Stimulating Methodological Innovations in Researching Inclusion: Posthumanism and Disability

A humanist orientation is foundational to the educational right of students with disabilities to participate in the mainstream life of schooling communities. Social science researchers, however, are increasingly questioning the limitations of the humanist position, and making the ‘posthuman’ turn within their epistemological orientations (Coole & Frost, 2010). The history of disability has complicated clear distinctions between the human and not-human. Indeed, the posthuman character of disability affirms the concept of life beyond fixed boundaries of the self (Goodley & Runswick-Cole, 2016). For inclusive education researchers, this means that school-based phenomena cannot be explained by either an empiricist logic or a social constructionist logic. A posthumanist orientation to inclusive education research recognizes human and non-human agents as entangled within arrangements emerging from particular relations with each other. It seeks to uncover inclusion as a material-discursive arrangement of people, events, ideas and things that are always in a state of flux.