Re-Constituting the 'Disabled' Other: Historical Materialism and the Politics of Schooling.

Within the current historical crisis of transnational capitalism, disabled people are finding themselves increasingly at risk. It is essential to (re)theorize the category of disability, particularly in critical response to the emancipatory possibilities offered through "border pedagogies." The paper locates the conceptual category of disability as the central ordering force within the social relations of schooling in much the same manner as theorists of race, class, gender, and sexuality have done before and ask the following questions: What does disability mean within the current global capitalist economy? How has global capitalism historically maintained the marginal "otherness" of disability? In what ways is disability related to the other social differences produced through race, class, gender, and sexual orientation? Through these questions that locate disability as the central analytic within the social relations of schooling, the paper demonstrates how this move will not only destablize the discursive meanings of disability, but will also challenge and reconstitute the historical, economic, political, and cultural structures that construct and shape lives in schools and therefore in society at large. A historical materialist analysis can foreground the necessity to transform the exploitative capitalist social relations that have historically marginalized disabled subjects. (Contains 54 references.) (LMI)