Abstract

This study explores the socio-cultural constructions that have accumulated within and around the phenomenon of disability in contemporary Canadian society. It inquires as to the cultural impulses, norms, and formations of identity that occur within and through systems of education, particularly with regard to how disabled identities are constructed, controlled and maintained through various practices at play within such systems. It argues that educational institutions are prominent in shaping, both implicitly and explicitly, legitimate identities, cultural values and social norms within Western society. Such familiar social systems provide a significant terrain through which to examine social responses to the phenomena of disability as well as providing a place from which to address and reconstitute such responses and their attendant social effects. If we view the current Western orientation towards disability as something that stems from various alterable political and social currents, it follows that the oppressive social effects experienced by disabled people would also prove alterable. It is such exclusionary social effects and the network of hidden social structures that work to enforce them that are addressed in this work. I believe it is imperative, both in the realm of disability studies and in the field of education, to trace the societal impulse which might account for such a pervasive banishment of those deemed mentally, physically, or socially abnormal from the bounds of ✹legitimate✹ society.

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