Towards a Complicated Conversation Among Disability Studies, Complexity Thinking and Education

Abstract

The presence of disability, an embodied form of extreme vulnerability that is socially enacted, introduces into complex systems such as education or society, a perturbation, embodied agents that are biologically and socially constructed as being 'unfit', 'mal-adapted' or who do not adapt easily to the specific ecologies in which they must operate and thus gestures toward a current limit(ation) (and new beginning) of the complexivist framework for theorizing the pragmatic question of "How we should act?" What is required of us in our interaction with dis/abled agents who are circumscribed by not being fully "capable of adapting... to the sorts of new and diverse circumstances that an active agent is likely to encounter in a dynamic world" (Davis & Sumara, 2006, p.14)?  In this paper I present a "complicated conversation" among complexity thinking, curriculum theorizing, and disability studies in education and argue that dis-embodiments prompt a certain type of ethical mindfulness