Session Information
28 SES 06, Reassembling Education Policy Trends with Actor-Network Theory
Symposium
Contribution
This paper examines the policy agenda of inclusion, using Denmark as a case. The aim with “inclusion” is to include students with special needs in the common school. This paper explores the shift from “integration” (classical special needs education) to “inclusion” with actor-network theory, drawing on sociologist Bruno Latour’s “diagnosis” of the coexistence of a ‘modern constitution’ and ‘non-modern hybridization’ (Latour 1993). It does so by tracing the construction of separations between nature and culture at two constitutive moments in the Danish history of special needs: The first moment is in the 1930s when a ‘modern settlement’ constituted special needs education as an objective science. The second is from the early 1990’s and onwards, under the headline of “inclusion”, where policy reconstitutes “special needs” as culturally constructed artifacts. The paper argues that attribution of responsibility to professionals (e.g. teachers) is rather intensified as a result of this. This has implications, both for accountability relations for professionals involved in special needs education and for the child deemed to have special needs, as special needs obtain a fundamentally ambiguous status.
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