A Foucaultian critique of learning disability discourses: personal narratives and science

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A Foucaultian critique of learningdisability discourses: personalnarratives and scienceWaseem Mazher aa Department of Curriculum and Teaching, Teachers College,Columbia University, 2008 Oak Grove Road, Hattiesburg, MS,39402, USAPublished online: 01 Sep 2011.

To cite this article: Waseem Mazher (2012) A Foucaultian critique of learning disability discourses:personal narratives and science, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 25:6,767-800, DOI: 10.1080/09518398.2011.569767

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International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education2011, 1–34, iFirst article

ISSN 0951-8398 print/ISSN 1366-5898 online© 2012 Taylor & Francis

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A Foucaultian critique of learning disability discourses: personal narratives and science

Waseem Mazher*

Department of Curriculum and Teaching, Teachers College, Columbia University, 2008 Oak Grove Road, Hattiesburg, MS 39402, USATaylor and FrancisTQSE_A_569767.sgm(Received 28 October 2009; final version received 22 February 2011)10.1080/09518398.2011.569767International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education0951-8398 (print)/1366-5898 (online)Article2011Taylor & Francis0000002011Mr. [email protected]

In this article, I present a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of two discourses inlearning disabilities (LD) – the academic research literature on emotions ofstudents labeled as LD and retrospective autobiographies from adults labeled asLD writing about their emotions as students. Drawing mainly on Foucaultianexplanations of power, I investigate how these two discourses differentiallyposition persons labeled as LD as human subjects. I raise research and theoreticalconcerns to further interpret power as discursively and historically situated andpoint out opportunities for resisting ways the dominant positivist, scientificdiscourse positions students labeled as LD.

Keywords: discourse; Foucaultian; learning disability

The one who acts … acts precisely to the extent that he or she [has been first] constitutedas an actor. (Butler 1997, 16, cited in Eskin 2000, 70)

My purpose in this study is to address how discourses (i.e., academic research andautobiographies) of learning disabilities (LD) and emotion ‘gradually and progres-sively’ (Foucault 1977b, 97) construct the human subject. No one with an interest inmodern society can ignore language as an important medium of power (Fairclough1989). It is specifically with power in mind that some scholars in special educationhave begun to reinvestigate issues around research and practice in the field of LD(Carrier 1986; Connor 2008; Danforth 2009; Heshusius 1989, 1994; Mazher and Kang2010; Reid and Valle 2004; Sleeter 1987). However, I have been unable to identifystudies that examine the discursive aspects of knowledge construction related to LDand emotion through the application of a critical discourse analysis (CDA).

Perhaps the hardest thing to do is to talk about science in a critical way becausescience carries so much prestige in modern life (Foucault 1977b). Foucault’s (1975,1977b) prolix excursions testify to the difficulties involved in such an undertaking.But that is precisely what I intend to do in this article. I analyze the discourse ofscience with an eye on its effects. I also explore the play and effects of that discourseon the personal narratives of individuals labeled as LD. I do not propose an alternativeto conducting scientific inquiry, but a case for an ‘anti-science’ that might fill a gapin our understanding (Foucault 1977b). If we account for such a gap, as problematicand elusive as such a mission might be, we can assume greater control of researching

*Email: [email protected]

Vol. 25, No. 6, September 2012, 767–800

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experiences (considered a ‘discourse’) related to LD and locate discursive sites toresist power in self-positioning, the expression of emotions, and the enactment ofschool experiences.

Foucault defines discourses as ‘groups of signs, verbal performances, acts offormulation, and a series of sentences or propositions’ (1972, 107). More broadly, theyare a ‘group of statements that belong to a single system of formation’ (1972, 108).We can speak, therefore, ‘of a clinical discourse, economic discourse, the discourse ofnatural history, psychiatric discourse’ (1972, 108). I draw upon Foucault’s (1975,1997b) ideas about power to explore two questions:

(1) What themes does a CDA reveal concerning how students labeled as LD arepositioned by two sources of writing: (1) academic researchers writing aboutemotions associated with LD; and (2) adults (as students once labeled as LD)retrospectively describing their emotions in autobiographies?

(2) What are similarities and differences between the ways the two discoursesposition students labeled as LD?

I approach the topic of emotions at the level of discourse. That is to say, I selectdiscourses that have ‘various signs, propositions, statements, and formulations’(Foucault 1977b, 97), which relate to some aspect of emotions. I do not report whatthe texts (the scientific and the autobiographical) tell us about labeled students’emotions, but rather, how discursive representations convey power. A point toconsider before embarking on the CDA is that the studies I chose for review in no wayconstitute an exhaustive search for all that is out there in the domain of psychologicaland epidemiological research. Instead, the studies serve as a way to reframe a largeand often fragmented repertoire of scientific works as integrated parts of ways ofthinking and speaking, which is discourse (Foucault 1972).

As I present further through the CDAs, the discursive practices included in thereview embody ‘technical processes, institutions, patterns of general behavior [ofthinking and conducting inquiry], in forms of transmission and diffusion’ (Foucault1972, 200). What we have, then, are the beginnings of a genealogical interpretation,in which the state of things reflects the presence of struggles, which the discoursesreveal through self-examination (Foucault 1972). That self-examination is expressedthrough the CDA, as the discourses represent us and how we define knowledge andscience (Foucault 1977b). Moreover, the scientific texts function as an archive of theliving present, which spans mostly the years 1997 to 2003.

In his book Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1977a) analyzes a transformation inthe way power has functioned in western society. He sees a shift in the modality ofsociety that punishes from the violence of public executions to the seamless control oftechnology and the bodies that become its subjects. Foucault (1972) points out thatthis technology operates on a discursive level even while articulating its frameworkon non-discursive objects and their workings (i.e., institutions, political events, andeconomic practices and processes). Moreover, he suggests that though the power ofmodern society is quieter and more discreet than the eruptions and the spectacles ofpunishment of the past (e.g., the public executions and torture), it is also now moreeffective and pervasive, and certainly no less coercive. Foucault (1975) finds at thecenter of contemporary mechanisms of control, the examination, for the measure ofdifference is instrumental in how we discipline each other. In this article, I provideevidence of the examination, and its frequent use, in researching issues related to the

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International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 3

emotions of students labeled as LD. I explore how the power of the examination ormore appropriately, self-examination, is played out through the academic and theautobiographical passages that I investigate.

I choose the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) definition toprovide a conceptual description of LD because it is a very commonly cited one witha rich history of debate surrounding it. There are other definitions that some havecounter-posed to the IDEA’s, but these have not gained wide traction (Raymond2008), not to mention affirmation by the federal government registry, which acceptsthe one found in the IDEA. A number of historiographers have discussed how thislandmark definition came about and its impact on subsequent movements within LD(Danforth 2009; Hallahan and Mock 2006; Hammill 1989; Sleeter 1987; Torgensen2004; Wiederholt 1974; Wong 1996, 2004).

According to IDEA 2004, persons identified as learning disabled are those:

who have a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved inunderstanding or in using language, spoken or written, which disorder may manifest inimperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell, or to do mathematical calcula-tions. Such disorders include such conditions as perceptual handicaps, brain injury, mini-mal brain dysfunction, dyslexia, and developmental aphasia. Such terms do not includechildren who have learning problems which are primarily the result of visual, hearing, ormotor handicap, of mental retardation, of emotional disturbance, or of environmental,cultural, or economic disadvantage. (Vaughn, Bos, and Schumm 2007, 67)

From the point of view of discourse, this definition elides the socio-political realityof the category of LD. As I and others have explored elsewhere (Carrier 1986; Connor2008; Danforth 2009; Mazher and Reid 2006; Reid and Valle 2004), LD is a construalof converging American movements from the 1950s and 1960s, which makes it apotent social force to reckon with, especially for those who are labeled as LD. Besidesthe vagaries of the particular history that inform LD (see Carrier 1986; Danforth 2009;Sleeter 1987), which are quite complex and involved, the term ‘disability’ itself actsas a social reality that is immersed in ‘systems of representations, social and materialpractices, discourses, and ideological effects’ (Thomas 1999, 111). Hence, in directcontrast to what the IDEA definition purports, we may argue that LD does result fromand represent environmental and cultural disadvantage. For our purposes, though,these oppressive forces constitute the very fabric of discourse, rooted as they are inspecific sets of locally defined differences identified in children (Mazher and Reid2006). And, as I further help to illuminate in this article, LD exists as a discursive cate-gory embedded in the psychometric–psychiatric–epistemological complex, of whichwe – the individuals, the research community, and schools – are a material part (seealso Foucault 1975).

A simple reading – without any analysis – shows that the canonized academicresearch discourse in LD and the study of emotions are uniformly grounded in posi-tivist science. The studies employ measuring instruments, such as rating scales,behavior frequency charts, behavior checklists, skills tests, depression inventory ques-tionnaires, clinical tests, and so forth. I review 47 studies, mostly from 1997 to 2003,that are listed in Table 1. There are two columns: one that lists the topical sub-area ofstudy (of which there are seven), and the second instruments that represent the labeledstudents’ emotions. This approach to inquiry, by and large, reflects a pervasive silenceby the positivist, scientific community of researchers in terms of hearing what thelabeled students tell about their own lives freely in their own language. The empirical

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4 W. Mazher

community of researchers seldom uses unstructured or in-depth interviews withstudents labeled as LD or narrative studies that allow the participants to give extensivevoice to their emotions about schools and their lives broadly (see Table 1).

Bakhtin (1984) states that every human being has an awareness or self-consciousnessof what they reveal freely through dialog. Another person (e.g., a psychologist) canprovide only a secondhand definition that fails to capture something that is the person-ality and the internal discourse to which only the person talked about has access. I findthat studies in LD often seem limited by the narrow scope of talk that researchers allowtheir labeled subjects. When students respond to researchers, they often do so to allowinvestigators to examine their words for indications of deficiencies located inside (seeAdelman 1978; Stone and May 2002; Toro et al. 1990).

For example, Adelman (1978) and Stone and May (2002) want to know if whatlabeled students say hides a willingness to exaggerate about their limited academicabilities. The act of asking labeled students to speak to catch them exaggerating aboutsomething as fragile and personal as one’s own ego seems feelingless on the part ofthe researchers. Toro et al. (1990) further demonstrate perhaps an ‘overly’ criticalapproach to talking to students. They describe decontextualized scenarios to studentslabeled as LD and ask them how they respond to different situations that call forethical decisions. Toro then interprets their answers to indicate social–psychologicaldeficiencies.

Choldin and Long’s (1998) narrative about (and not told by or with) a studentlabeled as LD and considered disturbed seems didactic, not exploratory. Namely, theauthors’ narrative seems confined within a monolog (i.e., the authors describe theirown assessments and perspectives on the labeled individual’s life) and does notpresent dialog with the student who captures their own opinions about their life.

Another striking example of a researcher speaking on behalf of a student isTrimble’s (2001) study. This clinician describes Mary, who is labeled as LD in thefollowing way:

Mary never spoke more than 1.5 min in our 50-min sessions … Therefore, I learned tosupply much of the language for our sessions. I would tell her about my conversationswith her teachers, her guidance counselor, and her mother, speculating aloud about themeanings of events in her life. (Trimble 2001, 5)

Trimble seems to give little consideration to the possibility that his words aboutMary may miss the mark concerning the importance of her own words for understand-ing her life. To him, her quantified reticence (e.g., the ‘1.5 minutes in our 50-minute’remark) becomes a clinical fact. For Trimble, his ‘conversations’ with her become areflection of the search for his own voice, which he reports as the following: ‘I workedto distinguish the voice I used in “multiple choice” to explore her [Mary’s] experiencefrom the voice I used to express my own experience’ (Trimble 2001, 5). We, as read-ers, can only wonder what Mary thinks about Trimble’s interpretations. Foucault(1965) also notices in the history of psychoanalysis a distance between a clinician (theobserver) and the observed. He states that clinical talk ended up being a redoubledeffort to silence the patient by allowing him or her to speak through a monolog (i.e.,more or less without the free response of another person in a symmetrical, dialogicrelationship).

In Power and Knowledge, Foucault explains the legacy in the west of subjugatedknowledge, which he defines as a, ‘whole set of knowledges that have been disqualifiedas inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naive knowledges, located low

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Tabl

e 1.

Two

disc

ours

es i

n L

D.

Aca

dem

ic r

esea

rch

‘Sci

enti

fica

tion

’ of

em

otio

n in

the

aca

dem

ic l

iter

atur

e of

LD

em

otio

n as

liv

ed e

xper

ienc

eA

utob

iogr

aphi

es

Are

as i

n th

e li

tera

ture

of

LD

and

em

otio

nIn

stru

men

ts u

sed

to d

efin

e em

otio

nA

utob

iogr

aphi

es o

f ad

ults

labe

led

lear

ning

dis

able

d in

a

book

ent

itle

d L

earn

ing

Dis

abil

itie

s an

d L

ife

Stor

ies

(Rod

is, G

arro

d, a

nd B

osca

rdin

200

1)A

rea

1: R

eadi

ng d

isab

ilit

y an

d em

otio

n(P

isec

co, B

aker

, and

Sil

va 2

001)

a

(Mos

t, A

l-Y

agon

, and

Tur

-Kas

pa 2

000)

(Van

, Vic

tor,

and

Rei

tsm

a 19

99)

(Seg

al 1

990)

Rat

ing

scal

eR

atin

g sc

ale

Rat

ing

scal

e, c

lini

cal

test

Rat

ing

scal

e, b

ehav

ior

chec

klis

t

(Que

en 2

001)

(Pel

key

2001

)(J

acks

on 2

001)

(San

ders

200

1)(A

aron

200

1)A

rea

2: L

D i

nter

vent

ion

and

emot

ion

(Tri

mbl

e 20

01)

(Wen

z-G

ross

and

Sip

erst

ein

1997

)(G

riga

l, T

est,

and

Bea

ttie

199

7)

(Lam

min

mak

i et

al.

1997

)a

(Mor

ris

and

Lev

inso

n 19

95)

(Lom

bana

199

2)

Beh

avio

r ch

eckl

ist

Rat

ing

scal

eB

ehav

ior

chec

klis

t, su

rvey

qu

esti

onna

ire

Beh

avio

r ch

eckl

ist

Rat

ing

scal

e, s

kill

s ch

eckl

ist,

skil

ls t

est

Beh

avio

r ch

eckl

ist,

clin

ical

tes

tA

rea

3: N

on-v

erba

l di

sabi

lity

and

em

otio

n(D

imit

rovs

ky, S

pect

or, a

nd L

evy-

Shi

ff 1

998)

a

(Dav

is, P

arr,

and

Lan

199

7)S

kill

s te

stS

kill

s te

stA

rea

4: P

rofi

les

of L

D a

nd e

mot

ion

(Sto

ne a

nd M

ay 2

002)

(Sca

nlon

and

Mel

lard

200

2)(M

onta

gue

and

Rin

aldi

200

1)(A

nder

son,

Kut

ash,

and

Duc

hnow

ski

2001

)(S

emru

d-C

like

man

and

Sch

afer

200

0)(G

utm

ann

1999

)(G

orm

an 1

999)

Rat

ing

scal

e, q

uest

ionn

aire

, tes

tsC

oded

int

ervi

ewP

osit

ive/

nega

tive

ini

tiat

ion

coun

tsB

ehav

ior

offe

nse

coun

tR

atin

g sc

ale

Rat

ing

scal

eR

atin

g sc

ale

771

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6 W. Mazher

Tabl

e 1.

(Con

tinu

ed).

Aca

dem

ic r

esea

rch

‘Sci

enti

fica

tion

’ of

em

otio

n in

the

aca

dem

ic l

iter

atur

e of

LD

em

otio

n as

liv

ed e

xper

ienc

eA

utob

iogr

aphi

es

(Cho

ldin

and

Lon

g 19

98)

(Fou

rnet

, Wil

son,

and

Wal

land

er 1

998)

(Low

enth

al 1

998)

(Gre

sham

and

Mac

Mil

lan

1997

)(S

abor

nie

1994

)(F

orne

ss a

nd K

aval

e 19

91)a

(Tor

o et

al.

1990

)(R

ourk

e 19

88)

(Wel

ler

and

Str

awse

r 19

87)

(Ade

lman

197

8)

Nar

rati

ve d

escr

ipti

onC

hild

beh

avio

r ch

eckl

ist

Beh

avio

r ch

eckl

ist

Rat

ing

scal

e an

d te

stR

atin

g sc

ale

Soc

ial

skil

ls s

cale

Rat

ing

scal

e, i

nter

view

as

test

Rat

ing

scal

e an

d su

rvey

que

stio

nnai

reR

atin

g sc

ale

Rat

ing

scal

e, c

oded

int

ervi

ew

Are

a 5:

LD

and

dep

ress

ion

(How

ard

and

Try

on 2

002)

(Hea

th a

nd R

oss

2000

)(P

alla

ndin

o, P

oli,

and

Mas

i 20

00)

(Ben

der,

Ros

enkr

ans,

and

Cra

ne 1

999)

(Nav

arre

te 1

999)

a

(Sta

nley

, Dai

, and

Nol

an 1

997)

Rat

ing

scal

eD

epre

ssio

n in

vent

ory

ques

tion

nair

eD

epre

ssio

n in

vent

ory

ques

tion

nair

eR

atin

g sc

ale

Rat

ing

scal

eD

epre

ssio

n in

vent

ory

ques

tion

nair

e

Are

a 6:

LD

and

psy

chia

tric

co-

mor

bidi

ty(B

ussi

ng, Z

ima,

and

Bel

in 1

998)

(Wie

ner

1998

)a

(For

ness

, Ram

ey, a

nd R

amey

199

8)(F

orne

ss, K

aval

e, a

nd B

aum

an 1

998)

(Han

dwer

k an

d M

arsh

all

1998

)(M

acM

illa

n 19

98)

(Jav

orsk

y 19

96)

Rat

ing

scal

eR

atin

g sc

ale

Rat

ing

scal

eR

atin

g sc

ale,

cli

nica

l te

stR

atin

g sc

ale,

ski

lls

chec

klis

t, sk

ills

tes

tR

atin

g sc

ale,

ski

lls

chec

klis

t, sk

ills

tes

tB

ehav

ior

chec

klis

t, cl

inic

al t

est

Are

a 7:

LD

and

sel

f-co

ncep

t(E

lbau

m a

nd V

augh

n 20

03)a

(Cos

den,

Ell

iott

, and

Kel

emen

199

9)(K

noff

198

3)

Rat

ing

scal

e, i

nven

tory

que

stio

nnai

reR

atin

g sc

ale

Rat

ing

scal

e, c

lini

cal

test

a The

exc

erpt

on

whi

ch I

con

duct

ed t

he C

DA

com

es f

rom

thi

s ar

ticl

e.

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down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity’ (1977b,82). According to Foucault, then, western historians have shown a positive bias towardknowledge that comes from science to the detriment of hearing the voices of the‘common’ folk. Historians subjugate (make silent) such voices and knowledge becausethese do not meet the standard associated with creditable information that may emergeonly from science (see Foucault 1972, 1977b).

Historically, the voices of students labeled as LD have become increasingly subju-gated (see Reid and Valle 2004). Scientism has gained ascendancy (Heshusius 1994).Research participants are seldom allowed to speak freely. In this regard, Moore,Beazely, and Maelzer (1998) point out negative consequences of researchers enactingsilence with their special education subjects. For example, this silencing of labeledstudents may result in imposing simplistic solutions to the difficult problems peoplewith disabilities face in their daily lives.

Disability studies, resistance, and critique

Varenne and McDermott (1998) review a history of qualitative research that hasoperated from interpretive and critical traditions to account for and understand disad-vantage and oppression through education, poverty (class), gender, disability, andrace/ethnicity in pre-modern and modern settings. These authors mention thesustained efforts of many anthropologists to change people’s thinking about differ-ence, going from a ‘culture as deprivation’ outlook to a ‘culture as different’ one. Forexample, it took several generations of research from the early twentieth centuryonwards to delegitimize a notion that groups who differ from ideals associated withaffluent-European-able-maleness are, indeed, anything but phylogenetically inferior.

Carrier (1986) locates a need for critique in learning disability theory throughacknowledging its essentialist, Eurocentric assumptions. He suggests, for example,that the notion of deficits in an ‘abstract attitude’, which the early researchers in theWayne County Training School associated with its disabled cohorts, went thedistance of theorizing from raw empirical foundations to a belief in the phylogeneticsuperiority of western (European) man who has mastered abstract thinking enoughto command an ‘advanced’ civilization. More recently, Danforth (2009) has pointedout the ways in which the Wayne County researchers struggled with identifyingtheir endogenous students with retardation as having ‘real’, etiologically underlyingtraits when apparently no such differences existed. Similarly and strikingly, hereveals that Kephart and the movement theorists in LD research scripted a social,agrarian paradigm rooted in a romance for the American frontiersman to explainpoor motor coordination and learning deficits in developing children. As judged bythe writings of Carrier (1986) and Danforth (2009), therefore, the work of critiquemust go on in the field of LD as we come to know more about the social history ofLD.

From before the 1970s and onwards, anthropologists working with educationalconcerns began to suggest that cultures may not be inferior, just different. Reid andButton (1995) have used the culture-as-different paradigm to show that a group ofAfrican American, elementary students labeled as LD in fact uses complex, sophisti-cated language rooted in Ebonics. Within a distinctly burgeoning field of scholarshipknown as disability studies (DS), researchers have joined forces with critical theory ineducation and anthropology to add their own insights into how society constructsmaterial and social handicaps for people with impairments. Such scholars gave rise to

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8 W. Mazher

the ‘social model’ of disability theory, which sought to understand the ways in whichdifferences are made into disability, an oppressive marker of social reality (Thomas2004). More recently, DS researchers have moved beyond such important work ofdeveloping a legal–political–theoretic base of knowledge and the accompanying levy-ing of critical theory to change socially manufactured oppression of difference (Peters,Gabel, and Symeonidou 2009). Some DS scholars have diversified their approach andmoved into the realm of post-structural analyses, which often track power and repre-sentation to critique ways that society discursively promotes oppression (Connor2008).

Scholars associated with DS have allied themselves over the years not just with thehuman experience of visible impairments, but also with the lives of people with invis-ible differences, such as persons labeled with mental retardation or LD (Danforth2009; Mazher and Reid 2006; Reid and Valle 2004). The relevant, emerging writingsin the field of DS are too vast to review here. Others and I have written about suchdevelopments in the DS literature generally and especially about developing aresearch base in the LD field, which may utilize various DS perspectives (Mazher andKang 2010; Mazher and Reid 2006; Tremain 2008).

Recently, Peters, Gabel, and Symeonidou (2009) have written about the possibilityof co-opting resistance as a unifying construct to promote the interests of disabledpeople in a more robust way than materialist approaches have afforded in the past.They note the challenging aspects of reckoning with disability as ‘strategic sets ofpositionings’ that support the conceptualization of differences as an unstable category,which can permit scholars and disabled persons to frame disabilities in more effica-cious, creative positions of struggle. Danforth (2009), in this vein, has explored thediscursive histories that inform antecedents of the current learning disability theory.He has shown, for example, how the vast repertoire of clinical science which precededthe push for an empirically based, functionalist science in the early 1970s resisted thevery nameless, impersonal quality of the epistemology that I too question in this arti-cle. However, whereas Danforth (2009) focuses on capturing the discursive sweep ofa broad swath of history in the making, I concentrate my analyses on surfacingdiscourse on a more minute scale.

Moreover, other DS scholars have also suggested a need for developing newdirections to fight disability oppression (Artiles 2003; Connor 2008; Connor andFerri 2007; Ferri 2004; Ferri et al. 2005; Franklin 1987; Gabel and Peters 2004;Linton 1998; Peters 2000; Peters, Gabel, and Symeonidou 2009; Smith 1999; Ware2003, 2006). For example, Gabel and Peters (2004) state the danger of silencingscholars and persons with disabilities who choose not to tow the party line withinDS politics and scholarship. These authors suggest inscribing a resistance theorythat can support points of divergence within discourse and not merely a hankeringfor uniformity in the guise of political solidarity. Furthermore, Artiles (2003), Ferri(2004), and more recently, Connor and Ferri (2007) have lamented the lack ofresistance to an age-old LD discourse, which perhaps pays homage (by a defaultinto silence) to the overrepresentation of colored students segregated for thepurposes of special education in the USA. Connor and Ferri see a similar pattern ofdiscursive framing in the media that negatively portray inclusion in school as an‘idealistic, cost-cutting device that will tip scales and destroy general education’(2007, 74). No less importantly, Ware (2006) suggests the stringent difficulties ofquestioning reductionist science that mitigates against the broadening of concep-tions of disability. She states, for example, that DS perspectives can help teachers

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to deal with and, when possible, resist their own assumptions about disability andwhat they mean for the authority of ‘including’ disabled people in schools andsociety writ large.

In this article, I explore the possibility of building on resistance as a means ofcritiquing the field of LD more than what has been possible thus far. I attempt to addto the DS literature, which is in the midst of a new kind of contemporary historiography– a kind of counter-discourse to the dominant positivism of the LD field (see Mazherand Reid 2006), which may insert new possibilities into discourse, leading perhaps toa different strain of freedom for disabled persons.

The research method

Even though Fairclough (1989) and Foucault (1977b) highlight different ideas regard-ing the examination of discourses, both of them recommend a bottom-up direction ofanalysis. Fairclough’s system of CDA is useful because it provides an outline foranalyzing specific linguistic aspects of discourses, whereas Foucault’s ideas suggestan overarching theoretical framework. In Fairclough’s method of analysis, the firstlevel, description, allows me to identify and label formal features of a text ‘in termsof the categories of a descriptive framework’ (1989, 22). Further, the second level up,interpretation, allows me to make explicit the interaction between the language andthe situational contexts through which the discourse operates. And the third, the high-est level, explanation, allows me to explain relationships of the discourse to moredurable social structures associated with institutional and societal power. Hence, Fair-clough (1989), like Foucault (1977b), presents (albeit more technically than Foucualt)a system of analysis that extends from a microanalysis of discourses to their macro-level functions.

A core Foucaultian concept that guided my literature search for this article is‘positivity’, which ‘like that of Natural history, political economy, or clinical medi-cine – characterizes its unity throughout time, and well beyond individual oeuvres,books, and texts’ (Foucault 1972, 126). I found scientific texts that address someaspect of the emotional life of students labeled as LD. My criterion for selection ofthe texts fell broadly around whether the authors of the scientific and the autobio-graphical texts talked ‘about the same thing’, or ‘placed themselves at the samelevel’, or whether they ‘deployed the same conceptual field’ (Foucault 1972, 126).Hence, selecting texts in terms of positivity is different from conducting a positivistreview of literature that encompasses texts in very specific terms, according to oeuvreor empirical field, such as, ‘LD and depression’, ‘LD and self-concept’, and so forth.My aim was to consider aspects of the discursive formation, which is, broadly speak-ing, LD and emotions. I did not search for what findings any particular oeuvre orempirical sub-field reported.

I read reviews concerning the students’ socio-emotional lives found in theHandbook of Learning Disabilities (Swanson, Harris, and Graham 2003), Learningabout Learning Disabilities (Wong 2004), and The Social Dimensions of LearningDisabilities: Essays in Honor of Tanis Bryan (Wong and Donahue 2002) to gener-ate parameters of the positivity of the academic research related to emotions andLD. These sources provided me with a substantive understanding of the range oftopics often covered under the labeled students’ socio-emotional lives.

Then I searched the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) andPsycInfo databases for journal articles on emotions associated with LD in school-age

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10 W. Mazher

students (K-grade 12) and covered a period mostly between 1997 and 2003, whichyielded 47 articles, to collect samples of the scientific discourse. I divided the articlesinto seven categories according to their focus. The peer-reviewed articles fell undercategories that included: reading disability and emotions; interventions and emotions;non-verbal disability emotions; profiles of LD and emotions; LD and depression; LDand psychiatric co-morbidity; and LD and self-concept. From each sub-area I pickedone article randomly. Then I chose a passage randomly from each article that eitherdescribed the procedure followed in the study or explicated its results andimplications.

Hence, my selection of the articles and the specific passages within them used forthe CDA both were random. Fairclough’s (1989) CDA permits such a microscopicscale of linguistic analyses that any passage within the procedures and discussionsections would suffice for my analytical aims. However, this is a provisional commentas it represents uncharted waters. A search for nuances in differences within thediscourse, which can vary systematically from section to section in the science arti-cles, can definitely benefit from further and more focused investigations from socialscientists, linguists, and DS scholars.

My selection of the autobiographies was informed by the way the editors gener-ated and compiled these narratives. The editors of the book Learning Disabilities andLife Stories allowed mostly young adults labeled as LD to tell their stories and to usetheir discretions to frame their stories. The thrust of Rodis, Garrod, and Boscardin’seditorship in the book was to develop life narratives that could, ‘focus on the writersin their human totality and complexity, not on LD per se as a kind of malady or clusterof problems’ (2001, xiv). Furthermore, the editors:

wished to be attentive to negative processes and life problems, as well as to how typicalacademic challenges were or were not met, but were most interested in the ways that thewriters’ lives had been constructed, both from within (i.e., how the writers thought andfelt about themselves) and from without (i.e., how they have been seen, treated, andvalued or devalued by other individuals and institutions). (2001, xiv)

As the editors stated, they ‘wished, in other words, for the writers to consider their LDas facets of (1) their total selves and (2) their total social, cultural, and political exist-ences’ (2001, xiv). Because the editors gave deep attention to the possibility thatnarratives that persons labeled as disabled tell may end up unduly representing an eticor a normative perspective on differences, I decided to use the narratives from thisbook to analyze. I wanted to see how excerpts from the same narratives were discur-sively structured and whether they, in fact, biased the very perspectives the editorsfeared, which might unduly reflect normative, medical, scientific points of view whentalking about one’s experiences as a disabled person.

Hence, I selected five autobiographies from the collection by Rodis, Garrod, andBoscardin (2001) called Learning Disabilities and Life Stories and chose the selectionsto analyze in the same way as I did the science articles, randomly. That is to say, Ichose the first five narratives in the book by adults labeled as learning disabled. In thesenarratives, I randomly selected excerpts for the CDA that described emotions the personhad experienced at an earlier time in their lives. I did not look for particular words asclues to judge which passage I should isolate for the CDA. But rather, I looked to seewhether a passage talked about emotional experiences in the narrator’s life and isolatedit for further analysis on that basis. There was no linguistic pre-meditation on my partto choose a particular passage and not another. However, in future studies linguistic

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criteria and categories for the discourse analysis will have to be further developed anddelineated.

I isolated themes to answer the first research question. I uncovered the themes byfinding common patterns that I first surfaced through the CDA among the academicand the autobiographical samples. I wrote out the CDA of the 12 samples and then iden-tified patterns of similarities among them. I summarized the similarities into executivestatements, which were the themes. Foucault’s writings helped me to flesh out the mean-ings of these themes. That is to say, Foucaultian theory allowed me to summarize thepatterns uncovered through the CDA in terms of circulating power broadly in a post-enlightenment society (see Section ‘Three themes that position labeled students’). Inother words, Fairclough allowed me to narrow my focus to a consideration of veryminute aspects of the discourses, and Foucault, in turn, helped me to broaden thosefindings and restate them in a way which can fill the canvas of post-enlightenment,western, scientific theatres generally. Hence, my theme-finding act was a recapitulationof Fairclough’s findings into broader, more history-conscious, Foucaultian terms.

In answer to the second research question, I focused on uncovering the thirdtheme, which delineated a major difference between the science and the autobiograph-ical discourses. First, I closely examined the personal narratives for passages thatconveyed some emotion in the narrator’s life. On this first attempt at coding, I identi-fied two broad categories of emotion-related passages detailing: (1) their academiclives, and (2) their social–personal lives. Then I collated the concerned passages intotwo groups, academic and social–personal. After this step, I identified only passagesthat illustrated common concerns across the autobiographies. In this way I focused onthe similarities among the autobiographies in describing emotions. After identifyingthe similarities, I wrote out an executive statement capturing the major differencebetween the academic and the autobiographical discourses.

Pointing out any difference between the two discourses, academic and autobio-graphical, presented difficult methodological challenges. There is an important reasonfor this. As the CDA revealed, there are dominant strains of similarities between theways the two discourses operate. Hence, to contravene the similarities and find resid-ual differences was not an easy task. There was a sense that the narrativity of the genreof autobiographies constituted an incontrovertible, indivisible link to a distinctivequality of difference, a quality that is hard to define but instantly knowable in its holis-tic power and effect. Hence, from such signs I performed my triage of defining andthen formulating that difference by collating the similarities among the autobiogra-phies themselves. There is an underlying a-priori assumption in my analysis (no doubtinformed by Foucault’s analysis of the human sciences) that the science discourse isat one level already different, materially and aesthetically, from the narrativity of theautobiographies. My analysis raises philosophical problems that need further penetra-tion from scholars.

I would further submit that my Foucaultian summarization of the insights surfacedthrough Fairclough’s CDA may differ in its outcome at the hands of another analyst,which may be an insertion of a different, but a significant re-reading of, discourse. Ofcourse, such attempts will be important in the future for reaching consensus amongresearchers and makers of discourse. I would also point out that the present investiga-tion is highly circumscribed and limited in the sense that an exploratory study can be.Yet, as becomes evident through the CDA itself, I argue that such investigations arenecessary, even essential, to understanding the ways in which discourse frames us andwho we are.

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12 W. Mazher

A critical discourse analysis of the academic research

In my analysis of the academic research selections, I study how this discourse func-tions based on a close reading of the samples. We cannot separate discourses fromtruth because we arrive at our notions of reality through discourses (Stiker 1999). Thescience that produces the research texts is not transcendentally true, as truth alwaysdepends on personal judgments of experts (Polanyi and Prosch 1975). Further, asevident from the CDA, discourses correspond to their own realities and internal mean-ings (Foucault 1972), which position the students labeled as LD in particular ways.

Sample 1 from an article in the reading disability and emotion literature

The authors of the first selection position students labeled as LD negatively (see Table2). First, they use certain descriptive words synonymously – ‘problems’, ‘disinhibi-tion’, and ‘at risk’ – that carry a negative tone. These words automatically portray thestudents as problematic, lacking something (i.e., by virtue of the ‘dis-’ in ‘disinhibi-tion’), and being risky (both to themselves and to those around them). The assumptionof negativity predates the study. Second, the authors present a developmental schemeof classification (e.g., 3 or 4), which suggests a timeline that shows the labeledstudents, as a group, behaving badly in negative patterns compared to non-labeledstudents who grow up more appropriately and behave not so badly.

A developmental timeline suggests that labeled students are naturally inclined toexpose their internal deficiencies, that is, to misbehave. The researchers focus on whatis wrong inside the student rather than on the social environments that may help topromote such problem behaviors. Through the negativity of the language and a clas-sification scheme that elaborates on negative growth patterns, the authors portraystudents labeled as LD in an unfavorable light.

Sample 2 from an article in the intervention and emotion literature

In the second selection, the authors portray students labeled as LD as negative, prob-lematic, and superficial. The word ‘problems’ is the most frequent. And words suchas ‘reduced’, ‘restrain’, and ‘maladapted’ suggest the students have in them somethingthat needs to be mastered and made more acceptable. These are judgments defined bythose who are working to identify and label the students’ distance from a positiveconception of what is acceptable.

I also find that the authors use a behavioral classification system that portrays thelabeled students as passive. Namely, they describe a closed system of action in thefollowing way: ‘factors [of a successful treatment]’ reduce ‘maladapted’ (negative)behaviors; conversely, ‘emotional problems’ restrain the success of treatments. Stateddifferently, students’ negative emotions lead to negative treatment outcomes. Butpositive treatments lead to positive emotions. Students, then, seem oppositional andmechanical, and their acceptable behaviors seem entirely at the mercy of theiremotions being positive. The authors describe the labeled students’ behaviors linearly:A leads to B, and C leads to D. These are homologous formulations. They serve thesame function of countenancing the linearity of a causal process. Moreover, theyexplain away the students by treating their only emotions as interesting, as measur-able, detectable signs (counts of misbehaviors). Through such an approach, thestudents labeled as LD become the simple and predictable problem. In short, such

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Table 2. The samples analyzed from the academic and the autobiographical discourses.

Sample 1(1) Nonetheless, the results are generally

supportive of Barkley’s (1997) assertion that problems of disinhibition emerge early in life (e.g., 3 or 4). (2) However, we would add the caveat that this may be especially true of those children who are at risk for the most pervasive forms of later behavioral problems (Pisecco, Baker, and Silva 2001).

Sample 7(1) Whereas groups could be defined by their

mean scores as low, average, and high, the same logic that led us to conduct the secondary analyses holds for these groups; that is, the group means tend to desensitize us to the individual variation present within the group. (2) However, the secondary analyses took us at least one step in the direction of acknowledging and investigating the differences in response to treatment based on treatment-relevant baseline data. (3) If the response of different groups to treatment is replicated at the individual level, such that individuals with low self-concept gain significantly more in response to treatment than do students with average-to-high self-concept, the implication is that using the effect sizes from groups of students with a range of self-concept levels to assess the value of self-concept intervention yields a spuriously low estimate of treatment outcomes for students with truly low self-concept (Elbaum and Vaughn 2003, 106).

Sample 2(1) These factors may have reduced

maladapted behavior at home. (2) Many children with learning difficulties have emotional and/or motivational problems, which can restrain the outcome of the treatment, and these problems should, therefore, be systematically addressed in any treatment of children with LD (Lamminmaki et al. 1997, 342).

Sample 8(1) I had never been in a knockdown, drag-

out brawl, but I had been forced to throw a few lame punches to warn off the vultures. (2) By never capitulating, I had, despite being prone after every attempt to defend myself, beaten the bullies. (3) It earned me the distinction of being regarded – in addition to a liar and a turnip-head – as crazy. (4) The label not only warded off bullies, but also widened the chasm between me and my peers (Queen 2001, 8).

Sample 3(1) In conclusion, the results further

underline the importance of differentiating subgroups among individuals with LD and clearly suggest that children with non-verbal dysfunction tend to have particular difficulty with an important aspect of social perception. (2) This, among other things, may render them at greater risk for the development of social and personal problems than other children with LD (Dimitrovsky, Spector, and Levy-Shiff 1998, 290).

Sample 9(1) I erased myself. (2) I hid who I was out of

shame. (3) I also had a growing fear of the unknown. (4) What was really wrong with me? (5) There had to be a reason and an explanation for why I was the way I was. (6) Would it get worse as I got older? (7) Was this it? (8) Was I retarded? (9) I was not sure that I wanted the answers to these questions. (10) Eventually, I turned my back on academics (Pelkey 2001, 25).

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14 W. Mazher

students come across as negative, problematic, and mechanically reactive – withoutagency or depth.

Sample 3 from an article in the non-verbal disability and emotion literature

Aligning with the messages of the previous sample, in the third selection the authorssuggest that students labeled as LD are negative and that they should be isolated more

Table 2. (Continued).

Sample 4(1) Although there may be disagreement on

the nature of social skills deficits in this population, there is considerably less disagreement that social skills deficits do in fact occur in children or adolescents with LD. (2) Research in this area is in the general context of studies on behavioral and social problems of LD youngsters using direct observation (Forness and Kavale 1991, 45).

Sample 10(1) I guess I carried myself well. (2) I don’t

know how I always managed to get an ‘A’, but somehow I came out all right. (3) This success, however, made me feel so inferior – like I was displaying an outside shell that wasn’t me. (4) I looked confident and able, when inside I felt meek and disabled (Jackson 2001, 42).

Sample 5(1) The examiner administered the RADS to

students with LD, individually, in a quiet office within the school setting. (2) The students without LD were administered the test, by the examiner, in their English class, as a group (Navarrete 1999, 142).

Sample 11(1) As you may sense by now, the use of

language in debate and other arenas is an area from which I derive confidence. (2) My difficulty learning languages struck at the very heart of that confidence, causing me to struggle with my sense of self-esteem. (3) At this point, I have attained a sense of balance in knowing that I can learn languages using other methods beyond the Rassias method (Sanders 2001, 60).

Sample 6(1) The evidence suggests that findings of

differences between children with and without LD with regard to externalizing behavior and self-control, such as aggression and disruptiveness, may be largely due to a significant proportion of children with both LD and ADHD in the samples of children with LD. (2) In this case, the psychiatric co-morbidity hypothesis may have some validity. (3) However, problems with social perception and social perspective-taking, assertiveness, and inefficient and passive social communication patterns are unlikely to be related to co-morbidity with ADHD. (4) Available evidence neither supports nor refutes the psychiatric co-morbidity hypothesis with regard to depressive and dysthymic disorders (Wiener 1998, 199).

Sample 12(1) All the tricks of the LD trade that are

supposed to enable us to learn were provided: mind-mapping, better note-taking, and comprehension tricks. (2) But there was lack on the center’s behalf to encourage the sense that we were there not to compensate for a disability, but to gain an insight into our learning style and our relationships to them. (3) A large part of me is angry that this was not provided (Aaron 2001, 35).

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to be studied further. The labeled students have problems inside them and with othersaround them as in ‘personal and social problems’. Furthermore, the authors’ use of theword ‘problems’ leads to another frequent word – ‘importance’. Based on the prob-lems, it is important to differentiate the labeled students into subgroups for havingdifficulty with an ‘important aspect of social perception’ (a score on a rating scale ofbehavioral adaptation), which leads to ‘differentiating’ the sub-group of those labeledas non-verbally disabled from those labeled as verbally disabled (both sub-groupslabeled as LD). The differentiation allows the authors, as scientists, to separate thedifficult group of students with non-verbal dysfunctions into more uniform categoriesto study further.

I draw upon Foucault’s (1994) ideas to interpret the authors’ goal that the labeledstudents should be categorized into more and more refined groups. In The Birth of theClinic, Foucault writes that as the clinic came into being, the gaze of the physicianbecame boundless: for example, ‘the individual in question was not so much a sickperson as the endlessly reproducible pathological fact to be found in all patientssuffering in a similar way’ (1994, 97). Similarly, I think, the student labeled as LDbecomes an element of disciplinary power, in part, because we conduct positivistresearch aimed at specifying and examining only the negative, which produces moreand more knowledge about the student’s perceived human pathology, and increasinglyignores her individuality, talents, reasons for behaving in particular ways, and so forth.

I am also struck by Foucault’s (1994) observation above that with more knowledgethe labeled individual (who is talked about) risks becoming irrelevant just as thephysician’s need to multiply the number and scope of studies supplants other consid-erations. That is to say, finding more and more information on what is deficient insidea person takes on a life of its own, and the person who has the pathological conditionbecomes little more than a pathological subject. The condition and the person merge(Gallagher 2001). Power circulates through the culture of multiplied researchconducted on the student with LD.

Sample 4 from an article in the profiles of learning disability and emotion literature

The authors of the fourth selection also portray students labeled as LD as problematic,even when the researchers seem to operate from an incomplete understanding of whatexactly the problem is. The word ‘deficits’ is synonymous with ‘behavioral’ and‘social’ problems. Such students are metaphorically incomplete, as containers thatmiss a sufficient amount of a good thing. Furthermore, whatever vaguely suchstudents lack inside makes them problems for others behaviorally and socially – forothers, who perhaps exercise more of the power to judge.

However, the scientists remain unsure about what precisely a labeled studentlacks. For example, the selection states that despite disagreement about the ‘nature ofsocial skills deficits’ (emphasis added), scientists know that deficits exist. They knowabout deficits by observing the visible symptoms – the students’ misbehaviors. Andthey track the misbehaviors as lower scores on rating scales: ‘direct observation’corroborates that such students are, indeed, a problem. Yet, researchers cannot agreeon what the social skills deficits are – in short, their ‘nature’ (e.g., the source of misbe-haviors or what they represent exactly).

Based on the evidence of higher incidences of misbehaviors coming from thelabeled students, as compared to more normal non-labeled students, the authors statethe following: ‘social skills deficits do in fact occur.’ The modal verb ‘do’ emphasizes

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16 W. Mazher

the surety of the information, which the scientists glean from direct observations.However, the directness of the observations contradicts the previous statementconcerning the equivocation about disagreements on the ‘nature’ of the problems. Theresearchers’ reification of the missing parts or deficits (i.e., a metaphor of humans ashalf-empty containers) and their investigations into negative information (despite theambiguous status or ‘nature’ of what it is they investigate exactly) portray suchstudents as lamentable, and at worst as sick or pathological.

Sample 5 from an article in the learning disability and depression literature

Consistent with the idea of tracking labeled students, the author of the fifth selectionfurther demonstrates how judging emotions of labeled students through tests (i.e., byderiving scores from rating scales) can lead to negative treatment of the students. Twosets of words indicate an antonymous relationship between LD and non-LD: theresearchers associate LD with ‘individually’ and ‘quiet office’ and non-LD with‘group’ and ‘English class’. Expressively, then, the words ‘individually’ and ‘quietoffice’ suggest pensiveness compared to the openness of a regular setting of anEnglish classroom. These words and the actual separation suggest that labeledstudents are naturally different, perhaps inferior (lacking what others have that enablesthem to benefit from social integration). Furthermore, the testers’ decision to find outabout depression by having the student fill in Likert scales may result in depressionthrough the isolation itself, because of a variety of other reasons (e.g., poor readingability, test anxiety, and so forth) (for vivid demonstrations of testing as a threateningritual see Gould 1996 and Hanson 1993). Paradoxically, the testing itself may becomea disciplinary vehicle for negatively treating some test-takers (see Hanson 1993).

Sample 6 from an article in the learning disability and psychiatric co-morbidity literature

The sixth selection reinforces my findings so far: that researchers often considerstudents labeled as LD as problematic and when the students are so framed, investi-gators treat them in ways that confirm that perception, and enable them to discovermore facts. In the sixth selection, the author makes two kinds of statements aboutdifferences, both of them negative. The students are problems because they have‘externalizing behaviors’ (i.e., they act out), ‘aggression’, and ‘disruptiveness’.

Such negative qualities in opposition to the implied positive qualities that studentsnot labeled enjoy (e.g., being controlled, compliant, and considerate) make the labeledstudent a problem for everyone. Indeed, the students labeled as LD have problemswith the following: social perception, assertiveness, perspective-taking, socialcommunication, and depression.

Besides being associated with such a litany of differences considered problems,the author suggests that the problems imply that researchers should theorize about thecauses of such differences. Yet, a hunger for more negative knowledge occurs in themidst of difficulties with knowing as a process.

The author suggests that when scientists do try to find out the causes of the differ-ences, they face problems achieving certainty in knowledge: for example, somenegative attributes ‘may be largely due’ to something; a particular hypothesis ‘mayhave some validity’; some negative attributes ‘are unlikely to be related to’ some othernegative conditions; and evidence ‘neither supports nor refutes’ a hypothesis. Such

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repeated efforts at finding the cause/s of LD are suggestive of the need to identify theproblem so they can treat it.

Furthermore, the author shows persistence in seeking out the negative, whichseems to be linked to typical situations played out among examiners and the exam-ined. For example, Foucault points out that modern-day examiners objectify theirsubjects and that examiners make heavy investments in time and effort to catalog indi-viduals and their attributes:

It is the examination which, by combining hierarchical surveillance and normalizingjudgment, assures the great disciplinary functions of distribution and classification,maximum extraction of forces and time, continuous genetic accumulation, optimumcombination of aptitudes and, thereby, the fabrication of cellular, organic, genetic andcombinatory individuality. (1975, 192)

The researcher’s naming of problems related to the label of LD and their discovery ofcauses may make the discourse threatening to the labeled students whom they exam-ine to place, as it were, in their own (the examiners’) hyperspace. Foucault (1975,1994) helps us understand the complexities behind the drive to hunt down negativefacts. Through the use of the statistical norm (e.g., by comparing labeled studentsagainst discursive standards set up by non-labeled students on multiple criteria), theauthors marginalize the labeled students who are, to use Foucault’s expression, ‘fabri-cated’ (as bits of information) into various ‘cellular, organic, genetic and combina-tory’ (Foucault 1977a, 192) individualities. Foucault (1975) might say that throughsuch an elaborateness in the seeking of knowledge that generates more and more unfa-vorable terms that go to understanding the label of LD, the discourse becomes thehuman (a student with LD), a type of person whose situation in the human communityis low status.

Sample 7 from an article in the learning disability and self-concept literature

In this final scientific selection, I find further evidence of a discourse obscuringlabeled persons inside a scientific veil. The authors, for example, use clusters of wordsthat position the student labeled as LD as a scientific entity and not as a person.Specifically, the authors use clusters of four words: difference, groups, treatment, andindividual. There are ‘different groups’ and ‘the “differences”’. There are ‘groups’,‘these groups (low, average, high)’, ‘group means’, ‘the group’, and ‘differentgroups’. They also use the following descriptions: ‘response to treatment’, ‘responseof different groups to treatment relevant data’, ‘spuriously low estimate of treatment’,and ‘treatment groups’. In addition, they use the terms ‘individual variation’ and ‘indi-vidual level’. They describe a person as an ‘individual [with low self-concept]’. Theseterms associate the individuals with ‘levels’ and ‘[numerical] variations’.

Some labeled individuals have ‘low self-concept’, and yet, self-concept pertains tothe quantification of emotions as measured through rating scales. The authors mostlyuse words that obfuscate the individual human qualities of those being researched: thestudents are in groups (low, average, high); reflect group means; and sometimesbecome responsible for spuriously low estimates. Steeped in the dominant discourseof science in LD research, the authors do not consider the possibility that labeledstudents might be explored outside of science (see Elbaum and Vaughn 2003). Theresearchers’ discourse conventions, which act as boundaries, do not seem to permitsuch a consideration.

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18 W. Mazher

A summary of the academic selections

The seven academic selections portray students labeled as LD mostly negatively. Thestudents come across as problems (both to themselves and to society) and as passiveand malleable. Moreover, the researchers isolate labeled students for tests, attempt tounderstand them precisely within a narrow range of acceptable behaviors, and theorizeabout them to find out why they are as they are. As a result of this analysis, I beganto wonder how the ways the scientific selections position labeled students comparedwith how adults labeled as LD (who share narratives about their days as labeledstudents) position themselves.

A critical discourse analysis of the autobiographical discourse

Mitchell and Snyder (2001) offer historical evidence that bodies and languages strainto limit what the other is able to do. Simply put, bodies cannot be what language doesnot allow them to be and conversely, the reality of bodies does place constraints onwhat language can do to convey meaning. Thus, an issue to consider is whatconstraints language places on bodies labeled as LD, which provides insights into howdiscourses position the people. The CDA reveals that language in the autobiographicalsamples consistently favors the negatively accented discourse of science. I prefaceeach of the samples with a brief description of the person’s background and thecontext of describing her or his emotions in the passages that I analyze.

Sample 8 from Queen

Queen was a 34-year-old, white, working-class man, who was at the time of writinghis autobiography a senior at a major state university, where he studied history. In thesample passage, he describes his mixed feelings about getting into physical brawls inschool when he was young with those whom he considered to be victimizing or bully-ing in their treatment of him.

This author negatively positions himself as a labeled student in relation to the idealof his more normal non-labeled peers. As a labeled student, he is a victim of a‘vulture’, which designates the bully who threatens him. If a bully is a vulture then theauthor (the labeled one) is rotten meat, something foul or the food of vultures. In turn,the bully is associated with ‘knock-down’ and ‘drag-out’ brawls. Moreover, thedescriptive words associated with the labeled student implicitly generate antonymousmeanings that signify the bully. A bully, for example, is someone who throws a lot ofpunches (and not a ‘few’ punches); throws good punches (and not ‘lame’ punches);attacks persistently (and the one attacked – the labeled one – ‘never capitulates’); andstands (and the labeled one is ‘prone’). The bully takes on a higher rank compared tothe labeled student. The bully is the stronger and more potent, but at the top of thehierarchy stands the non-labeled peer who seems to be above the fray.

The author’s words imply a series of antonymous relationships between labeledand non-labeled peers. For example, in Sentence 4, he states that his behavior (despitethe labels ‘liar and a turnip-head’) ‘warded off bullies but also widened the chasmbetween me and my peers’, which suggests that the labeled student wants to close thegap between the non-labeled peers and him. A move that to most of us would appearas positive in contrast to the negative qualities he assigns himself (negative qualitiesthat seem to stand in the way between the labeled and the non-labeled) generates the

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following positive qualities associated with non-labeled students: the non-labeledstudents do not fight; they are honest (and not ‘liars’) and smart (and not ‘turnip-heads’); sane (and not ‘crazy’); and fresh and alive (and not the rotten victims of a‘vulture’). Hence, I find that non-labeled students stand at the top of the hierarchy andbelow them the labeled student and the bully, who fight each other. So the norm (theideal type) seems to be a host of qualities that non-labeled students embody, and notthe bully or the student labeled as LD. The labeled student thus accepts the low statusaccorded to him through science.

Sample 9 from Pelkey

Pelkey was a 35-year-old, working-class, white woman, who at the time of writing herautobiography was working toward a bachelor’s degree in hotel management at alarge northeastern state university. In the sample passage, she described her feelingsof alienation at being exposed in front of her boss at her job when she could not readaloud the writing on tubes of paint during inventory.

Similar to the previous self-description, this author arranges a binary between LDand non-LD and through the discourse favors the positive associations that come withthe latter term. The narrator assigns herself a series of denigrating expressive wordssuch as ‘erased myself’, ‘[I] hid’, ‘[I felt] shame’, ‘[had] fear’, ‘really wrong [me]’,and ‘was I retarded?’ These words contrast against a series of words implicitly asso-ciated with a non-LD ‘normal’ ideal: ‘I promote myself’, ‘I show myself’, ‘I have nofear’, ‘there is nothing wrong with me’, and ‘I am intelligent’. This author seems toleave little room for a labeled person to nurture a positive self-image.

In addition, I find that the author uses a metaphor that reinforces the negativity ofthe existence associated with the LD label. She writes, for example, ‘would it getworse as I got older?’ which refers to a disease metaphor as she asks, ‘Was this it?’The pronoun ‘it’ signifies a fixed, ineradicable state of negative existence. The diseaseinfests within her and seems lodged in. She writes, ‘I am not sure I wanted the answersto these questions.’ The definite article ‘the’ suggests the apocalyptic significance ofthe answers and also, their unitary structure: there is an answer – the answer. She isunsure that she wants to know about the disease called LD.

Sample 10 from Jackson

Jackson was a 20-year-old, white, upper-middle class junior in an Ivy Leaguecollege at the time she wrote her autobiography. In the sample passage, shedescribed her mixed feelings about her success in most of the courses she took inhigh school before her learning differences began to be more and more ‘exposed’during college.

In this selection, the author describes self-doubt that places her as a student labeledas LD beneath the level of non-labeled students. Her ‘I’ is that of an unsure self: ‘Iguess’, ‘I managed’, ‘I somehow’, ‘I looked’, and ‘[I am a] shell’. She implicitly setsup an antonymous cluster of favorable meanings associated with non-labeled students.The implicit ‘I’ belongs to the non-labeled student who is sure (and does not have to‘guess’); who eases through (and does not have to ‘manage’); who certainly (and not‘somehow’); who really is competent (and does not just ‘look’ it like she does); andwho is the real thing (and not just a ‘shell’). Her discourse suggests that the labeledstudent is a negative image of the non-labeled.

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20 W. Mazher

Sample 11 from Sanders

Sanders was a 21-year-old, middle class, African American senior in college at thetime he wrote his autobiography. A positive experience on the high school debateteam had a profound impact on the direction his life took as well as on his self-esteem.In the sample passage, he described his feeling of frustration in having to pass foreignlanguage courses in college.

This author also negatively positions himself by suggesting that he lacks some-thing (language use), which makes him less valuable than a non-labeled student. Hedescribes the following positive meanings: ‘use of language’, ‘confidence’, ‘self-esteem’, and ‘sense of balance’. But such meanings signify everything that the narra-tor has to ‘struggle’ for. The author implies that non-labeled students do not have to‘struggle’, be ‘struck’, and have ‘difficulty’, words that convey a metaphorical battle,which reflects a threat of losing to the non-labeled.

Sample 12 from Aaron

Aaron was a 22-year-old, middle class, white male from England who had nearlyfinished his bachelor’s degree in anthropology at the time of writing his autobiogra-phy. He had a history of being a discipline problem in school. Teachers had focusedmore on this than his learning disability when he was young. In the sample passage,Aaron described his feelings of anger and disappointment at the fact that the learningcenter of his youth tried to provide remedial education rather than helping him explorehow he could learn in the positive sense of the term.

Despite the appearance of this selection as one that resists the dominant scientificdiscourse of LD, I find this author reifies LD as that which constitutes a distinctgroup. He suggests that terms such as ‘mind-mapping’, ‘note-taking’, and ‘compre-hension tricks’ hyponymously invoke another term, ‘LD trade’, which he considers anegative concern. Metaphorically, the ‘LD trade’ evokes a dry economic process thatpits the traders (the people supporting the learning center) against those they tradeaway (the labeled). In addition, the term ‘LD trade’ is synonymous with negativewords, such as ‘tricks’ and ‘angry’, which humanize the labeled narrator through theresentment he feels toward the learning center. Further, the author suggests that non-labeled people establish the LD trade to ‘compensate’ for a disability and considerscompensations a ‘lack’ on the part of the learning center. Yet, I find that he still main-tains or supports a basic assumption behind the learning center’s existence: thelabeled students constitute a group and not just individual variation.

In Sentences 1 and 2, for example, such words as ‘us’, ‘we’, and ‘our’ refer to LDas a group phenomenon. He does not complain that the learning center has labeledstudents separated for instruction. Instead, he maintains that such a center should helpstudents as a group gain ‘insight’ into their ‘learning styles’ and their ‘relationships’to ‘them [their learning styles]’. Therefore, while he does seem to criticize someaspects of the learning center’s assumptions, he does not question its fundamentalbelief that those labeled as LD should be considered part of a distinct group.

A summary of the autobiographical selections

In the first four of the five samples, the labeled narrator places herself or himselfbeneath the rank of a non-labeled peer. Further, in the fifth sample, Aaron, the narrator,categorizes himself as part of a group of students who are or have LD. By becoming

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a member of a labeled community, he confirms or buys into the reification of LD asa pathological construct that afflicts groups of people rather than representing ordinaryhuman variation, which may range from individual to individual. Such arrangementsthat favor the ‘non-LD’ over the ‘LD’ raise further questions about why the labelednarrators use a binary structure as a basis for writing about their emotions.

As the CDA reflects, it seems that we (the abled and dis/abled) use the languageof ableness as a set of conventions to normatively assign meaning to experiences andperceptions. Bakhtin notes that we do not ‘speak in a given language, but … as it were,through language, a language that has somehow more or less materialized, becomeobjectivized’ (Bakhtin 1981, 299, emphasis in original). Foucault (1972) posits thatlanguage, rather than conveying a person’s cogito (thoughts and intentions), acts as ifit inscribes through its conceptual and strategic formations certain limits of meaning,which are enunciative possibilities. Language is governed by internal rules and tech-niques that enable it to proliferate in ways that constitute discourse. In this sense, thepower of the ableness language, through which the non-labeled stand above thelabeled in a dichotomous relationship, becomes evident as the labeled adults positionthemselves in deference to science.

Three themes that position labeled students

The suggestion that discourse orders our perceptions and stages possibilities is not newin DS scholarship (Mitchell and Snyder 2001). But the precise ways in whichdiscourses accomplish conceptualizing differences have for the most part yet to betraced on the scale that I attempt in this article. Stiker (1999) critiques Foucault for notchronicling the modern history of visible disabilities, as opposed to the invisible oneof madness. This observation is not without its own contradictions, however, for asFoucault (1965) reveals, madness became quite spectral and social in its perceptionover the centuries. Yet, Stiker’s point remains, that a multitude of discursive historieshas yet to be written from varying levels of analytical focus. In turn, de Certeau (1988)suggests that Foucault fails to develop discursive histories of the important Christianmovements that shaped evolving perceptions in Europe. Hence, connected with thesecritiques of the limitations of Foucault’s oeuvre from both within and outside the DSliterature, the present study extends in some small way the knowledge of how we oper-ate in the history of the present, especially in terms of portraying emotions of individ-uals labeled as LD. I believe that writers such as Carrier (1986), de Certeau (1988),Danforth (2009), and Stiker (1999) make an important claim for an empirical warrantso that researchers might analyze how discourses actually operate as materials. Thework of theoretical synthesis may follow the first task of empiricism.

An intriguing empirical finding in this study is that academic and personal narra-tives both position persons labeled as LD negatively. In essence, both discourses paydeference to the power of science. Moreover, the science discourse depends on adispersion that is endless in scale which makes it characterless, impersonal, and infi-nite. The power of science becomes reified through endless repetition that is facelessand diffuse. Furthermore, the humans labeled as LD carve out existential niches forthemselves that cannot deny the subjects’ personal, subtle truths and their uniquecontexts, which ambiguously circulate the power of science as they also illustrate anordinary susceptibility to feelings of frustration, jubilation, and relief.

In this section, I describe the three themes that emerged from my analysis of theCDA and the personal narratives. I point out in each case how the themes become

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22 W. Mazher

sensible in the broader scheme of a Foucaultian framework of history. In terms ofFairclough, I touch on the staunchly durable circulation of a functionalist, positivistdiscourse in the LD field which may frame a discussion on transgressing thediscourse’s boundaries. I further examine and explicate that reframing in the next,final section of this article.

I discovered the first two themes of this study through the CDA and the third themethrough a separate analysis of the autobiographies. The CDA consistently revealed thediscourse samples’ penchant for negative positioning of labeled individuals as well asthe fact that both scientists and the autobiographers contributed their own acknowl-edgment and acceptance of the scientific norms used to judge the labeled personendlessly. I lifted both of the first two themes from the CDA through applying and link-ing a-priori observations that Foucault makes with the results of my CDA. My statingof themes is an attempt to further summarize and understand the implications of theCDA by weaving Foucault’s ideas into the trends surfaced through the CDA. Further-more, I discovered the third theme by coding for similarities among the autobiographersin how they present their emotions. I did not perform a CDA of the coded emotion-related passages identified for this theme. Rather, through identifying the commonelements across the autobiographies, I came to understand a difference between theways academic researchers represent emotions and the way autobiographers do.

The first theme – the scientists’ repeated concern for internal defects of the personlabeled as LD – sets up a field of expectations and ideas for the labeled adults to strug-gle against. The scientists conceptualize emotions as scores compared to the norm ofthe ‘average’ score: group means measured through rating scales; social behavioralcompetence defined by a score from checklists and rating scales; the extent of peer-rejection measured by socio-metric data on students’ behaviors; deficit subgroups(verbal and non-verbal) and their relationships to scored socially sanctioned behav-iors; the extent of aggression measured through checklists; depression detected froma quantitative analysis of scored answers to questionnaires; interventions (academicand behavioral training) and their behavioral–emotional effects measured throughchecklists and rating scales; and so forth.

Despite the will to resist (even if in an attenuated form), all of the autobiographersconvey and reinforce the first theme through self-doubt, which makes significantconcessions to science’s power to position. I find that the adults seem to have troubleaccepting the label of LD and understanding its implications. Perhaps sentient individ-uals cannot avoid self-consciousness coming from the language that constructs them(Peribanayagam 2000). As long as there are people and conscious minds, no amountof what Peribanayagam calls a ‘deconstructive fiat’ can remove or diminish the impactof a discourse in naming particular students in particular ways. The labeled adultsseem to internalize the scientific discourse and through their talk perpetuate language,which is evident in their consistent pattern of placing themselves on a lower planehierarchically than the ideal of a non-labeled student. Then, to state that labeledstudents (later as labeled adults) experience self-doubt, is to say that they seem unableto avoid the power of negativity from the scientific discourses. My analysis of theirpositioning in the scientific discourse confirms the pervasive power of establishingnorms that come from disciplinary channels of psychology and psychometrics. Theideal of the non-labeled normate puts in place a system of self-surveillance (Foucault1975) that negatively promotes power over those who fall short.

In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault (1977a) makes refer-ence to a fundamental shift in western society that led to testing individuals to gauge

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their differences. This is, of course, the case with determining emotions of studentslabeled as LD and correlating the emotion scores with indices of educational andsocial outcomes. Foucault writes that:

The examination as the fixing, at once ritual and ‘scientific’, of individual differences, asthe pinning down of each individual in his own particularity … clearly indicates theappearance of a new modality of power in which each individual receives as his statushis own individuality, and in which he is linked by his status to the features, the measure-ments, the gaps, the ‘marks’ that characterize him and make a ‘case’. (1977a, 192)

My CDA reveals that the ‘cases’ that persons labeled as LD become are distinctlynegative entities. Their emotions are relevant only to the extent that they define andfurther elaborate the implications of having LD, a pathological condition locatedinside the person. Perhaps situated from the opposite end of the totem pole embodiedby a person positively considered academically gifted and well adjusted in school andsociety, the person labeled as LD is constructed as a negative foil and, therefore, anegative presence in society. As Foucault (1977a) suggests, this discursive movebecomes a material force for modern societies to control and ‘train’ individuals to playtheir parts in society. This is the nature of the power the discourse exerts on such indi-viduals.

I find that the second theme is the facelessness of discursive power. The power thatcirculates among discourses is evident in the numerous negative words and unflatter-ing metaphors associated with the labeled student (e.g., as an empty container, afighter, a victim – ‘dead meat’, a commodity, and a patient). The power to positionlabeled individuals seems quite diffuse and impersonal, endless. It is after all science,real, and at some level, truth. Moreover, every participant in a discourse (whether ascientist or a labeled adult) contributes his or her negative knowledge in the discoursestream so that no one person or institution can claim responsibility for consequences.No one seems personally responsible because science is ‘objective’. The anonymityof such power relates to Foucault’s panopticon – everyone monitors everyone else andone’s self as well and this spreads the monitoring (Foucault 1975). Both scientists andlabeled adults, for example, seem to accept common criteria (i.e., tests and other diag-nostic tools of science) for categorizing diverse human attributes and experiences (seeDavis 1997).

Moreover, the implications of the second theme, that the power of the scientificdiscourse is endless, faceless, and incalculably present in our post-enlightenment age,are elaborated by Foucault (1972) in The Archaeology of Knowledge and theDiscourse on Language. The power in the scientific discourse is evident in its sheersize, its diffuseness. Concerning the nature of discourse in contemporary history,Foucault writes that:

The field of discursive events … is a grouping that is always finite and limited at anymoment to the linguistic sequences that have been formulated; they may be innumerable,they may, in sheer size, exceed the capacities of recording, memory, or reading: never-theless they form a finite grouping. (1972, 27)

Foucault’s formulation seems correct if one considers an insight from my CDA. MyCDA reveals that both academic researchers and autobiographers add to the corpus ofknown negative descriptors in an endless cycle of negativity to deal with morecomplex realities than the scientific discourse would have us believe. Those realities

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24 W. Mazher

are partially revealed in the ways that the narrators attempt to humanize their emotionsby situating them in particular ethnographic contexts. In his book Order of Things:The Archaeology and the Human Sciences, Foucault (1970) suggests the threat of thediscursive scientific reality overwhelming and vitiating the power of ethnology. I seethe same trend in my findings. I discovered that narrators mostly seem to identify withthe conceptions of science by structuring their self-beliefs around normative dictatesof society that LD represents a reified group and a state of pathology. Yet, at the sametime, the third theme emerged, which suggests that, faced with the ways science posi-tions labeled individuals, the narrators seem to find spaces in words that providecounter-examples to science, spaces which allow them to express a deeper, morenuanced level of personal, existential complexity. These are ambiguities that certainlyrequire further elaboration in future studies.

The third theme, which reflects a difference between science and personal narra-tives, is the personal, existential depth that narrators of the autobiographies reveal. Ifind that faced with science’s deficit orientation the labeled persons show a positivevulnerability, which is different from the consistently negative profile that scientistsdepict. The labeled individuals, for example, voice some of the same concerns thatmight be of issue to any student in a school – a concern to do well in academics andmake friends, which are positive attributes contrary to science’s negative lens. More-over, all of the autobiographers express a desire for peer-acceptance and to do well inschool (Rodis, Garrod, and Boscardin 2001). These are concerns we can all relate to.Their human sentiments indirectly question or challenge the negativity of theacademic discourse, and thereby give vent to something more recognizable, morepositive than what the scientific profiles suggest. Next, I describe in more detail thepatterns I uncovered under the third theme.

I further find that the passages in the autobiographies that concern the authors’social–personal lives consistently relay a feeling of relief when they are acceptedsocially. An interesting finding is the emphasis most of the narrators place on thevalue of being accepted by their peers with LD. They often talk about the emotion ofrelief that comes from being able to share their personal insecurities with those whomay truly understand, which often happens to be a peer labeled as LD. Yet, one of thenarrators, a young African American man labeled as LD, conveys his relief at findingan oasis of acceptance with empathetic, understanding family members and a girlfriend, all non-labeled persons.

To continue, on the academic front, the individuals labeled as LD convey emotionsof jubilation when some rare teacher highlighted their need to understand academiccontent. They complain that most teachers and the educational system in generalworry too much about whether they are able to write neatly, perform well under stricttime limits during tests, spell correctly, and produce correct grammar – skills theysimply do not command to the same extent as their non-labeled peers. They alsoexpress jubilation when a teacher honors their need to ‘broaden their minds’, whichadmittedly only a few teachers are willing to do in the ways they prefer. In short, thenarrators express jubilation when the rare teacher honors their human need to under-stand academic content and widen their horizons.

By contrast, they all express frustration at the memory of teachers being sticklersfor form in the students’ productions of handwriting, grammar, organized (linear) think-ing, or correct drilled responses in a foreign language classroom. Moreover, they expressfrustration when the pedagogical system is neutral or even unresponsive about thequality of their ideas, a system which focuses on how poorly they package their ideas.

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In both domains, then, social and academic, we can all relate to the emotions ofrelief, jubilation, and frustration when obstacles come our way, obstacles which eitherhamper us from reaching our goals or enable us to fulfill them. Such a goal may bethe existential need of finding acceptance among others and personal growth thatcomes from learning. Indeed, the situational, contextual complexities that narratorsreveal through their stories shed an entirely different light on their emotions, theirpersonal aspirations, and their lived realities than the scientific discourse can.

Foucault states that analysis ‘should be concerned with power at its extremities,in its ultimate destinations, with those points where it becomes capillary, that is, inits more regional and local forms’ (1997b, 96). Through the way the languageworks at the local level within the scope of the excerpts I examine, I point out themicroscopic, capillary reaches of power and how discourse samples relate themati-cally to the circulation of power. Furthermore, in Language, Counter-Memory, andPractice, Foucault (1977a) suggests that a ‘will to knowledge’ provokes a consider-ation of disturbing possibilities.

In speaking of the way knowledge performs disciplinary (i.e., punishing or regu-lating) functions, Foucault writes:

Knowledge does not slowly detach itself from its empirical roots, the initial needs fromwhich it arose, to become pure speculation subject only to the demands of reason; itsdevelopment is not tied to the constitution and affirmation of a free subject; rather, itcreates a progressive enslavement to its instinctive violence. (1977a, 163)

Foucault (1977a) believes that a will to knowledge ends up delighting in ‘disturbingdiscoveries’, a will that is implacable, even ‘malicious’, for threatening to break downthe unity of the subject: that is, when a human being becomes no more than a sum ofits parts to be dissected, trained, and controlled (see Foucault 1975). My analysis alsoproblematizes such knowledge by demonstrating how it inscribes the position ofpersons labeled as LD as negative and un-free (except perhaps on occasions when apositioned person resists).

I further find that the descriptive and the interpretive levels of Fairclough’s (1989)analyses are interwoven in the writing of the CDA. The circumstances and thedescriptions of the discourse are mingled in the form and meaning of my analyses. Inpractical terms, it is hard to separate the description of the discourse from its situa-tional contexts, which infuse the description with meanings. Furthermore, in eachsample I show how the description can be reframed to critique itself, that is to say,how rearranging the discourse allows it to become more self-conscious and capable ofsurfacing the power it exercises.

Moreover, on the level of Fairclough’s (1989) explanation of discourse, I shouldmention that the themes relate to the staunch durability of the practice of functionalistscience in the learning disability field. Skrtic (1991, 1995) and Skrtic, Harris, andShriner (2005), as well as others such as Carrier (1986), Danforth (2009), Reid andValle (2004), and Smith (1999), have drawn attention to the ways in which function-alist psychology has operated and still operates in the LD and other high incidencedisability fields to limit discourse. Moreover, Skrtic (1995) has made some of the mosttrenchant dissections of the way the discourse has historically failed to critique its ownlimitations. He has shown, for example, how in the example of the most ‘progressive’strands of the regular education initiative (REI) in the USA, the same foundationaldiscursive assumptions apply that permeate its more conservative counterpart (e.g.,Education of the Handicapped Act [EHA]). Such foundational discursive assumptions

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26 W. Mazher

perhaps prevent effective critique of the field in terms of adopting ideologies andschooling practices that reflect a different ‘adhocratic’ or team-oriented problem-solv-ing approach.

The durability of functionalist science, which favors a kind of unwaveringadherence to the ideal of experimental, positivist research designs, still goes largelyunquestioned in the LD field proper. For a cursory corroboration of this observationone can type descriptors such as ‘learning disability’ and ‘social skills’ into theERIC database and find that functionalist psychology prevails with a vengeance.Hence, our work remains in merging a more sociological, historically consciousdiscourse with the practical aims of functionalist psychology to enable otherpostures in the research of emotions and LD in situated lives.

Implications

A major implication of this study concerns what it means to allow individuals labeledas LD to speak freely. It seems that simply allowing such individuals to speak may notallow them to wrest power away from the same discourse that positions them. It seemsfurther that such persons may require the help of prosthetics to acquire power withinan entrenched system of thinking and talking: discourse. Such special cases – suchprosthetics – may be offered in the form of Foucault’s technologies of the self, whichI try to highlight, elaborate, and appropriate to the concerns of such persons in thissection.

Moreover, I ask how the present study may help to develop and apply Foucaultiantheory. I note that such research, from a theoretical point of view, is largely unchartedin education and LD. I point out also that such research presents a basis to furtherexamine the comparative facts between ways in which the scientific and personalnarratives function. This is an important aim as it promotes the understanding of wayswe operate in society and its schools because discourses are ours and position us(Rabinow 1997). Furthermore, an examination of discourses surfaces strategicramparts that can protect the interests of marginals, of whom it may be argued thatstudents labeled as LD are a type. In this regard, we may use Foucault’s ‘technologiesof the self’ to uncover ways to resist discourses that position persons labeled as LD(Dreyfus and Rabinow 1994).

In this section, I hardly do justice to the concept of technologies of the self.Scholars have debated about the concept’s social and political limitations. Theysometimes purport that such constructs put too much weight on the individual and hissubjectivity rather than helping to promote a wider, more explicitly strategic politicalprogram of the oppressed (Shuttleworth 2002). Peters, Gabel, and Symeonidou(2009) have given voice to the same tensions within the current milieu of DS scholar-ship that leverages analyzing discursive formations on a global scale against thenarrower scope of investigating tactics from individuals living under an oppressivesystem. These issues are far from resolved, however. Hence, I proceed with a sense ofcaution, which stems from a fear of oversimplifying some of the political implica-tions of technologies of self. I focus on appropriating this concept to do the work ofresistance in the field of LD.

To highlight a main implication of my study, I juxtapose two actually ratherdisparate texts, one a scientific study that explored whether non-labeled studentsconsider those identified as LD less likeable over the course of primary school (Estellet al. 2008), and the other a narrative study about how men with cerebral palsy (CP)

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searched for sex and affection (Shuttleworth 2002). I find that this juxtapositionallows me to develop my main line of contention in the most efficacious mannerbecause it allows me to reveal as clearly as possible the primary lacunae I find withinthe scientific discourse. I weave some basic conceptual implications of the two textswith Foucault’s concept of ‘the technologies of the self’ (Rabinow 1997) to suggestthe concerns of persons labeled as LD. Indeed, the difficulties and elusiveness ofextrapolating theoretical–practical implications from the findings of this articlebecome evident as I try to align Foucault’s technologies of the self with resisting thediscourse of science.

Estell et al.’s (2008) longitudinal study uses regression analysis to show thatamong a sample of a third- to sixth-grade cohort, non-disabled students view peerslabeled as LD as less likeable than their non-LD peers in terms of a ‘social prefer-ence’ scale, which asked students to rate which of their peers they liked from most toleast. Based on the conclusion that non-disabled students consistently disfavor peerslabeled as LD, the researchers suggest that ‘closing this relative difference [in like-ability] and helping students with LD to function just as well as their typically achiev-ing peers would clearly be a priority for educators’ (Estell et al. 2008, 12). However,we may problematize the researchers’ central suggestion in the study that feelings oflikeability might be malleable. We may interrogate what likeability means andwhether it is subject to the type of change these researchers suggest. My reading ofthis text (Estell et al. 2008) against another (Shuttleworth 2002), which concerns thequest of men with CP to be liked, suggests crucial lacunae in the scientific discourseof Estell et al.’s study.

CP affects a person’s ability to move and maintain tone in the muscles (Shuttle-worth 2002). Such persons usually sit in wheelchairs and may use slight facial move-ments to communicate through computer transcriptions. Their faces often show thelooseness and contortions of a compromised musculature. One of the lessons of thisstudy is that because of the hanging, limp look of their faces they are considered ‘ugly’by a norm and usually may never reach a threshold of acceptance for a person withoutCP. This is the core issue that the previous scientific study vitiates: it may be that achild labeled as LD can never be accepted by a norm that engenders feelings of like-ability among his peers. The issue thus becomes how to arouse feelings of likeabilitydespite the norm and the assumptions that hinder it. Shuttleworth (2002) offerscreative answers that men with CP developed in seeking love and sex in the face ofthe discursive limitations against CP. Foucault (1994) would call these moves ‘tech-nologies of the self’.

Foucault (cited in Rabinow) defines this concept as discourses that:

permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certainnumber of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way ofbeing, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity,wisdom, perfection, or immortality. (1997, 225)

Foucault’s definition suggests unique possibilities for defining one’s self-concept.There are perhaps any number of operations a person can perform to allow for a diver-sity of values ascribed to common objects, such as to bodily forms, mental capacities,and personalities. We may engender values that are less sensitive to the norm or sensi-tive in a different way than usual. For example, a student labeled as LD may developlanguage to understand what makes him likeable to himself despite what anyone elsesays about him or the way they act toward him. Such a process of questioning may

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28 W. Mazher

require extended and varied opportunities to converse with a researcher and peers tolearn to think independently of the norm.

To continue, the same avenues might be explored through reflecting on differencesin learning rate. Students labeled as LD who learn slower or experience difficulty inprocessing language or math might develop discourse, as a means of the technologyof self, to investigate the value of learning for its own sake, for the joy that it bringsregardless of speed of learning or the grades one makes. I think that it might be possi-ble, for instance, to develop ways of talking that cater to a student’s deepest need tobelieve that learning is worthwhile for life enhancement, despite all the difficultiesone may experience by dint of processing differences. There are also other topics ofimmediate relevance to students and other Foucaultian directions of analyses that wemay explore with labeled students.

Foucault’s theory offers a scope of thinking that aspires to evade the reach ofdiscourses, in the unconventional sense of allowing an individual to fall astray ofnorms that are defining. For instance, we need research that investigates the limita-tions of the norm that operates against the interests of students labeled as LD. A corol-lary of such an idea might be to help such persons resist the ways they are positioned.In this regard, we may use the findings of the present study to locate school sites thatallow students to develop technologies of the self, which they can use to support theirindependence in school and beyond, throughout their lives. We may conduct researchwith students labeled as LD that permits them to interrogate a norm that operatesagainst their likeability. This may involve considered attack from any number offronts on the discursive enactments related to defusing adverse social contexts thatmay occur around rejection from peers and adults (see Shuttleworth 2002).

One way to illustrate the theoretical potential of exploring self-practices might beto first recall the three findings of my study: (1) the scientific discourse positionslabeled students negatively; (2) the power of discourse is diffuse and endless; and (3)autobiographers labeled as LD display depth in interpreting their emotions. We canapply these findings to develop counter-discourses that serve the interests of resis-tance. For example, we may engage with students labeled as LD in prolonged conver-sations to find out what they say about a variety of situations, circumstances, andevents they experience in school. Through such conversations we may be able togenerate texts of ways they perceive being positioned negatively in school. Further-more, we may help the same students name the discourses to gain awareness of strug-gles. For example, we may develop names for the emotions they experience in relationto discourses that involve them. In this way, we can tap into emotions associated withself-doubt, which may allow us to strategize against such a process by reframing self-doubt into more positive, hopeful counter-discourses. Such deployments can furtherinsert their positions within discourse and through naming it, enable it to do work ofa liberatory interest. That is to say, our surfacing of counter-discourses may help toredefine their self-image or self-concept in a way which reorients their differences.Opening up such spaces may free them to operate outside the strict scope of the canonor the norm of what is ‘good’, functional, attractive, and useful (Rabinow 1997). Ourthoughts and expressions, which may act as transgressions, can enable technologies ofthe self that are bold and daring from the point of view of discourse, which is after all,the norm (see Allan 1999).

Furthermore, we need participatory, grounded studies to explore how school sitessupport and perpetuate discursive limits. The scientific authors’ call to help studentslabeled as LD includes the recognition that a ‘meta-analysis of social skill interventions

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ha[s] limited success … This may be due to the systemic nature of social development,in which individually based intercessions may not be sufficient to effect change’ (Estellet al. 2008, 12). I find that this injunction, though perhaps well-meaning, hardlycomments at all about the discursive aspect of living. I point out that all parties – educa-tors, disabled, and the non-disabled – need to develop an understanding of oppressionsthey promote consciously or otherwise, which may narrow the discursive spaces forstudents labeled as LD to operate within. It is at the level of discourse and the self-practices that power can be addressed, which may actually help labeled students insteadof attempting to teach them in a social site, such as the school, new and improved or‘better’ social skills. We should address the emotions associated with the children’slikeability and freedom head-on through discourses that can embattle and resist oppres-sive sites, and deepen the students’ understanding of disabilities as discursive construc-tions. These aims pose difficult theoretical and practical problems that we ought toconfront and advance through further research.

Such studies may help us resist power that promotes the subjugation of knowl-edge (i.e., a kind of silencing of students labeled as LD). Apart from allowingstudents labeled as LD to speak freely and widely (Reid and Button 1995), I alsosuggest investigating positive aspects of the lives of such students. Some questions toexplore are, for example: (1) What do labeled students identify as their primary prob-lems in life? (2) How do labeled students see their emotional needs being fulfilled?(3) What can researchers do to help labeled students cope with and question thepower of norms? (4) What do labeled students say that researchers can do to helpthem in school, such as with friendships, academics, and any other concerns? Weneed research that addresses the question of how persons labeled as LD conceptual-ize and apply technologies of the self in the context of school, leisure, work, andfamily life.

Related to the school lives of young adults labeled as LD, Connor (2008) has donesome such work by allowing labeled persons to analyze and critique their experiencesof school, race, class, and gender. However, he does not name his theoretical concernspecifically to be Foucaultian or about advancing the ‘technologies of the self’. Yet,his research, nevertheless, provides important information about what labeled personsfind to be limiting discourses. Such work may help us to critique and resist the powerof discourse. In perhaps a broader sense, it may also allow us to imagine a differentorder of history. In keeping with Foucault’s (1972, 1997a) vision of history, I too viewit as a conduit to human effects and desires and not dominated by uncontrollable,immanent, timeless, or abstract forces. I believe that we can begin to reform historyto create a more respectful position in our society for students labeled as LD. Thiswould mean more investigations that allow labeled students to speak freely in thelanguage of lived experience, and more about the positives of such lives. Moreover,researchers should help them in such a venture through the ways they frame theirresearch discourse and the extent to which they are willing to analyze, critique, andresist power in discourse with them.

Notes on contributorWaseem Mazher is a doctoral student at Teachers College, Columbia University. He iscurrently conducting his dissertation research on the coping of middle school students with LD.His research interests are in de Certeauan, Bakhtinian, and Foucaultian theories, the copingefficacy of children with disabilities, and qualitative methodologies (in particular, ethnographicinquiry) in education.

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A Foucaultian critique of learning disability discourses: personal narratives and science

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