Inclusion of children with Special Educational Needs and Disability in education has long been debated as a Global North and Eurocentric project. Armstrong et al. (2010) maintain that programmes and policy strategies around inclusive education should be understood as contextual to the management of social diversity following the Second World War, including the end of colonialism and the tension between global and local cultures. However, inclusion is also a project that is animated and mobilised by greater aims of social justice and equity in education. Sociologists of Education in the field of Disability Studies have contributed to a great deal in advocating for inclusive education, and shaped a tool-box of methods and theories to conceptualise epistemologies and practices of inclusion (Barton and Armstrong, 2008); to support the ontological production of included subjects building on personal experiences of oppression (Tomlinson, 1982); and to foster the emancipation, empowerment and power of these subjects (Barnes et al, 1999).

However, increasingly, Sociologists of Education in Critical Disability Studies are questioning the Eurocentric and Global North premises of the inclusive education project. Building on sociological debates from international scholars (Walton, 2018; Bourassa, 2021), growing groups of scholars from different countries in Europe are calling for decolonising Critical Disability studies in education and the inclusive project with it (Grech, 2015; Goodley et al. 2019, Elder and Migliarini, 2020; Peruzzo, 2021). They claim that, as occurred with Sociologies of Education and understandings of disability (Meekosha, 2011), increasingly transnational policy mobility processes (Peck and Theodore, 2010) contributed to the exportation of inclusion from the Global North and, by re-enacting it in the Global South, reproduced neo-colonial forms of oppression through education policies and practices which disregarded and discarded local education approaches (Santos, 2018; Mignolo, 2011). Challenging the feel-good rhetoric mobilising inclusive education, they expose both the discursive reproduction of subjects to be included in a normative and normated includens whole and who decides the criteria for inclusion, questioning what whole is perpetrated through these processes (Allan, 2008; Bourassa, 2021).

To further this debate, in particular in present times in which global logics of neoliberal capitalism are reshaping the logics of accumulation through reframing inclusion digitally, this paper draws upon findings from a one-year project titled the DIGITAL (Diversifying Inclusion and Growth: Inspiring Technologies for Accessible Learning) project in times in Coronavirus. Envisaging the chaos of the pandemic as a creative moment, we explored online and offline pedagogical strategies of enacting inclusion in 6 countries (Italy, England, Australia, the US, Malaysia, and Chile) during the period March 2020-July 2021. Our aim was to look for alternatives that challenged, rewrote and decolonised the Eurocentric and Global North project of inclusive education during the pandemic, by interrupting the discursive reformulation of exclusions, marginalisations, and vulnerabilities in the digital era along with racist, ableist and colonial social descriptors.

By merging Critical Studies of Inclusion, Critical Disability Studies of inclusion and Decolonial Studies in education to envisage teaching and learning practices mobilised by decolonialised and inclusive epistemologies, we shift and question the boundaries of European Sociologies of (Inclusive) Education. We aim to create a space to mobilise epistemological tools that are culturally relevant, and present enactable concepts to validate ontologies made subaltern by colonial legacies and Eurocentric perspectives in the field of European Sociologies of Education.

The project mobilised post-structural tools and assemblage theory (Deleuze and Guattari, 2020; Youdell, 2015). We deployed Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the assemblage to explore both the global dimension of education policy and politics during the pandemic and local inclusive teaching and learning practices between online and offline spaces. Through assemblage theory we could challenge the Eurocentric and modernist epistemic premises of the inclusive project, theoretically mobilised by a stark binary understanding of reason and nature, and body and mind (Connell, 2011). This division was reiterated in the (sociological) production of knowledge, which was ‘supposed to be universal and independent of context’ (Mbembe, 2016: 32). Following Walton (2018, 42), we connected sociological elements of inclusive education (disability, schooling, marginalisation), technical models (general, public education) and tactics (online and off-line pedagogical approaches, digital tools and platforms). We collected data from documentary and policy analyses of international documents, national and local guidelines and 27 semi-structured interviews with teachers, teacher assistants, inclusion managers and community leaders. We conceived these dispositions of things as assemblages, constituted of lines that connect and productively interplay heterogeneous components including political orientations, institutional arrangements, formal and informal knowledges, subjectivities, pedagogies, and affects (Youdell, 2015). Assemblages can be described as acentric nonhierarchical networks crisscrossed by three kinds of lines that deeply challenge the ontological and epistemological existence of borders. First, molar lines, which are ‘binary, arborescent and striated’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2020, 587) constituted by normative and disciplinary spaces, riddled with colonial legacies and dichotomic divisions such as able/disabled, inclusive/exclusionary, regular and special school. Second, molecular lines, which enable multiplicities, smooth places and flows (Deleuze and Guattari, 2020) such as ‘strategies for organising schools classrooms and pedagogies that are not predicated on prior assessments of “ability”’ (Youdell, 2015, 112) and therefore eschew neo-colonial ontologies (De Lissovoy, 2010). And third, lines of flight, which open for processes of becoming and deterritorialise assemblages to spaces of multiplicity that challenge the premises of the inclusive project in its dualistic inclusion/exclusion dimension and geographical borders (Bourassa, 2021; Allan, 2008). Through rhizomatic analysis, we connected data from documents, objects, affects, education community policies and practices, stakeholders’ accounts and observed how these dispositions opened connections across different planes, lines of flights, and subjective multiplicities through the encounter of digital and non-digital technologies. The analysis of the last lines allowed the formulation of five concepts and related planes of experience as qualifiers of inclusive education assemblages.

Following a crisis that showed the interdependence of countries and people and the necessarily global effort to tackle the production of new forms of exclusions and subaltern knowledges in education, and decolonise towards global social justice, this paper calls for Sociologies of Education to engage critically with a conception of inclusive education open to contamination and to non-linear connections of multiple systems of thought and epistemologies that do not rely on binary subjective formations. The DIGITAL project shows how through horizontal rhizomatic teaching and learning, new lines of flight for interdependence, solidary and decolonised connectedness on a local and global level can rewrite studies of inclusion in European Sociologies of Education by decolonising its premises and enabling subaltern subjectivities to become lived and possible experiences. Our intent is far from suggesting a normative understanding of inclusion through technologies; rather we hope that these concepts can offer context-based tools for political intervention in the field of European Sociologies of education, so to begin to envisage how inclusion can be practised in education in a digital world which encloses visions of social futures outside or beyond neoliberalism and its colonial premises (De Lissovoy, 2010) and, as the call makes clear ‘highlights the relational premises’ of the modernist project of Sociologies of Education and ‘their “coming with” other spaces, times and more-than-human processes’ in the enactment of inclusive education policies and practices.

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