Chapter 4: Resisting Intersectional Disability Soul Destroying in Education Contexts: A Collaborative Autoethnography for Healing

Our individual and collective consciousness is not isolated from human forces or nature’s forces. These forces include: time, space, life-force, and soul-force, as well as the full range of human and animal emotions—from fear, anger and indignation, to joy, hope, and love. These all contribute to our spiritual experience as humans on planet Earth, and within the universe and our local and global contexts. Our “spiritual research paradigm turns to inquire about its own origin- to infer, evoke invoke, intuit, practice, and finally to realize our own spirit” (Lin et al., 2016, p. 7). Some of us see spirituality as being connected with the spirit inside each of us, and others see spirituality as encompassing a connection to God’s Spirit, and thereby reflected in our lives and the world we live in. The trauma each of us has experienced in and through higher education spaces has impacted our spirits, minds, and soul. As authors, each of our individual consciousnesses is deeply grounded in an interdisciplinary and intersectional disability studies in education (DSE) framework. This framework rejects dominant narratives of disability, and its intersections, as deficit, disorder, or something to “fix.” Thus, given our DSE lens, our narrative should not be misunderstood as a medical-psychological or commonsense understanding of trauma. As authors and educators, we are giving voice to the hegemonic ways in which trauma is enacted and experienced within K–16 educational contexts and cultures, undergirded by race, ability supremacy (Berger et al., 2018; Hulgin et al., 2020) and ways that healing has become possible by reclaiming our voices as adults.