Problematizing Reflexivity, Validity, and Disclosure: Research by People with Disabilities About Disability

In this article, I explore the potential for people with disabilities to conduct research about disability in education. Drawing upon Rasmussen (2006), I consider whether merely sharing one aspect of identity with participants is enough to gain an emic (insider) perspective when doing research. I argue that not only should we problematize our own identity, but that research should change the researcher's own identity and that the degree to which research promotes this change is an essential aspect of formal validity of the research. Finally, I propose some practical implications and offer some advice for researchers conducting research on disability. Keywords: Queer Theory, Emic Perspective, Disabled Researchers, Non-Disabled Researchers, Validity In the course of my decade of working in the field of Special Education, I have rarely encountered a teacher, let alone a researcher, with a visible disability, either physical or mental. More generally, I have rarely encountered researchers in the field of education with any kind of visible deviant personal characteristics, whether it be disability, gender, sexuality, weight, or other ways in which bodies are marked and shaped. Discrimination and other structural barriers combine in a way that marginalizes researchers with disabilities, particularly when it intersects with race, class, gender, and sexuality. Similarly, it is also uncommon to encounter work in the field of Special Education that critically interrogates how the researcher's positionality influences their work. Allan and Slee (2008) discussed this problem and wrote that "too often, there is an apparent unwillingness by researchers of inclusive education to reveal their positions, where they are coming from, by specifying the foundations of knowledge and assumptions about the nature of reality on which their work based" (p. 1). This lack of critical interrogation leads to a situation where much of the field of Special Education is comprised of writing about those with disabilities, with little understanding of how researcher identity impacts one's research. The consequences of this marginalization are devastating; the discipline of Special Education has become insular; ignoring the critiques offered by researchers in disability studies (many whom identify as disabled), researchers in Special Education persist in the "standard and widespread use of damaging labels and deficit-driven medicalized conceptions of conceptions of disability that undeniably contradict[s] the views and life experiences of many disabled people" (Connor, Gabel, Gallagher, & Morton, 2008, p. 445). Moreover, efforts by those wishing to bring disability studies into the field of Special Education are often pushed to the margins due to the fact that "most special education publications and organizations seem [are?] philosophically and methodologically conservative and monolithic" (Brantlinger, 1997, p. 430). In this article, I want to consider the idea of disabled persons being able to do their own research on disability. Rather than valorize this idea, however, I want to both explore the possibilities raised by this approach as well as the potential pitfalls that researchers with disabilities can fall into when writing about disability. By raising both these possibilities and pitfalls, I offer guidelines for what makes for quality research within the study of disability. I draw extensively on my own work on queer methodology (for example, Sheldon, 2010a) in order to bring a queer lens into the study of disability, although I make an effort to avoid simple analogy in favor of a more complex analysis of the relationship between queer and disabled identities. I also offer suggestions in this paper for those researchers who may not identify as having a disability themselves; their voices and ideas matter to the discourse around disability, but they cannot and must not be offered in lieu of people with disabilities being able to conduct their own research and define their own questions. …