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Educational Life In The Interregnum: Race, Dis/Ability, And Special Education, Benjamin Kearl

Democracy and Education

This article undertakes a comparative analysis of special education policy through the juxtaposition of two recent Supreme Court actions: Allston v. Lower Merion School District (2015) and Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District (2017). This comparison reveals an ordering of special education policy around questions of race. Specifically, this article argues that special education policy is governed by a racecraft of disability labeling that defines students of color as variously disabled and through a biopolitics of special education that expands disability services for individual students who are within the truth demarcated by scientific-juridical mediations of life. Against such negative …