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In 2006, Helen Meekosha published a paper titled, ‘What the Hell are You? An Intercategorical Analysis of Race, Ethnicity, Gender and Disability in the Australian Body Politic’. In this paper she highlights the lack of intercategorical analysis between race, ethnicity, gender, immigration trajectories and other social markers in disability scholarship. Meekosha (2006) contextualises this with the Australian colonisation of, and the ongoing violence towards Aboriginal communities, and how ableist legislation, legal frameworks and institutional structures seek to exclude disabled Aboriginal communities, immigrants, and other ethnic minorities on an everyday basis. I came across this paper during my postgraduate studies when I was exploring the South Asian mothering of disabled children in the UK, at which time I was coming across very reductive and essentialising scholarship that, at best, would frame their experiences as being down to cultural or language barriers. Reading Meekosha felt like a breath of fresh air, and an invitation to write about the exclusions of certain minoritised groups from disability scholarship. Meekosha’s writing on Global South/North dynamics, and how that further removes rights, entitlements and citizenship from minorities, pushed me to consider how communities I was researching with are framed and discussed within dominant scholarship. 

Later, as an educator, I was teaching critical perspectives on inclusion to postgraduate students. As a woman of colour scholar from the Global South, I found that much of the scholarship in the module reading list and the teaching resources was apolitical, lacking accountability of the ongoing colonial violence towards racialised communities. As a critical scholar, this was deeply unsettling - a clear exclusion remained at work within disability studies despite Meekosha’s call for an intercategorical analysis. I felt that much could still be learnt from engaging with justice studies, critical race studies, migration studies, and international politics in order to understand how different oppressive structures work to silence liminal subjects. I then came across Deborah Stienstra’s (2015) paper, titled ‘For Michael Charlie: Including girls and boys with disabilities in the global South/North’. Stienstra explored decolonising inclusion discourse, highlighting how capitalist and colonial forms of state surveillance impact Global South communities living in the Global North. Unpacking Stienstra’s paper enabled me to ask difficult questions of students in traditional white spaces about the role of white saviourism, western NGOs, and more importantly, the taken-for-granted expertise that is seemingly assigned unthinkingly to western discourse on inclusion and disability, meanwhile ignoring the context of ongoing Global North military interventions and violence perpetrated upon Global South communities. I came out of these classrooms feeling invigorated and challenged because these spaces opened new possibilities of de-territorialising disability scholarship (Mbembe 2016). 

Over the years I have become bolder in blurring the imposed boundaries between disability studies and other disciplines. My current research specifically explores how racialised children and young people are constructed as unruly subjects in neo-liberal states, and subsequently punished for their unruliness. This work draws on Falguni Sheth’s (2009) Unruly Framework to highlight how racialised children are not only excluded from their educational settings, but also excluded from mainstream inclusion/exclusion discourse. The state orchestrates this exclusion by formally categorising their tangible and intangible markers as unruly symbols (Sheth, 2009). These markers can manifest as ‘Black hairstyles’ or the hijab which ‘do not conform’ to official dress codes, background, religion (e.g. being Muslim or Rastafarian), disability, citizenship status or any other symbol which pathologises and positions them as requiring social control (Joseph-Salisbury and Connelly, 2018). A case in point, 13-year-old Tashaun Aird was expelled from Hackney New School in London in July 2017 for carrying out a prank which damaged a teacher's coat. Tashaun’s family were initially told that his exclusion was temporary and conditional to exhibiting better behaviour. However, the school reversed its judgement and permanently excluded him, transferring him to a PRU and then onto an alternative provision. This unlawful action left Tashaun extremely vulnerable in an environment which not only threatened his education but also his physical and emotional wellbeing - and ultimately his life. Tashaun was assaulted whilst he was attending the PRU, and later after being transferred to an alternative provision he expressed anxieties about threats he was receiving from a group of boys. Tragically, he was fatally stabbed three months later by a local gang who had mistakenly thought Tashaun was part of a rival faction. Staggeringly, educational and social care agencies had apparently considered that a certain level of threat was to be expected in such educational settings, despite Tashaun’s family repeatedly raising concerns. Tashaun’s exclusion irrevocably defined him as unruly, and as such, not worthy of the state’s protection. Added to the fact that he was ‘Black’, ‘male’, and of ‘lower socioeconomic status’, the state also categorised Tashaun’s interest in ‘Afrobeat’ and ‘drill’ music as unruly symbols which were indelibly associated with criminal gangs. Consequently, he was immediately marked out as unruly, threatening and deserving of disciplinary action, despite having only committed a rather innocuous prank. Arguably, even his temporary exclusion itself represented an unruly symbol to other educational settings, indicating how boys like Tashaun should be treated (Rizvi, 2023).

My theoretical engagement with Sheth’s work has reminded me why, as researchers, we must be political in our research; we must sit with uncomfortable truths, and we must be witnesses to the ongoing exclusion and silencing of racialised communities in local and international contexts. As someone who continues to teach and research within critical disability studies - still traditionally a white space - being political is not only liberating but also holds me accountable to those whom I research with.

References

Mbembe, A. (2016). Decolonizing the university: New directions. Arts and Humanities Education, 15(1), 29–45.

Meekosha, H., 2006. What the hell are you? An intercategorical analysis of race, ethnicity, gender and disability in the Australian body politic. Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, 8(2-3), pp.161-176.

Joseph-Salisbury, R. and Connelly, L., 2018. ‘If your hair is relaxed, white people are relaxed. If your hair is nappy, they’re not happy’: Black hair as a site of ‘post-racial’social control in English schools. Social Sciences, 7(11), p.219.

Rizvi, S., 2023. ‘Unruly’ Ethnic Minorities: Exclusion Through Policy Constructions. In International Perspectives on Exclusionary Pressures in Education: How Inclusion becomes Exclusion (pp. 259-277). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Sheth, F.A., 2009. Toward a political philosophy of race. Albany, NY: Suny Press.

Stienstra, D., 2017. For Michael Charlie: Including girls and boys with disabilities in the global South/North.