Tools In Practice. Genealogy To Tackle Academic Inequalities

Abstract

This paper introduces the method of genealogy to analyse the government of disability in Italian higher education contexts. Looking at how power and discourses construct disability within the academic setting, I problematize the truths that, throughout the last century, brought disabled subjects to be part of the mainstreamed education. Ethnographic work within a specific university milieu situated my research in the present of disabled students. That provides me with the access to tactics and power relations in specific and local settings, problematising the use of standardised criteria and classificatory systems. In depth-interviews with disabled students allow me to look for those technologies of power that work on the bodies and in the souls of disabled subjects, enabling me to delve into disabled students’ subjectivities.

Seeing disability as a complex social function (Foucault, 1978; Peter and Fendler, 2003), the study shows how relations of power within precise historical, political and economic factors fashion the ways we are governed and we govern ourselves.