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Oral Presentation Session
Reviewed by: Council on Anthropology and Education
Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Teachers of Anthropology in Community Colleges, Students
Primary Theme: Resistance
Secondary Theme: Identity and Equity
Our responses to social, cultural, and political changes often reflect the tension generated through cooperation and/or opposition in the process of transformation. This panel explores anthropological tools as means to reconceptualize our understanding of disability and diversity in local and global settings. We examine the ways in which people with disability and their family members negotiate, resist, and/or adapt to the current social, cultural, and political landscape in and outside of classroom. By challenging inequalities in various contexts, we envision our shared future through collaboration for building inclusive communities and opposition to ableist ideologies and practices through resistance and resilience.
The first two papers focus on local areas of resistance in teacher education programs. The first paper follows the resistance to introducing a DSE (Disability Studies in Education) framework into a special education teacher training program at a university in California using collected over two semesters from 29 teacher candidates, while the second paper uses counter narratives to highlight the expressed beliefs of N=6 special education teachers of color who were obtaining teaching credentials at a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) in Southern California. Using DisCrit as a framework for teacher education instruction and as a tool for analysis of data, findings revealed three major themes highlighting how special education teachers of color develop and shift beliefs about students at the intersections of disability and race.
Next the panel moves into more global areas of resistance. In the third paper, the authors take on the case of Sayed, a Muslim, Iraqi refugee who has been recently re-settled, along with his wife and children to the United States. As a child in Iraq, Sayed experienced seizures and an ensuing operation that left him paralyzed in the left side of his body. The authors situate Sayed’s experience of disablement through Puar’s (2017) notion of debility, where the production of impairment is a tactic of war, poverty, and colonial projects. This anthropological exploration will contribute to an understanding of how disabled refugees negotiate and make sense of the re-settlement process.
The fourth and fifth papers focus on adulthood in Korean and Korean American culture. The fourth paper explores how ableism is constructed and reproduced during the emerging adulthood (Arnett, 2000) of youth and adults with disabilities in Korean American culture by sharing the experiences of Korean American youth and adults with disabilities at disability community events, where able-bodied individuals are encouraged to engage in volunteer work to serve young people with disabilities. The fifth paper draws on Puar’s (2017) notion of debility in order to examine the ways in which marriage-labor immigrant mothers are situated in Korean society as a vehicle through which the population is reproduced and maintained.
MinSoo Kim-Bossard
Assistant Professor
The College of New Jersey
Saili Kulkarni
San Jose State University
Eunyoung Jung
Elmira College
Sylvia Mac
University of La Verne
Sylvia Mac
University of La Verne
Sylvia Mac
University of La Verne
Sally Bonet
Colgate University