Disability comes from the rejection of political purity
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- Disabled students are always flagged as troublemakers and punished for their disability
- F/W is the attempt to isolate disabled people from this sphere of education
- Our 1ac is a performance of academic activism that rejects the pedagogical mastery of the negative
AT: F/WThe fundamental thesis of the affirmative is to expose the ableism embedded in educational structures like debate, absent a solvency takout fo our advocacy you default to the Mitchell, Snyder, and Ware evidence – the failure of crip bodies in educational spaces – it exposes the flaws in the inclusionism that the negative forces upon is – if we fail to meet then you should vote affThe Hoffman evidence should frame your ballot. Crip bodies are disproportionately punished in educational spaces, and their model of framework is just an attempt to punish crip bodies for acting out – you vote to discourage punishment of disabled bodies engaging in educationDisabled students are always flagged as troublemakers and punished for their disabilityHabib, 16 (Daniel J. Habib is an American documentary film director, producer, and cinematographer, His award-winning films on disability-related topics include Who Cares About Kelsey?, Including Samuel, Restraint and Seclusion: Hear Our Stories, and several short documentaries, In 2014, he was named a member of the President's Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities, 2016, Foreword for the book “Empowering Students with Hidden Disabilities A Path to Pride and Success” by Margo Vreeburg Izzo and LeDerick Horne, http://archive.brookespublishing.com/documents/empowering-students-with-hidden-disabilities-preface.pdf ) LeDerick and Margo understand intimately that youth with hidden disabilities are often misperceived as being troublemakers instead of as complex children who need supports from the adults in their homes, schools and communities. They understand that effective support and interventions can ease the pain of these students, raise graduation rates and help students connect with their community through mentors and peer groups. They also know that students with emotional and behavioral disabilities are more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators, and that without appropriate interventions, they are at increased risk for dropping out of school, for incarceration, homelessness, and for long-term reliance on government assistance. Here are a few things to consider while reading this book. 1. Hidden disabilities are extremely prevalent. Over three million students in the United States have diagnosed hidden disabilities such as learning disabilities, ADHD or emotional/behavioral disability (EBD). One in every 10 youth in the United States experiences a mental health disorder severe enough to limit daily functioning in the family, school, and community setting. 2. Hidden disabilities can wreak havoc on learning. Students with hidden disabilities receive below average scores on reading and math assessments, compared to students in the general population. For example, one-third of students with LD have been held back (retained) in a grade at least once. 3. Punitive approaches are disastrous. Punitive discipline policies, like “zero-tolerance,” which emphasize the use of suspension and expulsion in addressing problem behavior, don’t get at the root causes of behavior. Studies also show that these policies do little to improve school safety and disproportionately impact students with disabilities and students of color. What they can result in is traumatic experiences for students and adults, as you can see in another one of my film, Restraint and Seclusion: Hear Our Stories (www.stophurtingkids.com). 4. Post-school outcomes for students with EBD are dismal. National studies show that students who are suspended or expelled often drop out of school, which frequently leads to juvenile delinquency, arrests, and prison. Students with EBD are twice as likely as other students with disabilities to live in a correctional facility, halfway house, drug treatment center, or on the street after leaving school. And the Brown evidence says that the continual punishment of disabled bodies justifies ongoing eugenics – they are the systematic removal of crip bodies this space. And you should frame the TVA with the Campbell evidence that the distancing of disabled bodies results in continued self-hatred. We ask ourselves – why can’t we achieve on the same level? Why can’t we debate the same way?Normalizing the affirmative’s resistant politics in an attempt to create an imagined perfect debate community only results in the maintenance of ableism – forced norm emulation should be rejected and replaced with our inversion of politics as usual.Campbell, 8 (Fiona Kumari Campbell works at the School of Education & Social Work, University of Dundee. She was Program Convenor, Human Services in the School of Health & Wellbeing at the University of Southern Queensland. She writes on disability and specificially—ableism, Sri Lankan disability, jurisprudence, technology, and South Asian disability, “Refusing Able(ness): A Preliminary Conversation about Ableism”, M/C Journal, 07/2008 http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/46 ) Typically literature within disability and cultural studies has concentrated on the practices and production of disablism, specifically by examining those attitudes and barriers that contribute to the subordination of people with disabilities in liberal society. Disablism is a set of assumptions (conscious or unconscious) and practices that promote the differential or unequal treatment of people because of actual or presumed disabilities. On this basis the strategic positions adopted to facilitate emancipatory social change whilst diverse, essentially relate to reforming those negative attitudes, assimilating people with disabilities into normative civil society and providing compensatory initiatives and safety nets in cases of enduring vulnerability. In other words, the site of reformation has been at the intermediate level of function, structure and institution in civil society and shifting values in the cultural arena. Such an emphasis produces scholarship that contains serious distortions, gaps and omissions regarding the production of disability and re-inscribes an able-bodied voice/lens towards disability. Disability, often quite unconsciously, continues to be examined and taught from the perspective of the Other (Marks; Solis). The challenge then is to reverse, to invert this traditional approach, to shift our gaze and concentrate on what the study of disability tells us about the production, operation and maintenance of ableism. The earlier work of Tom Shakespeare concludes, “… perhaps the maintenance of a non-disabled identity … is a more useful problem with which to be concerned; rather than interrogating the other, let us de-construct the normality-which-is-to-be-assumed” (28). Hughes captures this project forcefully by calling for a study of the “pathologies of non-disablement” (683). An Abled imaginary relies upon the existence of an hitherto unacknowledged imagined shared community of able-bodied/minded people (c.f. Butler & Parr) held together by a common ableist homosocial world view that asserts the preferability and compulsoriness of the norms of ableism. Overboe and Campbell point to the compulsion to emulate the norm through the internalisation of ableism. Ableistnormativity results in compulsive passing, wherein there is a failure to ask about difference, to imagine human be-ingness differently. Compulsory ableness and its conviction to and seduction of sameness as the basis to equality, claims results in a resistance to consider ontologically peripheral lives as distinct ways of being human least they produce a heightened devaluation. Ontological reframing poses different preoccupations: what does the study of the politics of ‘deafness’ tell us about what it means to be ‘hearing’? Indeed how is the very conceptualisation of ‘hearing’ framed in the light of discourses of ‘deafness’? By decentring Abledness, it is possible to “to look at the world from the inside out)” (Linton 13) and unveil the ‘non-disabled/ableist’ stance. In a different context Haraway (152) exclaims “… [this] cannot be said quite out loud, or it loses its crucial position as a pre-condition of vision and becomes the object of scrutiny”. So what is meant by the concept of ‘ableism’? A survey of the literature suggests that the term is often referred to in a fleeting way with limited definitional or conceptual specificity (Clear; Iwasaki & Mactavish: Watts & Erevelles). When there is commentary, ableism is described as denoting an attitude that devalues or differentiates disability through the valuation of able-bodiedness equated to normalcy. For some, the term ableism is used interchangeably with the term disablism. I argue however that these two words render quite radically different understandings of the status of disability to the norm. Furthermore, as a conceptual tool, ableism transcends the procedures, structures, for governing civil society and locates itself clearly in the arena of genealogies of knowledge. There is little consensus as to what practices and behaviours constitute ableism. We can nevertheless say that a chief feature of an ableist viewpoint is a belief that impairment or disability (irrespective of ‘type’) is inherently negative and should the opportunity present itself, be ameliorated, cured or indeed eliminated. Ableism refers to In a similar vein, Veronica Chouinard defines ableism as “ideas, practices, institutions and social relations that presume ablebodiedness, and by so doing, construct persons with disabilities as marginalised … and largely invisible ‘others’” (380). In contrast, Amundson & Taira attribute a doctrinal posture to ableism in their suggestion that “Ableism is a doctrine that falsely treats impairments as inherently and naturally horrible and blames the impairments themselves for the problems experienced by the people who have them” (54). Whilst there is little argument with this presupposition, what is absent from the definition is any mention of ableism’s function in inaugurating the norm. Campbell and Chouinard’s approach is less about the coherency and intentionalities of ableism; rather their emphasis is on a conception of ableism as a hub network functioning around shifting interest convergences. Linton defines ableism as “includ[ing] the idea that a person’s abilities or characteristics are determined by disability or that people with disabilities as a group are inferior to non-disabled people” (9). There are problems with simply endorsing a schema that posits a particular worldview that either favours or disfavours dis/able-bodied people as if each category is discrete, self-evident and fixed. As I will argue later, Ableism sets up a binary dynamic which is not simply comparative but rather co-relationally constitutive. Campbell’s formulation of ableism not only problematises the signifier disability but points to the fact that the essential core of ableism is the formation of a naturalised understanding of being fully human and this as Chouinard notes, is articulated on a basis of an enforced presumption that erases difference. The first Mitchell, Snyder and Ware evidence says that the attempt to include disabled bodies on the “same level” only reinforces ableism and the idea that we can never achieve – any TVA they read will try to incorporate disability scholarship in a way that blames us for no achievingF/W is the attempt to isolate disabled people from this sphere of educationWendell, 89 (Susan Wendell is Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, 1989, “Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability,” Hypatia, Vol. 4, No. 4, Feminist Ethics & Medicine, pp. 104-124. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3809809.pdf) In the split between the public and the private worlds, women (and children) have been relegated to the private, and so have the disabled, the sick and the old (and mostly women take care of them). The public world is the world of strength, the positive (valued) body, performance and production, the able-bodied and youth. Weakness, illness, rest and recovery, pain, death and the negative (de-valued) body are private, generally hidden, and often neglected. Coming into the public world with illness, pain or a devalued body, we encounter resistance to mixing the two worlds; the split is vividly revealed. Much of our experience goes underground, because there is no socially acceptable way of expressing it and having our physical and psychological experience acknowledged and shared. A few close friends may share it, but there is a strong impulse to protect them from it too, because it seems so¶ private, so unacceptable. I found that, after a couple of years of illness, even¶ answering the question, "How are you?" became a difficult, conflict-ridden business. I don't want to alienate my friends from my experience, but I don't want to risk their discomfort and rejection by telling them what they don't¶ want to know.8 Disabled people learn that many, perhaps most, able-bodied people do not want to know about suffering caused by the body. Visibly disabled women report that curiosity about medical diagnoses, physical appearance and the sexual and other intimate aspects of disability is more common than willingness to listen and try to understand the experience of disability (Matthews 1983). It is not unusual for people with invisible disabilities to keep them entirely secret from everyone but their closest friends. Contrary to what Sue Halpem says, it is not simply because they are in able¶ bodies that the able-bodied fail to identify with the disabled. Able-bodied¶ people can often make the imaginative leap into the skins of people physically unlike themselves; women can identify with a male protagonist in a story, for example, and adults can identify with children or with people much older than themselves. Something more powerful than being in a different body is at work. Suffering caused by the body, and the inability to control the¶ body, are despised, pitied, and above all, feared. This fear, experienced individually, is also deeply embedded in our culture. Our 1ac is a performance of academic activism that rejects the pedagogical mastery of the negativeGarland-Thomson, 02 (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is Professor of English and Bioethics at Emory University, where her fields of study are disability studies, American literature and culture, and feminist theory. Her work develops the field of critical disability studies in the health humanities, broadly understood, to bring forward disability access, inclusion and identity to communities inside and outside of the academy, 2002, “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory”, https://www.english.upenn.edu/sites/www.english.upenn.edu/files/Garland-Thomson_Rosemarie_Disability-Feminist-Theory.pdf ) The concluding version of activism I offer is less controversial and subtler than glitzy fashion spreads. It is what I call academic activism, the activism of integrating education, in the very broadest sense of that term. The academy is no ivory tower but rather it is the grassroots of the educational enterprise. Scholars and teachers shape the communal knowledge and the pedagogical archive that is disseminated from kindergarten to the university. Academic activism is most self-consciously vibrant in the aggregate of interdisciplinary identity studies-of which Women's Studies is exemplary-that strive to expose the workings of oppression, examine subject formation, and offer counter narratives for subjugated groups. Their cultural work is building an archive through historical and textual retrieval, canon reformation, role modeling, mentoring, curricular reform, and course and program development. A specific form of feminist academic activism can be deepened through the complication of a disability analysis. I call this academic activism the methodology of intellectual tolerance. By this I do not mean tolerance in the more usual sense of tolerating each other-although that would be useful as well. What I mean is the intellectual position of tolerating what has been thought of as incoherence. As feminism has embraced the paradoxes that have emerged from its challenge to the gender system, it has not collapsed into chaos, but rather it has developed a methodology that tolerates internal conflict and contradiction. This method asks difficult questions, but accepts provisional answers. This method recognizes the power of identity, at the same time that it reveals identity as a fiction. This method both seeks equality, and it claims difference. This method allows us to teach with authority at the same time that we reject notions of pedagogical mastery. This method establishes institutional presences even while it acknowledges the limitations of institutions. This method validates the personal but implements disinterested inquiry. This method both writes new stories and recovers traditional ones. Considering disability as a vector of identity that intersects gender is one more internal challenge that threatens the coherence of woman, of course. But feminism can accommodate such complication and the contradictions it cultivates. Indeed the intellectual tolerance I am arguing for espouses the partial, the provisional, the particular. Such an intellectual habit can be informed by disability experience and acceptance. To embrace the supposedly flawed body of disability is to critique the normalizing phallic fantasies of wholeness, unity, coherence, and completeness. The disabled body is contradiction, ambiguity, and partiality incarnate. Download 0.7 Mb. Share with your friends:
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