Understanding the Boundary Between Disability Studies and Special Education Through Consilience, Self-Study, and Radical Love - (Paperback)

About the Book

In this book, the authors explore what constitutes boundary work at the intersection of traditional special education and critical disability studies in education. Readers will consider how their personal, professional, and programmatic actions can lead to freedom from the hegemony of traditional special education and White and Ability supremacy.

Book Synopsis

In Understanding the Boundary between Disability Studies and Special Education through Consilience, Self-Study, and Radical Love, the authors explore what it means to engage in boundary work at the intersection of traditional special education systems and critical disability studies in education. The book consists of fifteen groundbreaking accounts that challenge dominant medicalized discourses about what it means to exist within and around special education systems that create space for new conceptions of what it means to teach, lead, learn, and exist within a conciliatory space driven by radical love and disability justice principles. The book pushes readers to consider how their own personal, professional and programmatic future transformational actions can be driven by disruption and the desire for freedom from the hegemony of traditional special education and White and Ability supremacy.

Review Quotes

"Bringing together seasoned to emerging DS/DSE scholars writing from within multiple positionalities, this volume illuminates and interrogates the rewards and struggles of working the interstice between disability studies and special education. The collection constructs a highly diverse communal space for the reader to consider consilience, self-study, and radical love as a collective way forward. Of significance, radical love as the challenge to whiteness and ableism is one of the most compelling and generative arguments I have read to date. I can hardly wait for my students to engage with this provocative work!" --Jan Valle, The City College of New York

"At a moment in human history in which the foundations of what we have known in our local and networked communities seem tattered and more liquid than solid, I welcome this edited volume which challenges the boxes in which many have lived professionally and personally. We need to center our love and commitments to growing as we (re)mediate what it means to know and practice as educators, family members, and advocates. I hope you too will be touched by a volume that puts radical love in the middle of finding common grounds. Hernandez-Saca, Pearson, and Voulgarides have given us a present to take on our journey." --Elizabeth Bailey Kozleski, Stanford University

About the Author

David I. Hernández-Saca is associate professor of disability studies in education in the Department of Special Education at the University of Northern Iowa.

Catherine Voulgarides is assistant professor at the City University of New York (CUNY)--Hunter College in the department of special education.

Holly Pearson is contingent assistant professor in the department of sociology and criminology at Framingham State University.