individual affected by aphasia lacks the capacity to use the word knife to designate various types of knives, but rather invents complex alternate names (e.g. pencil-sharpener, apple-parer) for every single item of a different shape and purpose. The difference is that an aphasic person has an impaired capacity of selection, whereas feminists strive to abolish the freedom of selection. The paper presents the mechanism of the motion of nouns in the Serbian language and demonstrates that unmotioned items have two different values: one is related to verbal logical reasoning (profesor - a role, person performing that role), whereas the other is related to what is apparent. That lower level of reasoning implies an ostensive and/or iconic reference, and, consequently, gender sensitivity (profesor - male professor, and profesorica - female professor).