Diversity and Inclusion Research
Special Issue Title – Reparative Futures: Disability Studies, K-20 Education, and the Prison Nexus
Guest Editors:
Dr. Lauren Shallish; Rutgers University-Newark
Dr. Ashley Gwathney; Rutgers University-Newark
Submission deadline: 30 June 2025
People with disabilities and those who are formerly/presently incarcerated are often perceived as an “allowable” loss in educational settings: Regularly framed as a liability, threat, or detriment to the purported rigor and meritocratic elitism of society and schooling. Black and Brown bodies and minds (with and without disabilities) are regularly prepared for containment, not college or career advancement. These logics are evident in the overrepresentation of students of color in restrictive educational placements, the lack of curricular and professional representation, racialization and criminalization of smartness and behavior, exclusion from higher education and college access programs, and perpetuation of carceral push out policies that dehumanize multiply-minoritized communities seeking educational opportunity. System-impacted communities (many of whom identify or are politicized as disabled) are those with the least amount of interaction with educational opportunities, particularly higher education. These knowledges of aspirational and community capital are often excluded from the public domain given disciplinary gatekeeping practices and narrow assumptions about what expertise looks and sounds like— and who and where it comes from. While eugenic and carceral logics have endeavored to extinguish such bodies and minds from existing, long-standing practices of collective refusal, cross-movement solidarity, and coalition building have persisted despite the aims of K-20 education spaces to resist otherwise. This special issue will address how efforts for decarceral, reparative, and disabled futures are taking shape in public and higher education.
Topics include:
- Policies and practices that disrupt surveillance and punitive measures in K-16 education
- Challenges to disproportionate disability classification and exclusionary school discipline
- The role of disability studies and system-impacted experiences in DEI efforts
- Justice-impacted perspectives of disability classification and access to higher education
- Exploration of the socio-emotional impacts of school surveillance and/or mass incarceration
- Gender studies in the historical marginalization of disability classification and the prison nexus
- Counternarratives to disability classification, exclusionary practices, and access to educational opportunity
- Higher education in prison programs and reentry, particularly regarding disabled students
- The role of educational institutions in reparative justice work
- Anti-carceral and anti-eugenic practices in K-12 and higher education
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