Abstract
Special education is a practice grounded in surveilling students' learning differences in an effort to ensure they are performing similarly to same age peers. Scant scholarship examines the field of special education through a critical lens. This dissertation aims to critically theorize special education using four objects of analysis. The first analysis explores the manufactured conflict between the fields of general education and special education. General education's focus on standards and accountability for all is in direct conflict with special education's focus on individualized education, which manifests as a culture of fear. The second analysis surveys an introductory special education textbook to discern underlying assumptions surrounding disability and special education to provide preservice teachers interpretive tools to comprehend students with disabilities and how they are represented. The third object of analysis is the Individualized Education Program (IEP), which produces knowledge about subjects using discourses of medicine, positivism, and deviance. Finally, I analyze a recently updated edition of a reading program designed for students with reading disabilities. I analyze this prescriptive program to identify the underlying beliefs about instrumental, rather than critical, ideologies behind literacy instruction. The study concludes that special education programs and policies serves as a form of modern-day eugenics that seeks to eradicate difference through intellectual violence. This project highlights the historical, social, political, economic, and ideological structures that confine the field so that we can reconceptualize a special education that emphasizes the valuation of difference, student agency, and humane treatment, rather than exclusionary, Othering practices and ideologies.