Towards socially just pedagogies: Deleuzoguattarian critical disability studies

Socially just pedagogies call for sensitivity to politics and culture. In this paper I will uncover some key challenges in relation to working pedagogically with disabled people through the exploration of a critical disability studies perspective. First, I will unpack some of the assumptions that underpin educational understandings of ‘disability’ and ‘impairment’, suggesting that we need to engage more willingly with politicized and socially constructed ideas in relation to these phenomena. Second, I will raise questions about the current aims of pedagogy in relation to the market and the autonomous learner. In light of the market—and the subject it produces—I will argue that ‘disability and ‘impairment’ demand critical researchers to think more creatively about setting the conditions for experimenting with socially just pedagogies. Third, with this experimentation in mind, I will draw upon the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to think of socially just pedagogies in terms of rhizomes (n – 1); productive models of desire and planes of immanence. These concepts construct pedagogies as ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’—opening up resistant spaces and potential territories of social justice—all of them uncertain.