Conference Agenda

This panel brings together leading scholars, who adopt an intersectional approach to understanding the complex nexus of race and disability and its impact on multiply-marginalised student populations across Europe. Although the popularity of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989) has increased in recent years in Europe, educational research remains at risk of being colour-evasive (Annamma et al, 2016), of failing to challenge erasures of race with other identity markers (e.g. disability) in policy and practice. This issue is central to education, because racialised minorities continue to be disproportionately identified with particular categories of special educational need or disability and subject to disciplinary exclusion. This panel engages in critical discussion about the possibilities of an intersectional approach to educational research. It does so by exploring the historical, colonial and contextual conditions leading to the erasure of race across Europe. Lastly, the panel hopes to stimulate a wider debate on these issues.

Paper 1 (Peter Hick)

From the early eugenicists and the origins of IQ testing, racism has been fundamentally imbricated in the history of education in the UK. Educational psychology colluded with the pseudoscientific fraud of Cyril Burt, framing a rationale for the postwar tripartite secondary education system. Colonial racism shaped the context for the labelling of children of the Windrush generation as ‘subnormal’; and created the legacy of disproportionate disciplinary exclusion and identification of children from racialised minorities with particular categories of special educational need.

The attempts of successive governments to deny the existence of institutional racism, have all but erased a language for discussing race in schooling. Intersectional analysis has at times been reduced to a fragmentation of categories of ethnicity and special educational need in administrative data. Yet there remains an urgent need to untangle these complex issues and to address these injustices.

Paper 2 (Valentina Migliarini)

The contribution presents biases and discriminatory discourses by Italian teachers, educators and medical professionals operating in educational, health and social services for forced migrants in Rome, in relation to the inclusion of unaccompanied asylum seeking and refugee children. It locates such narratives within the historical invisibilisation of race and racism (Giuliani, 2015) that have characterised Italy since the end of World War II, while showing how they legitimate contemporary processes of disablement and over-representation of Black forced migrant children in the category of special educational needs. This contribution adopts the Disability Critical Race Studies approach to discuss how a colour-evasive racial ideology has seeped into various institutions in Italian society, particularly into education policies and practices. Lastly, it shows how multiply-marginalised communities have been organising to challenge institutional race erasure.

Paper 3 (Girma Berhanu)

The school to prison nexus presents a complex landscape in which special education is commonly characterized by disproportionality – that is, learners from social/cultural groups are found in special education in proportions that are different to the overall school population (Berhanu and Dyson 2012). Connections between race, ethnicity, criminalization and education have been outlined in the ‘school to prison pipeline’ literature (Losen 2011). A number of other identity markers, including disability and gender, also have a distinct role in the 'pipeline' (Gillborn 2015) and their intersections with ethnicity and diverse cultural affiliations make children more vulnerable. Research is therefore required into both intersectionality and special education factors (and their combination) leading to offending and incarceration among young people. In particular, establishing a clear system of early detection and swift intervention, especially among special education students who are at risk of entering the school to prison pipeline, is needed in order to combat the harmful trajectory from trauma/school failure to incarceration.

Discussant (Alfredo Artiles)

A response from an internationally recognised authority