Monday, August 27, 2007

Belated Update

It's been a month since I've updated things here, but my life's been a flurry of chaos since mid-July. Between travels to Boise for the DD Council, camping with the family, getting courses prepared and online, finishing papers and presentations...not the least of which is my presentation to the Royal Geographic Society this Thursday. I am currently sitting in the international terminal of the Seattle airport waiting to board British Air flight 48 to London's Heathrow airport. I have a 12 hour flight ahead of me...and I'm a little nervous about that...I'm not a good sitter, I need to move. I hope there is space to spread out and move...

Besides presenting at the RGS, I've been asked to chair a session so that should be interesting. The session I'm chairing has presenters from Egypt, South Africa, Hong Kong, and Scotland. It promises to be an exciting and multicultural experience while I'm there. I just hope I can find my accommodations...I'm going to try and take the Tube from Heathrow instead of paying $80 for the cab ride. The Tube only costs $8, so in the interest of saving money I'm going to take a chance...

The paper for the RGS conference is coming together nicely. I'm finishing edits and references now. The last section has been a challenge and needs more space, but that paper is already at 35 pages and I'm loath to let it grow anymore. It's probably unpublishable at it's current length, so I'll have to cut it back anyway. Kathryn has been a great help in editing and firming up a lot of the ideas. I think that this paper will form a good outline for the book on the same topic that we're working on. Once this is done and the paper off for publication , we can turn our attention to the book in earnest. Part of the problem with getting some real substantive work done on the book however, is both of our teaching loads this semester. We're both teaching new classes that we haven't taught in the past, so it requires more time and effort than courses which we have taught and refined in the past.

Speaking of which, I'm loving my new classes. The students seem to be engaged and interested in learning, so that's always a good sign. Now the instructor just needs to keep the momentum up and enthusiasm high so learning can take place...no problem, right? It really is fun to teach these undergraduate seminar type courses because they are flexible and allow for more creativity.

Okay, I need to get dinner before I get on the plane. BA is notorious for their crappy food and exploding microwaves, so I'm going to grab my last burger for the week and head to the gate. Here's a quick taste of the paper I'll be presenting....let me know what you think....

Within the past decade there has been increasing interest in examining the geography of disability and the “barriered and bounded lives” of people with disabilities (Imrie, 2001). However, a large portion of this recent work has merely focused on the interaction between the individual with a disability and, so-called, “disabling space” that defines and reinforces individuals with disabilities’ outsider status. As Gregson points out so astutely: “Conceptually, what this means is that such research ends up reinstating the very oppositions which it seeks to challenge, and that ‘the excluded’ are defined by, and remain trapped within, their representation as specific instances of exclusion” (Gregson, 2003). This approach to analyzing the inhabited space of those considered “disabled” fails to address the continuing oppression and inequality that defines the day to day life of individuals with disabilities by couching analyses in the rhetoric of difference rather than addressing the role of geography in perpetuating inequality. Indeed there is a further need to look beyond the geography of lived experience and to shift the focus to organizations and discursive systems that produce the spaces that define our perceptions of reality, ability, and inequality (Jackson, 2003). We must look at the material and discursive systems of power that perpetuate the societal tendency to look at individuals with disabilities and say: “We are here; we are this happy breed of men. They are there; they are not fully human and they live in that place” (Tuan, 1977, p. 50).

This paper shifts the unit of analysis from the geographic space that defines the existence of individuals with disabilities to looking at the “materialized discursive” (Gregson, 2003) of teacher education. This paper examines how discursive power works through colleges of education and how the built environment in these colleges work together to perpetuate attitudes, structures, and spaces that continue to reinforce the unequal status of individuals with disabilities in society. This paper considers how the material space exemplified in teacher education buildings and the separate discursive space exemplified in inclusion literature and in programmatic structures reinforces the separation of general and special education and introduces constraints in achieving effective training on inclusive educational practice and reifies categorical notions of disability and typicality. Separation is so naturalized that the segregated nature of the built environment of teacher education is seldom questioned. The following sections provides data that illustrate how underlying material structures and processes function to (re)construct disability as separate from “typicality” or “normality” in teacher education programs in the U.S.

I'm going to try and regularly post things here this week so friends and family can stay up to date...we'll see how internet access is in London. Peace and Good Happiness Stuff....Matt

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