Conceptualizing and Problematizing Inclusion Porn in Education Scholarship and Practice

Discourses of inclusion are currently used without clear and consistent meaning and multiple and varied interpretations exist, therefore stunting our ability to enhance or utilize the concept in social justice and education scholarship and practice. In this article, we argue that the ambiguous, conflicting, and contested features of inclusion have opened a door for nondisabled policy makers, academics, practitioners, and other stakeholders to exploit the concept of inclusion by crafting the logics and taken-for-granted assumptions that become associated with it. Accordingly, these nondisabled stakeholders gain social, cultural, and symbolic capital in the fields that they operate, while (some) disabled students are objectification and exploited. Accordingly, we utilize existing empirical literature to conceptualize and problematize inclusion porn in education scholarship and practice through a comparison to the key features of porn. We do this to offer inclusion porn as a conceptual tool for education practitioners and scholars to think with so that they can reflexively consider and interrogate their own ideologies, discourses, practices, and common-sense logics relating to ‘inclusion’.