Conference Agenda

Education is today seen as a key to an equal start in life and is a fundamental human right for all children. However, children with disabilities remain a neglected group in education, research, and society, both historically and in the present. Both in Sweden and internationally, history of education, history of disability and special education are research areas that have been relatively detached with separate communities, conferences and journals. Although initiatives for bringing these areas closer together have been taken, like ISCHE 34 in Vienna 2012 and thematic issues of Paedagogica Historica 60:4 (Verstraete et al. 2024) and Nordic Journal of Educational History 12:2 (Berg et al. 2025), there is still not much knowledge about how disability and education have interacted throughout history. In particular, we know very little from previous research about the differences between what policy documents have stated, how institutions and institutional practices have developed accordingly, and how education in fact has been provided to individual children with disabilities throughout history in Sweden.

EDUDIS is a new research programme – financed by Swedish Research Council for five years and based at Umeå University – that will increase the understanding of the historical relationship between education and disability from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. This will be achieved by combining expertise from the history of education and disability history and by strengthening national and international collaboration.

In the presentation, we will portray the research planned within the programme. The research aims to expand current knowledge of the policies, institutions and practices that have shaped the relationship between education and disability, and their impact on the individual life trajectories of disabled children with the help of three key questions:

1. How has education for children with disabilities been discussed and organized?
2. How have schools decided who receives mainstream versus special education?
3. What education have children with disabilities actually received, and how has it affected their future?

Document and archive studies provide answers to research questions 1 and 2, while question 3 is addressed using Sweden’s population databases, which enable statistical comparisons over time. By combining qualitative text analysis with quantitative analysis of registry data, time-bound ambitions of education policy can be related to its actual implementation and how children with disabilities have accessed education. This will generate new insights into the inclusion and exclusion of children with disabilities in schools and how education has affected their later lives.

Theoretically, the research has its base in the biopsychosocial model of disability, where disability is regarded as a function of both people’s health conditions and contextual factors (WHO 2011). Although physical or medical factors are involved, disability is understood also as a social construct where physical environments and surrounding attitudes creates restrictions for people with disabilities (Oliver 2009). This perspective is particularly fruitful in studies of education, as organizational measures and pedagogical ideas are formed in relation to timely constrained and shifting ideas of children’s abilities and restrictions.

This paper analyzes how the image of the "West" and the "capitalist world" was systematically constructed and disseminated in the Soviet Lithuanian educational system. Educational discourse is treated not only as a medium for the transfer of knowledge, but also as a fundamental tool of ideological indoctrination, designed to shape the younger generation's rejection of social and political models that contradict Marxist-Leninist dogma.

Previous studies (Stonkuvienė and Ivanavičė, 2024; Stonkuvienė, 2024) show that in educational discourse, the Soviet Union was positioned as the absolute guarantor of "friendship between nations" and "social justice" and a bastion of equality. In contrast, the capitalist world was portrayed as a space of racial hatred and systematic exploitation.

Along with the positive emphasis on the moral superiority of the Soviet Union, a narrative of existential threat was consistently developed. Western countries were represented as a source of inevitable military aggression. The construction of the US as "Enemy No. 1" (Magnúsdóttir, 2019) became a direct source of legitimacy for the militarization of the education system. This discursive strategy allowed Soviet patriotism to be equated with constant readiness to defend the "socialist homeland," thus normalizing a militaristic culture in the everyday life of schoolchildren (Stonkuvienė, 2023).

This study aims to answer the question: what systematic linguistic and visual strategies in Soviet educational discourse allowed for the construction of a comprehensive image of the capitalist world as a civilizational "Other," and whether and how this interpretive system changed throughout the Soviet period (1945-1990).

In this paper, I aim to re-member – based on materials held at the Norwegian Archive for Queer History in Bergen, Norway – Nordic trans* and gender nonconforming histories of education (particularly early childhood education), centring the Norwegian case of Esben Esther Pirelli Benestad (1949-present).

I do so positioning myself explicitly as a cis queer aspiring trans ally and as an historian of education who thereby joins forces and collaborates with trans colleagues who have been paving the way (Martins 2023; see also Martins & Thyssen 2025).

The background against which my paper aims to rescue such non-heteronormative educational experiences from an erasure retraceable to projects of Western colonial violence (e.g. Oyěwùmí 1997) is one that, on the one hand, has witnessed increasing restriction of trans rights, both internationally and in Norway. Thus, in Hungary and the U.S., for instance, not to mention Russia, anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been voted into law, and in Norway, where until 2016 trans people could be forcibly and irreversibly sterilised and still recently nonbinary persons were denied access to gender affirming care by the National Treatment Service for Gender Incongruence (NBTK). This background is, on the other hand, also one where scholars and activists internationally have reclaimed their childhoods as having been trans, as in the case of the late Argentina-born, American trans and queer activist, performer and author Cecilia Gentili (2022).

Trans*, gender nonconforming and queer experiences, of course, long did (not) yet exist (if) only (differently) ‘at their intersection with institutions of disciplinary power’ (Martins 2023; Heyam 2022, Mesch 2020) constraining the conditions of their im/possibility (Barad 2017, Hartman 2008; Foucault 1972, 1980). Beyond Modern notions of singular, linear temporality stabilising boundaries between past, present and future (Thyssen et al. 2021; Thyssen 2024; Thyssen & Ødegaard 2026), then, I endeavour to rescue “impossible stories” (Hartman 2008, 10) “that are not the histories …archives wish to recount” (Martins 2023, Steedman 2001).

Among such stories are those of the American Elbert (“Ellis”) Glenn, recounted in Skandinaven (1899), a journal then widely read by Norwegian/Nordic immigrants in the U.S. (cf. Skidmore 2017), or of Christine (“George”) Jørgensen (1926-1989), the first trans person (based in the U.S.) who successfully underwent gender affirming surgery and female hormone treatment in Copenhagen, Denmark, or of Esben Esther Pirelli Benestad (1949-), one of the best known (nonbinary) trans persons in Norway, and a medical doctor and sexologist whose story features in Alt om min far [All about my father], a documentary made by their son Even Benestad.

In my paper, I will focus especially on Pirelli Benestad, such as they are enabled – with co-involvement on my part – to emerge from a reconfiguring tangle of space, time, and material like their son’s documentary about them. Such film material will be analysed through archival materials on a queer (in fact, transvestite) association, namely: the Scandinavian FPE/Phi Pi Epsilon-Northern Europe (an acronym for FemmePersonate or Full Personality Expression), where Pirelli Benestad first became active (1979-80), shortly after also joining a research project on heterosexual transvestites. The first time Pirelli Benestad publicly came out as trans was in the TV2 programme En anelse rødt [A little red ] ca. 1993-94. In 2002, then, their son directed the aforentioned documentary film, which also received some attention outside Norway. Pirelli Benestad, incidentally, has become strongly involved in the public debate around trans people. They have introduced in Norwegian language terms such as trans talent, trans-gifted person, and gender enthusiasm. Likewise, they have set out to change gender- and trans-related medical diagnoses, helping re(con)figure the latter as diverse talents.