Upcoming Events

January 13, 2023

SSWR 2023 Special Interest Group Meeting: Anthropology and Social Work

Place: Please check the SSWR conference schedule. To join via Zoom, email Katie at gkate@uchicago.edu for the link.

Time: 12:30 to 1:30 pm MST

January 13, 2023

SSWR 2023 Happy Hour Gathering

Place: Arizona Wilderness Brewing Beer Garden (201 E. Roosevelt St, Phoenix, AZ)

Time: 6:00 to 7:30 pm MST

March 3, 2023

Winter SASW workshop

Presenter: Kathryn Wright, Doctoral Candidate in Social Work and Anthropology at Wayne State University

Place: The workshop will take place on Zoom. Please contact Katie Gibson at gkate@uchicago.edu for the link.

Time: 2 pm CST

Paper Title: Why is special education such a bad place to be?: What’s missing in the disproportionality discussion.

Abstract: In this paper I review the education literature on disproportionality (the over-representation of Black and Latinx youth, often male, in special education and especially, in isolated special education classes in U.S. K-12 schools). I argue that the literature on disproportionality has not examined all of the broader conceptual and historical forces that leads to restrictive placement of racialized youth, in particular, the role of ableism. I suggest shifts in this theoretical discussion to generate a more complex understanding of disability in educational settings, of which disproportionality is only one part, as well as ways that the literature might gain from deep ethnographic exploration of these restrictive settings.