Identity Making as a Colonization Process, and the Power of Disability Justice to Cultivate Intersectional Disobedience

Abstract

Intersectionality has been used to describe the products of difference but scholars who work intersectionally in the tradition of Disability Justice have argued that attention should focus on the process of identity making—those processes by which some Lives–Hopes–Dreams are positioned as more valuable and Whole because of our societies’ commitments to racial capitalist coloniality. This work uses intersectionality as critical social theory, combined with broader cultural analyses of colonization as a process that did not stop within the creation of the Modern Western world, to visibilize identities often explicitly erased: students labeled with disabilities. Through excavating group-made artifacts from a larger research study, I show how intersectionally-disobedient grammars can serve to illuminate complex identity making beyond juxtaposed colonialities of power, and, therein, I situate this bricolage approach as an embodiment toward Disability Justice.

1. Introduction

Sins Invalid originated Disability Justice (DJ) as a term [1,2] to describe the knowledge-building that has emerged from disabled peoples, their communities, and the cultural critiques they afford. Through their collective organizing, Sins Invalid outlined ten tenets of DJ that focus on multiply marginalized identities, centering Queer and trans voices of color, disrupting the racial capitalist commitments that determine a person’s value, the need to see disabled people as Whole, and to inform more liberatory access:

(1)

Intersectionality—that privilege and oppression can manifest together, often dependent on the characteristics and identities within a specific context, and that disability should not be viewed separate from identities such as race, class, and gender.

(2)

Leadership of Those Most Impacted—that those subject to violence be given the space, time, and respect to speak about what they are uniquely familiar with.

(3)

Anti-capitalist Politic—that labor is directly connected to how different bodies, minds, and spirits are seen as valuable in a racial-capitalist colonial setting.

(4)

Cross-movement Solidarity—that to pursue Disability Justice, scholars must build across movements in ways that help everyone understand ableist supremacy.

(5)

Recognizing Wholeness—that “Disabled people are whole people” [2] (p. 228), and this Wholeness is not defined by how they contribute to racial capitalism.

(6)

Sustainability—that the experiences of those with and without disabilities, when experiencing ‘burn-out’, provide a litmus test for how to pace our justice efforts.

(7)

Commitment to Cross-disability Solidarity—that to focus on Disability Justice leverages the knowledge of all community members, across impairment and marginality.

(8)

Interdependence—that state-based solutions to disabling contexts can only get us so far, and before Western Modern colonization, people understood their connections to this planet, the land, and each other as an integral part of being human.

(9)

Collective Access—that scholars must not compromise commitments to one another while balancing autonomy and community; they should not be afraid to express vulnerabilities, instead be confident and proud of their individual needs and capacities.

(10)

Collective Liberation—that to build a movement toward Disability Justice, for disabled and non-disabled folks alike, there should be no ‘body-mind-spirit left behind’.

These tenets have recently been built into the Disability Justice Audit Tool by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, paying homage to the late disabled activist Stacey Park Milbern, in hopes to work toward building more capacity for Disability Justice (https://www.northwesthealth.org/djaudittool; accessed on 1 March 2022). This DJ audit tool subsequently provides organizations, social justice collectives, and scholars pursuing more just futures for all peoples in and beyond the academy a way to “center DJ politics, practices, and leadership”; starting where we all are—and moving forward together.

In a similar way, living Quarely [3], I draw on the various contrapuntal and empirical foundations of intersectionality. Meaning, I am primarily interested in the contexts that lead explicitly to the multiple marginalization of some identities over others [4] and the processes by which identities become vulnerable to society’s violent designs [5]. Drawing on this work helps me understand the world, and disciplines such as education, where identities are made visible through their categorization as similar or different to the normative center of schooling vis-à-vis race and ability [6]. These frameworks also aide me to better understand the world I survive and help make sense of futures unknown, untold, and explicitly erased from the ways scholars often conceptualize identity and humanity, as well as how Disability Justice can be leveraged to work anew in these spaces where ableist supremacy thrives and is sustained. Invariably, when I taught in New York City Public Schools, and as I train new teachers, I hold close the reality that the designs I work to dismantle in pursuit of Justice have been created through the process of colonization [7,8] and, therein, by design sustain imperialist commitments that valorize the eradication of difference [9]. This requires that I engage with colonization, intersectionality, and multiple marginalities among students’ experiences to explore what the making of identities means for education research, as well as in what ways these theories, and critical theorizations, of Self and Other demand disobedient disability-centered lenses. To this end, the tenets of Disability Justice provide a powerful analytic frame for bricolage [10].

In reflecting on these articulations, I am engaged with understanding what an approach to decolonization might look, feel, and sound like for those living at these nexuses of identification—i.e., asking myself how can I envision a future beyond identity utilized primarily for marking oppression? Like Tuck and Yang [11], when they engaged with “Decolonialization beyond a metaphor”, I concur that, alternatively: “Decolonization offers a different perspective to human and civil rights based approaches to justice, an unsettling one, rather than a complementary one. Decolonization is not an ‘and’. It is an elsewhere”. (p. 36, italics added). In defining decoloniality as ‘something else’ than that which I currently see and experience, I take care to think with Leigh Patel who reminds me to explore intra-group complexity in and among categories of difference, where she advocates leveraging the power of an intersectional analytic approach to difference that gives “priority to the overlapping of vectors that create unique positions of vulnerability”:

For educational projects that focus on justice and/or self-determination, where self is meant to invoke both the individual and the collective, how difference takes shape within collectives that have been formed out of shared identity is a particularly apt place of becoming and ripe for reflection and self-study.

[12] (p. 14)

These authors develop a rhetoric to think about the nuances within and among difference, but also, vis-à-vis Tuck and Yang, demand addressing what material realities must be faced in my work, such that the making of difference from colonialization, imperialism, and subsequent assimilationist agendas are not left to the space of discussion and, instead, call on me to act, and in these call to arms, disability justice plays a central role.

With this articulation of “political and ideological connections that require generative conditions to exist” [13], the product of difference—as an entity to be faced—is less intriguing for my scholarly and activist pursuits to dismantle oppression for all. Rather, the process of creating marginalized identities as inferior serves as an important inquiry to move beyond the flattening of identity categories to generalized constructs of assumption [12], especially given the robust designs of colonization as a project of assimilation to construct acceptable visions of Self in our modern institutions documented throughout the world [9]. This paper articulates colonization as a process of identity making everyone becomes participant in when engaging with social contexts like schools, and, therefore, one where teachers and researchers can leverage their power to move beyond metaphors toward actively deconstructing colonial narratives of Self, replacing them with unseen possibilities for identity research not yet imaginable in current educational landscapes. In turn, this requires that those least centered in educational pursuits toward Justice to be made visible for their complex humanity, specifically those identities that are consistently erased within social justice projects in education [14,15]: students labeled with disabilities, as well as chronically sick and disabled people more broadly. This approach advocates that to dismantle a politics of identity that is designed to enforce violence against those outside the acceptable expectations of studenthood, there is a need to disobey past grammars used to (juxta)position Self and Other. In doing so, when engaged with this process, identity and the categories assigned to them are seen as dynamic [12], which open ripe opportunities and possibilities to utilize intersectionality as a reflexive act of disobedience.

This work first starts by expounding on the importance of intersectionality used beyond thinking about identity making via an intra-personal constitution at interplay with inter-personal culture, and instead leverages the original articulation of intersectionality as a critical social theory for new and imaginative ways to analyze the world in which we feel and live through systemic oppression that is differentially applied across identities. Next, this manuscript develops the importance of colonization in relation to how we name and take up an identity politics centered around social contextualization of identities made visible, and/or erased, through epistemological silencing and smothering [16]. Thereafter, I engage a rhetoric of inclusion without a centering of disabled people, and what that models for the types of schools we wish to promote, and the body–mind–spirits we value as students in these spaces. Drawing a more critical pragmatics, this piece ends by providing a bricolage [10] analysis of group-made artifacts to represent complex conceptual architectures of Self and Other in the Western Modern world such that the grammars by which these representational structures embody and allude to identity making as a colonization process that impacts multiply marginalized, and disabled, identities the most is brought forth and explicitly engaged with among research in pursuit of justice.

2. Intersectionality Is a Critical Social Theory, and Not Primarily about Identity

Kimberlé Crenshaw elaborated on some key misunderstandings about intersectionality during her keynote at the Southbank Centre [17], describing how intersectionality is “less about overlapping identities, and not primarily about identity”. Instead, Crenshaw elaborates, intersectionality is concerned with the “structures that make some identities the consequence of and vehicle for vulnerability”, and contends that if we are to disrupt discrimination and violence head-on, we must engage with the contexts that have led to “the exclusion of some people but not others” [17]. Similarly, Cho et al. [18] corroborate viewing difference made visible through analyzing contexts designed for oppression:

… what makes an analysis intersectional is not its use of the term “intersectionality”, nor its being situated in a familiar genealogy, nor its drawing on lists of standard citations. Rather, what makes an analysis intersectional—whatever terms it deploys, whatever its iteration, whatever its field or discipline—is its adoption of an intersectional way of thinking about the problem of sameness and difference and its relation to power. This framing—conceiving of categories not as distinct but as always permeated by other categories, fluid and changing, always in the process of creating and being created by dynamics of power—emphasizes what intersectionality does rather than what intersectionality is.

[16] (p. 795, bold added)

Given these clarifications of often (mis)used interpretations of intersectionality more broadly, which is a central tenet of Disability Justice, I align my work with this more critical interpretative power for the term, drawing on Patricia Hill Collins’ book, Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory [16], when she evokes Stuart Hall [13] to explore the manifestations of hierarchies created and sustained through the process of identity making:

Identity is not a set of fixed attributes, the unchanging essence of the inner self, but a constantly shifting process of positioning. We tend to think of identity as taking us back to our roots, the part of us which remains essentially the same across time. In fact, identity is always a never-completed process of becoming—a process of shifting identifications, rather than a singular, complete finished state of being (p. 37).

This articulation of the active social positioning that makes some identities more subject to violence and discrimination in schools [19] shifts our understandings of intersectionality beyond analyzing ‘what is’ and, like my colleagues and I argue, envision research possibilities of ‘what if’ [20]. With these critical frameworks in mind, Disability Justice finds its power and promise to provide a conceptual architecture from which those multiply marginalized in schools and society are valued, seen as Whole, and deserving of love.

Taken a step further, such an approach to identity making as a process allows me to apply an intersectional lens to teaching and learning spaces where the focus is not about overlapping identities as in and of themselves windows into oppression. Rather, I argue, the use of the term intersectionality aligns with how notable scholars have articulated its various exploratory and explanatory powers [21,22]; namely, understanding nuanced discursive and experiential realities that subject some to oppression over others affords me a pathway to deconstruct systemic designs that sustain the purpose of schooling as one of cultural inculcation for economic stratification [23]. Furthermore, while it is beyond the scope of this paper to explain the cognitive architecture intersectionality as a social theory uses when authentically leveraging its critical origins (see [16] for a deeper unpacking), the three dimensions that Patricia Hill Collins uses to name inquiries as intersectional, she writes, require attention paid to intersectionality as a metaphor to describe social designs of power beyond explicit and implicit mono-categorical flattening practices, leveraging intersectionality as a heuristic to “critique rigid knowledge systems and pose new questions”, and as a paradigm shifting act of theorizing fields, practices, and the world writ large such that new horizons of possibility are made visible through the “constant, reflexive critique of intersectionality as an act of critical social theorizing”.

Bringing to bare the foundations upon which intersectionality rests also encourages me to take up the term sparingly, at most, and to be purposeful in my use. In other words, most of the work I do I would not categorize as intersectional, even though I have looked closely at the complexity within racial categories in terms of gender differences through quantitative analyses [24]. These projects and partnerships do not originate their research commitments from intersectional traditions on the outset when designing their structures and purposes and, therefore, just because I look at the overlapping identity nexus among races and genders does not mean that this work is of a tradition that could be defined as intersectional. Instead, naming these works as what they are and what they do in terms of their social theorizing [16] demands that I not apply the term intersectionality with no commitment to expand on the current landscape for these disciplinary inquiries around power and the politics that sustain oppressive social designs [17]. Here, disabled experiences provide valuable, but very often neglected and erased, sources of knowledge where our assumptions and expectations of how the world, and schools, should operate based on a racial capitalist coloniality are brought to the fore for their oppressive cultures.

However, in other work I have done [25,26,27], I do not use the term intersectionality to critically theorize how differential positioning of specific identities are made subject to discrimination and educational neglect, such as disabled students and multiply marginalized youth labeled with disabilities, but I do point out is that there is a need to interrogate how overlapping identities are developed as ‘less-than’ through a rhetorical process and set of material realities that deny agency and visibilization of students’ experiences. Not using the term intersectionality, though, does not make these analyses any less intersectional, as Cho et al. [18] remind me. Instead, what I make evident in this work is the need to move beyond those theories and approaches to theorizing that have stifled more nuanced grammars of identity in the context of schooling, consequentially invoking an intersectional sensibility that helps me name disability as an erased subject of identity inquiry. Through this evocation of what my work ‘does’ rather than what is ‘says’, I thus align my own researcher positionality and agenda as one that demands disobedience to the violent designs embodied by sustained colonialities of power, and pivot to embody and embolden the power and promise of living with Disability Justice. In the next section, I take up what colonization and disobedience have to do with the making of identity.

3. The Process and Effects of Colonization in the Americas That Demand Disobedience

In [8], Aníbal Quijano wrote his seminal work, Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America, where he unpacks the discursive and material consequences of the rise in colonization with the onset of Modernity during a time when globalization was increasing the violent impact of capitalistic ventures that were designed to prey on the multiply marginalized peoples of the world in hopes to build profits on the backs of enslaved and colonized labor sources, as well as through the explicit erasure of the intellectual grammar of indigenous cultures in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Consequently, the Western Modern approach to peoples around the world that live outside of the Eurocentric view of life, identity, and humanity for centuries before the colonial encounter has been to inculcate (or from a Gramscian perspective, hegemonize; [28]) these peoples from ‘inferior’ cultures in order to create and sustain identification processes that could translate into explicit castes of peoples from which exploitation could render vast profits for those that align their ways of knowing and being with whiteness. Quijano elaborates on this point:

Social relations founded on the category of race produced new historical social identities in America … Insofar as the social relations that were being configured were relations of domination, such identities were considered constitutive of the hierarchies, places, and corresponding social roles, and consequently of the model of colonial domination that was being imposed. In other words, race and racial identity were established as instruments of basic social classification … All of those turbulent processes involved a long period of the colonization of cognitive perspectives, modes of producing and giving meaning, the results of material existence, the imaginary, the universe of intersubjective relations with the world: in short, the culture.

[8] (pp. 534, 541, bold added)

Witnessing the effects of colonization on the making and marking of identities through a rigid process of defining value in relation to an ethnocentric paradigm that positions whiteness, ableism vis-à-vis capitalistic labor, and maleness as the only valid culture and authority of knowledge production, aids in how I view identity in the making, as well as how such a process sustains the marking of identities in juxtaposition to each other. Here, Disability Justice stands firm as a set of tenets from Queer and trans disabled people of color that constantly require leading by those who experiences oppression to unpack and disrupt the systemic designs of coloniality. To adopt a resistance to coloniality, then, is also to engage with how schools become the litmus test for whose body–mind–spirits our institutions are designed for, and whose identities are expendable by design.

In schools where Black and Brown youth encounter the historical designs of this deadly colonization process, these youths are often positioned as ‘in need of saving’ in ways that echo rhetoric from periods during manifest destiny where America sought to “kill the Indian, but save the man” [29]. This explicit identity making of race sustains a coloniality of power that upholds normative centers of whiteness from which all other identities are measured for their value [30]. This pledge of allegiance to whiteness (and ableism more broadly, see [19,31]), moreover, is documented among teachers’ positioning practices that sustain intersectional privilege by denying agency to multiply marginalized Lives [32,33]. It also serves to (juxta)position students’ identities through pathological lenses that mark their ways of being as deviant by design [34]. In response, to challenge this maintenance of whiteness- and smartness-as-property in schools [6,35,36] requires that I also bear witness to Black and Brown youth disproportionately labeled with disabilities in predominantly white schooling spaces [37,38]. These material realities that develop specific consequences for Black and Brown youth in schools should not be taken anomalously. Rather, by witnessing the patterns in these systemic positioning practices as a maintenance of and service to racism, ableism, and colonialism, I make visible the (mis)identification of students disobeying Western Modern hegemony being labeled as deviant, deficit, and disabled. I then leverage intersectionality in these contexts designed to sustain injustice in ways to actively challenge education stakeholders who use these labels to justify the exclusion of these students away from the ‘normal’ populous who embody colonial identities, articulating ‘teachability’ as a proxy for bigotry [25].

To disrupt these violent educational structures, which by design do not seek to interrogate the grammar of whiteness, ableism, heteropatriarchy, capitalist exploitation, and colonization in the ma(r)king of students’ identities, demands a disruption of not only the ways in which students are (juxta)positioned by teaching practices, but also a disobedience to the very foundational ways that the colonial project has valued specific methods of knowing the world. Leveraging a bricolage [10] approach honors Disability Justice as a multi-dimensional plurality of ever-shifting changes that are needed in the ways we explore and analyze the creation and sustainment of some identities as assumed to have more value for the world than others. Indeed, the interdependent nature of how youth and adults juxtaposition their Selves in relation to the Other leverages cross difference solidarity and intersectional grammars that are pivotal components of how Disability Justice seeks to disobey hegemony. Aimé Césaire, quoted by James Baldwin [39] from a conference he attended in 1956 of African writers and artists, shares similar sentiments as I:

Any political and social regime which destroys the self-determination of a people also destroys the creative power of that people … Wherever colonization is a fact the indigenous cultures begin to rot. And, among these ruins, something begins to be born which is not a culture but a kind of subculture, a subculture which is condemned to exist on the margin allowed it by European culture … How these elements will be mixed is not a question to which any individual can respond. The response must be given by the community. But we can say this: that the response will be given, and not verbally, but in tangible facts, and by action (pp. 62–63, bold added).

In his astute articulation, witnessing that the power wedded in colonization can only be disrupted with concerted effort from the community, and by action, Césaire engages with what Walter Mignolo calls epistemic disobedience [40]. Similar to arguments made by Black Feminists like Patricia Hill Collins [16] and Angela Davis [41], where identities are not defined as static monoliths for inquiry but artifacts of structured designs, Mignolo aligns with Césaire in that identities and the processes that construct their grammar come into being as detrimental artifacts from colonization through the silencing and denial of agency for those historically marginalized. To disobey this identity making process that juxtaposes all body–mind–spirits in relation to the normative center of Western Modern ethnocentrism then calls upon a different quality and understanding of how identity operates in schools, as well as how these operationalizations of covert oppression manifest in connection to the colonialities of power in society to define difference as deficit and in need of ‘cure’. This, then, requires the tenets of Disability Justice to provide guidance for dreaming “our way out of this oppressive-based system”, as Davis et al. [42] reminds us of Octavia Butler’s radical speculativeness and its power to engage beyond ‘what is’ [20].

Pulling back from these more abstract theorizations of identity making as a colonization process, I put forth that the pragmatic manifestations of this critical social theorizing of the world and schools as sites of colonization illuminates very real material consequences for both teachers and the students they are charged to serve. I argue the invisibilization of disability identity and culture when the grammar of schooling is unquestioned demands intersectional disobedience among pursuits that are named as socially just. In turn, here, I present group artifacts that highlight the latent epistemological structures among new teachers and graduate students that exemplify when a colonized stance is taken up toward who has historically been unduly bestowed the agency to identify (with) the Self and define (for) the Other. I also visibilize who has the power to exert authority over what constitutes truth where the making of identity as an act of colonization is disrupted. I do not say this lightly, as I presented the very material consequences of colonization; rather, I argue that if teachers maintain binary epistemic (juxta)positioning as the way they make sense of identity (i.e., either/or ways of thinking that sustain an oppositional politics of identification; [43]), the powers vested in colonial designs are sustained.

In this way, I am less concerned with identities as physical entities that exist in the world and, instead, I am looking closely and carefully at the process through which these identities become marked in relation to the normative Western Modern center that began with the colonization process and has been sustained by our schooling structures. These structures, indeed, are also those that deny disabled identities the space to articulate their lived realities beyond ‘saving’ and could help open up spaces where new ways to think about schools as sites of indoctrination could be disrupted. These processes and effects of colonization moreover become critical to articulate among contexts where multiply marginalized students are labeled with disabilities often by privileged education stakeholders that consequentially lead to denying inclusion, and impossibility of disability justice. Furthermore, if this denial is sustained, the questions asked about how to pursue inclusion for students labeled with disabilities are cut off from their complex socio-historical contexts and end up erasing disability humanities from equitable schooling designs/Dreams.

4. Inclusion, Disability Erasure, and the limits of Biological Identification

Morgan Friedman explains that the term inclusion is both contested terrain from a sociological point of view in relation to its origins and is often an amalgam of ideological commitments in terms of its use [44]. Moreover, Göransson and Nilholm [45] unpack how inclusive education can be named across four different interpretations among the literature, which each have complementary and divergent articulations when examined in tandem. These works shed light onto the reality that when considering educational (im)possibilities for students labeled with disabilities (the defining of appropriate instruction for them and the interpretation of least restrictive environments for their instructional placement), almost all the authors who are considered knowledgeable in relation to answering those questions are non-disabled education stakeholders. Education, then, is done on these students rather than with them—erasing the possibility that their lived experiences within these contexts could provide valuable information on how to liberate them, as well as how to support their Lives, Hopes, and Dreams. This bears witness to a specific centering of epistemological authority—of who has the power to name their Self and define Others—that, when not examined critically and intersectionally, leads to the flattening of disability identity as being a medical condition to be merely cured, with little mind paid to how these students’ experiences in classrooms provide distinct windows into the ways designs that go unquestioned in our schools are sustained to categorize students among grammars of smartness and goodness [46], which mirror racialized, gendered, and classist articulations and consequences of identity making latently held over from the colonial process.

Accordingly, if I am to accept that epistemologies are often driven by peoples’ identities and experiences, this begs the question: How can I work with multiply marginalized students with and without labels of disability to help me examine and disrupt exclusionary practices in schools, and Dream our way out of these oppressive designs? Given that disabled knowledge production in educational contexts has historically been the purview of special education, the long-standing dominance of positivist research in this field provides little more than a colonized perspective by defining disability as an impairment marked solely for amelioration of barriers to help students become like their (en)abled, colonized peers. This approach uncritically leaves the ableist commitments and expectations of the stereotypic classroom context students experience intact [47], denying any possibility to disobey the sustained grammar of coloniality used to homogenize individual experiences and position difference as ‘less-than’ that which is normatively conferred [48]. For me, articulating that disabled students’ experiences matter and can be used to design for possibility rather than assimilation, like critical scholars in Black Education argue [49], speaks into existence using intersectional disobedience and Disability Justice.

Working from these marginal spaces means that I am also shifting from obeying the Western Modern coloniality of power that defines all those different from the white, (en)abled center as inferior, toward disobeying the grammar of this dichotomous logic of juxtaposition that serves only to categorize, subordinate, and discriminate by design. This takes material form in my research (as I noted above; also see [20]), as well as how students see themselves as in the act of becoming, as belonging to their school community, and as beloved members of a social culture committed to value diversity as possibility [25]. To engage with culture, coloniality, and intersectional disobedience, therefore, means that the methodological approaches to a research inquiry that would emerge and be able to take on the plurality of ways of knowing and being known through a qualitative inquiry would demand flexibility, an engagement by the researcher of the political dimensions that have shaped, and continue to shape epistemological authority (as supported above being directly connected to coloniality and often denied to disabled body–mind–spirits), and a breaking away from (post-)positivist traditions in qualitative research that siphon and silo bodies of knowledge away from each other in segregated fields of study. Thus, bricolage was used as a critical hermeneutics to interpret, synthesize, and present a trans-disciplinary rhetoric and its impact when thinking about how disability, intersectionality, and epistemology inform the ways we think about identity and its construction [10].

5. Method of Inquiry

[B]ricoleurs seek out ways that phenomena are interconnected with other phenomena, and socially constructed in a dialogue between culture, institutions, and historical contexts. Ontologically, bricoleurs examine how socio-historical dynamics influence and shape an object of inquiry … Bricolage addresses the plurality and complex political dimensions of knowledge work.

[10] (pp. 10, 14)

Leveraging Joe Kincheloe’s symbiotic hermeneutics, as expounded in [10], the data from this research is nested in a larger project that invited 25 students in a graduate course at an Ivy League institution in the American Northeast to participate in a study where their understandings of disability, and other markers/concepts of difference in society, were explored and examined for their conceptual-cognitive development. The collected data used in this work was from graduate students at the end of their only degree required ‘diversity’ course, where I had asked them to co-generatively organize their thoughts around four conceptual terms: Science, Urban, Culture, and Disability. Students were given consent forms at the beginning of the course and could opt out of participation at any time. All but one student agreed to participate, and no student withdrew consent. Through one course-required artifact, there emerged a specific grammar of oppression.

When examining and analyzing their final group-made concept maps, what became evident in these graphical representations of how these students made connections between these complex terms was a very literal set of structures that exemplify the continuum between isolated, binary categorization (Western Modern colonial obedience) and the start of more a fluid process of identification that could be used to challenge the ways in which these teachers understand identity (epistemic disobedience). Below, I present this continuum from isolation, through attempts at (mis)representing overlapping identities, toward a porous grammatical form of identity: Engaging with Disability Justice. It is through Kincheloe’s symbiotic hermeneutics [10]—of refusing to merely examine concepts of inquiry as things in and of themselves but instead as nuances contextualized within broader socio-political cultural histories—that bricolage as a multi-method plurality of inquiry form was made evident as the most appropriate method of inquiry and analysis. As stated above, this trans-disciplinary rhetoric of difference and culture as they pertain to coloniality and disability when identity form and take shape in social contexts is much more disperse than coalesced within a single field. Thus, to engage primarily in one reading of the word and the world would be antithetical to the notion of this type of inquiry and would deny the possibility to engage these artifacts intersectionally [50].

6. Results: Reading the Colonial Grammar among Representational Structures

Among the five conceptual representations created by the 25 students in the course I noted above, three stood out for the cognitive architecture and colonial grammar that I previously found in my conceptual change research looking at the importance of culture for new science teachers [51]. In Figure 1, for example, the group of students depict the four terms I asked them to represent in distinct and segregated spaces. The students were also asked to present their representations and discuss how they understood the terms to the rest of the class. This group was asked explicitly why they had four separate spaces—divided by lines—and if they thought the terms were at all connected. The discussion that ensued was one that I can only describe as a grammar of ‘political maneuvering’, which I was not surprised at when it happened. In my experience teaching many new pre-service teachers and graduate students over recent years, representations often denote specific political affiliations and commitments to colonization, topics often difficult to discuss.

Under each term there is a separation of where identity may and may not exist. In the grammar of this representation, the descriptive adjectives used under ‘culture’ are synonymous terms often used for identity; but that speaks to the product of design rather than describing the identification process. This group also shows that urban can mean ‘culture’—as seen where culture is noted—but invariably what is needed is a greater effort to disrupt the nice clean boxes that categorize, segregate [26], and, therein, colonize. This group embodies an oppositional grammar and concept juxtaposition [43] that identifies terms through differences and not similarities, but this was not true for all groups.

Different from the segregated conceptual architecture used in Figure 1, another group in this course that created Figure 2 showcases a transitional step toward disobeying binary epistemologies by depicting the overlapping nexus among concepts, which is stereotypical among much scholarship that (mis)uses intersectionality to describe the product of identification rather than the process. In this representation’s grammar, identity sits among all overlaps, lacking an identification process of creation, modification, and sustainment. Indeed, what is obfuscated by the seemingly justice-oriented approach to depicting these concepts as interwoven are the commitments marking disability, through science, as specifically found in the body-mind. Taking a careful look at the overlap between science and disability, all adjectives for this nexus are specific to medical traditions in special education to diagnose, treat, and cure disability—valorizing the ‘biological’, ‘genetic variance’, and the ‘evolution of genetics’ as the primary articulated links between science and disability. And while the group does hint at disability as a social construction at the disability and culture nexus, when asked why there was nothing at the disability, culture, and science nexus, the group said they “didn’t know what should go there”.

Taken together, this group lacks explicit connection between how science informs culture and the expectations of the (en)abled body–mind–spirit that are unfortunately also reminiscent of the oppositional grammar in Figure 1. In other words, this group’s representational grammar illuminates that the students could say through a rhetoric of ‘equity’ or ‘social justice’ that disability is or can be socially constructed, but their representational structure unveiled the lacking connection between science as discipline that has been historically used to mark identities as different from one another, thereby denying agency of Self. In this way, the cultural fixation of Western Modern science that supports identity making as a process of colonization historically and in the present day [52,53] is left to assumed neutrality—that science is truth and beyond bias—which sustains a rigid grammar that, while seemingly innovative, merely masks the colonialities of power present in our schooling designs: Namely that disability, unlike race and gender, is at best a biologically-determined phenomenon ‘in need’ of ‘special’ curative solutions to barriers that the disabled body produces. This harks back to the rhetoric of colonization as a process of identification to situate difference within the body (vis-à-vis melanin that creates skin colors and genitalia that are assumed to exist solely for reproduction) rather than interrogating how contexts fail to support these students’ learning needs because of commitments designed to uphold social stratification. However, a final artifact (Figure 3) provides an exemplar of what a grammar of intersectional disobedience leveraged to disrupt identity making as a process of colonization might look like in working toward Disability Justice.

Rather than segregating the concepts to identify what they are not in juxtaposition to one another (as in Figure 1), or attempting to develop a representation exhibiting an overlapping approach to identification but failing to interrogate how biological determinism plays a part in the making of identity (as in Figure 2), Figure 3 disobeys both of these characterizations of identification through juxtaposition entirely by adopting an approach to culture where its impact, especially on disability identity, is paramount [54]. In Figure 3, there are no bounded concepts; there are no lines used specifically to mark clear ways to differentiate between how science, disability, and urban are related to culture more broadly. Alternatively, culture is showcased as informing all other concepts in this representation; that through witnessing the sociality of political and cultural commitments, teachers can better represent the grammar fluidly leveraged to understand the process of identifying disability, the determination of what constitutes urbanity, and how the scientific enterprise is made into a set of epistemological tenets to obey, and not objective truth.

Furthermore, when asked to present their representation, the group (who had the only self-disclosed student with a disability) started with a need for an “explosion”—a explicit disruption of ‘what is’ to engage possibilities of ‘what if’ [20]. Put differently, by articulating the representations and relationships among these concepts as fluid, interdependent, and constitutive of one another, the students are taking up the need to not see these concepts in isolation or merely a compounded set of circumstances that embody rigidity; rather, the grammar articulated by this representation explicitly identifies the proximity of special education to science that produces marginalization, while also naming the alienation of disability (as shown in the Figures above) as a process that occurs through the invisibilization of disabled peoples and the inaccessibility of social contexts.

This intersectional grammar of disobedience, in this way and others, thus affords other students in the class a space to reflexively think about how culture plays a role in the process of determination and identification of their own identity in the making. Moreover, the group, during their presentation, made evident that culture was not included explicitly among these four concepts because, they argued, the interpretation they took to these multi-faceted components of our Western Modern capitalist social worlds is greatly determined by the cultural commitments people assume as truth, which is inevitably used by those in power to uphold the privilege and opportunities of those at the normate center of schooling and society over the multiply marginalized. Dirth and Adams [55], in tandem, provide a well-articulated conjoiner to these students’ interpretations while also corroborating the crucial importance of witnessing the grammar of colonialization:

[Projects that disobey colonial lenses and their sustainment of oppression] provide epistemic resources for understanding coloniality as a process of enablement/disablement. The colonial violence that produced the modern order has enabled a dominating WEIRD minority, endowing them capacity for action, freedom from constraint, and scaffolding for (over)achievement that people in these settings (and scientists observing them) understand as the full realization of natural human potential. The inseparable dark side of this enablement of modern being is a process of disablement or coloniality of being … [these] hegemonic understanding[s] launder or legitimize colonial injustice by portraying inequality as the just-natural result of inherent differences in merit or deservingness. In contrast, DS [Disability Studies] perspectives illuminate the cultural affordances that provide the foundation for otherwise natural ability. From this perspective, the performance of people in dominant positions is not the just-natural product of superior talents, evidence of their merit, and explanation for superior outcomes. Instead, their performance benefits from epistemic and material investments that act as performance-enhancement devices that artificially inflate their outcomes.

[55] (pp. 276–277, bolding added)

In sum, as Stuart Hall reminds me above, identities are never fixed or the stable product of heritage; rather, they emerge within the process of making evident whose identifications are valued within a particular context. So, it is radical to ask: Where have disabled identities been given the space to articulate their personal knowledge of Self, and when do we begin the process of leveraging the tenets of Disability Justice so that there can be a re-articulation of disabled Lives–Hopes–Dreams as worthy, Whole, and valuable. Given what that these eminent intersectional theorists teach me above about the interpretative need to focus on the context in which discrimination occurs as a starting point of addressing multiple marginalization, schools as contexts that inculcate youth into very specific social stratum by leveraging the erasure of (disabled-raced-gendered-classed) cultures as a latent form of control from colonization illuminates the importance that culture plays in sustaining a epistemological hierarchy of binary either/or holding value in naming Self and Other over more fluid episteme. Coming full circle, this grammar also pinpoints the limitations of naming biological features when describing difference in relation to Self and Other, troubled by scholars working toward Disability Justice, and instead explicitly evokes Aníbal Quijano’s argument that the primary vehicle through which colonization has latched it clutches to deny agency and self-determination for so many is culture.

7. Toward Identity as Possibility: Leveraging Grammars of Intersectional Disobedience

In [56], Jessica Bacon and Erin Pomponio reviewed position statements across U.S. education and disability related organizations over the last two decades. What they found in terms of the articulations of inclusive education gives me pause to think about, and hold close, what Aimé Césaire reminds me of the importance of community action more broadly, as well as what Leigh Patel argues in relation to how identity often evokes both individual and community:

… nearly all of the professional organisations we reviewed, many of which have mission statements related to fighting for the civil rights of students with disabilities, sought for students with disabilities to be included into the neoliberal approaches to education reform … the very term inclusion was, at times, redefined as giving students with disabilities the opportunity to be part of the neoliberal educational system. Further, for some organisations, students were not required to be physically present with their general education peers to be considered ‘included’ in the neoliberal sense of the term; and in fact, new self-contained classrooms have been created in many US states to provide access to standards through segregated settings.

[55] (p. 17)

Among the articulations of what is or could be inclusion, what is frightfully reminiscent of the grammars used to describe what is ‘right’ for students with disabilities (rather than what’s ‘possible’ when working with them) is a commitment to (juxta)pose disabled students as in need of support to claim an (en)abled identity as a form of ‘inclusion’ or ‘inclusive education’. Bacon and Pomponio argue, rightfully, that these organizations are enacting a neoliberal ethos that unquestionably serves merely to serve the inculcation of these students into the normalized stratification processes that education as a social institution has served quite well among theorizations that purpose Western Modern lives.

I problematize this argument further by lovingly holding dear the work of Emily Nusbaum and Maya Steinborn around ontological erasure [14]. These authors remind me that “Erasing disability from social life became the first step in erasing disability from conceptions of humanity and knowledge” [14] (p. 26). Echoing, Nielson [57] corroborates that disability has always played a role among the textures of life and liberty in the United States, and among ideologies of independence and autonomy—or, rather, whose humanity is deserving of citizenship under the positioning of rigid identity characteristics in contrast to the Western Modern center of ‘whose lives are worthy’. I have argued that these processes of identity making are sustained through binary epistemological grammars held over from colonization, and that working toward Disability Justice provide a disobedient approach to disrupt ableist supremacy that values body–mind–spirits if and only if they contribute to racial capitalism. In this way, social institutions like schools become the vehicles for this inculcation and identification process that serves primarily to articulate difference as deficit by obfuscating the possibilities that disability could afford intersectional pursuits toward educational justice. In all, by adopting an articulation of identity making as a process of colonization and urging social justice-oriented scholars to engage with the tenets of Disability Justice, I argue that education stakeholders can visibilize their own erasure practices, and work toward developing more intersectionally-disobedient grammars of Self and Other beyond juxtaposition, difference, and disability-as-deficiency.