Embedded Files
Original pattern by: Muggins (2019)
POSITIONING MYSELF
POSITIONING MYSELF
Identities are complex. Even if we try to isolate a certain part of our identities, like the brown stitch in the center, the blue still surrounds it and expands out into a broader, interconnected pattern. No single thread or stitch exists in isolation. Oppressive systems are interconnected, too-- ableism reinforcing racism, racism reinforcing patriarchy, patriarchy reinforcing classism.
Disability Justice Commitment: Intersectionality and Recognizing Wholeness
I commit to analyzing my lived experience through an anti-ableist, anti-racist, critically inclusive lens. I commit to rejecting deficit-based narratives of my identity and honoring my inherent worth and complexity.
Lys Adel Pinkerton is my name. Names can tell us a lot about where we come from and what helped shape our identities. My given name, Alyssa, was given to me by my mother, who loved the rhythm of how it sounded. I have since chosen to go by Lys, a nickname I had growing up that feels more reflective of how I see myself. I am nonbinary, and the feminine associations that go along with Alyssa do not appeal to me. However, my family and my wife still call me Alyssa. It gives a sense of intimacy knowing that they fully know me, syllables strung together that represent a piece of me. Pinkerton represents patrilineal English, German, and Irish settler colonial roots, while Adel is a name that has been passed down matrilineally-- it is my grandmother's name and my great-great-grandmother's name. My matrilineal side represents Pueblo Indigenous roots and Spanish settler colonial roots. Because patriarchal contexts generally pass down names from man to man, I am grateful for this explicit trace to my female elders and ancestors. I carry both Pinkerton and Adel with complexity. I simultaneously am grateful for my existence, and hold the layers of colonialism woven into my stories.
While my ethnic background is complex, my race is white. I move through the world with racial privilege based on how others perceive me. Initially, the thought of writing about myself made me very uncomfortable. It seemed inappropriate to center my whiteness in a field that systematically rewards whiteness and oppresses Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). I still hold this tension. At the same time, confronting these systems is not the sole responsibility of those most directly impacted by oppression. It can be incredibly laborious for BIPOC communities to bear the burden of educating others on top of navigating systemic harm. It is also the responsibility of white people like myself who benefit from these systems.
“Progressive white intellectuals who are particularly critical of ‘essentialist’ notions of identity when writing about mass culture, race, and gender have not focused their critiques on white identity and the way essentialism informs representations of whiteness” (hooks, 1992, p. 30).
hooks (1992) is calling out how often white scholars like myself critique the way other identities get essentialized while leaving whiteness unexamined. Whiteness gets treated as something that is neutral, something that does not need examination, which is how it maintains its authority. When white critics refuse to see our own whiteness, we get to imagine ourselves as objective observers rather than active participants in the systems we are critiquing. hooks (1992) exposes the contradiction that we cannot claim to challenge essentialism while simultaneously protecting the essentialism built into our own identity. This notion is what led me to critical autoethnography as a methodology: the realization that, despite engaging in activism, adopting symbolic inclusive values, and having “good intentions”, I had yet to thoroughly examine my own whiteness and privilege. My positionality statement is not a one-time disclosure. My thesis, in many ways, IS my positionality statement. My positionality is inextricably tied to and woven through the entirety of this study. I prioritize the ethical responsibility to interrogate my own complicity in systems of power and commit to an ongoing process of becoming and embodying change (Holman Jones, 2016).
I am a queer trans/nonbinary ADHDer. My passion for teaching stems from difficult experiences in my K-12 education. I experienced profound distress and isolation, especially in my secondary schooling experiences. I was desperate to fit into normative expectations. However, I slipped by unnoticed because I was quiet and managed to achieve high grades. I felt so misunderstood and undervalued. I started getting into dangerous situations and engaging in risky behavior. At that time, I did not have the language or understanding of normativity, but I knew that I did not want any child to suffer in silence like I did. The years I spent masking grew into internalized shame that I continue to deconstruct and understand. In my adulthood, I have come into my queer and neurodivergent identities.
I also want to acknowledge that I do not speak for all disabled communities, nor do I speak for all ADHD brains, and certainly not for every queer person. In fact, my class and racial privilege have shaped my experiences of neurodivergence and queerness. The following video explores my identity through a disco ball lens: I am a disco ball of influences, privileges, vulnerabilities, and choices shaped by context, power, and relationships. It critically examines how normative assumptions position independence, silence, stillness, speed, and compliance as what constitutes a “good” student.
Original pattern by: Spincushions (2019)
CONFRONTING NORMATIVITY
This thesis focuses on normativity. Normativity concerns what people "should" do, believe, or value. Generally, it is a force that privileges white, upper-middle class, heterocisgender, neurotypical, and non-disabled standards. The boxes in this square represent series of norms and expectations in schools.
Disability Justice Commitment: Commitment to Cross-Movement Organizing
I commit to confronting normativity as an interconnected system that works to advantage privileged identities and disadvantage marginalized identities.
I grew up in a suburban, predominantly white neighborhood in the United States. This context heavily influenced my understanding of the world. I bring this understanding into a four-year teacher education program and a master's program in inclusive education. In the four-year bachelor's program, my major was elementary and special education. My focus centered on accessibility-- giving disabled students access to accommodations and modifications. In the context of the crocheted square above, giving students access to the box. If a student doesn't fit, how can we accommodate them? Later, as a graduate student, my mindset shifted. My focus now centered on inclusion-- changing the environment to include all students. In the context of the crocheted square above, questioning are these boxes even necessary? Instead of changing the students, can we change the boxes?
My initial engagement with anti-ableism snowballed into critical and anti-oppressive fields. I began to understand that forces of ableism intertwine with other oppressive systems, such as racism and classism. In school systems, students are separated and categorized based on their disability designations. At the same time, segregated special education settings have long been populated with students from marginalized ethnic and racial groups, immigrant populations, and students marginalized by poverty (National Council on Disability [NCD], 2019). As Annamma et al. (2013) put it, “racism and ableism often work in ways that are unspoken, yet racism validates and reinforces ableism, ableism validates and reinforces racism” (p.6). And it doesn't stop at ableism and racism.
At the center of these dynamics is normativity. Normativity concerns what people "should" do, believe, or value. Generally, it is a force that privileges white, upper-middle class, heterocisgender, neurotypical, and non-disabled men. Since colonial educational systems and paradigms in Turtle Island (North America) were built by and for this demographic, normative assumptions are embedded within the structures of schooling. Settler colonialism and capitalism are foundational for understanding why our education system works the way it does, and how it influences beliefs about education (Roberts, 2024). In my own context, I began to make connections to implicitly oppressive patterns in my teaching practice and beliefs, and rethink how I view inclusive education as a whole. Therefore, I have come to understand inclusive education not as integrating students with disabilities into general education classrooms, but as reconfiguring “physical and social structures to welcome diversity (e.g., of abilities, culture, ethnicity, and gender identity)” (Inclusion BC, 2026, para. 3).
It is not enough to confront normativity. This study focuses on the active deconstruction of it. This includes the research process. To guide this work, Disability Justice serves as my foundational ethical framework. It is a framework made up of 10 principles that originates from disabled queer women of color, including Patty Berne, Mia Mingus, and Stacey Milbern (Sins Invalid, 2015): (1) Intersectionality; (2) Leadership of the Most Impacted; (3) Anti-Capitalist Politic; (4) Commitment to Cross-Movement Organizing; (5) Recognizing Wholeness; (6) Sustainability; (7) Commitment to Cross-Disability Solidarity; (8) Interdependence; (9) Collective Access; (10) Collective Liberation. Instead of using Disability Justice as purely an analytical lens in this study, it is an embedded ethical commitment. Perhaps most importantly, Disability Justice did not come from an institution. It came from grassroots community organizing and lived experiences of multiply marginalized disabled folks. I address and reaffirm these commitments throughout this study.
Original pattern by: Madelenon (2019)
DECONSTRUCTING NORMATIVITY
I argue that there is a need to deconstruct normativity-- to question it, pick it apart, expose the gaps, and analyze it from every angle.
Disability Justice Commitment: Leadership of the Most Impacted
I commit to learning from and with multiply marginalized self-advocates and scholars. I commit to honoring and prioritizing lived experience.
For inclusive education to actualize, and for diversity to be understood as the norm, scholars call for a paradigm shift (e.g. Slee, 2022; Walker, 2021a). This paradigm shift calls for an audit of ableism in our school system (Slee, 2022), but, again, ableism is interconnected with other forms of oppression. In recent years, more scholarship has focused on how these systems interact with one another (e.g. Cruz et al., 2024; Naraian, 2021), but less attention is given to the intimate ways that teachers internalize, perpetuate, and deconstruct normativity embedded in teacher education. This intimacy is key. Limited research has addressed the embodied, transformative process of teachers moving beyond oppressive notions of education towards a critically inclusive education. Given the need for the shift in underlying belief systems and how oppressive systems function intersectionally, I plan to explore my own intersectional experiences as a white nonbinary, neurodivergent undergraduate and masters student to analyze how normativity operates in education systems through critical autoethnography. Critical autoethnography involves the self (auto), the context/culture (ethno), and the writing (graphy) while explicitly centering critical analysis.
Although I can trace a shift from a less inclusive stance to a more inclusive one, I do not yet understand the when, how, or why of that change, nor can I name the themes, patterns, tensions, and nuances that structured it. This study does not aim to center my experience as universal, but to use it as a site of analysis and reflection. The work of BIPOC and disabled scholars and self-advocates is fundamentally reshaping my relationship with anti-racism, whiteness, and disability (e.g. Annamma et al., 2013; Cruz et al., 2024; hooks, 1994; Roberts, 2024; Sins Invalid, 2016; Yu, 2024). Critical autoethnography calls for theory as a collaborator, inviting me to construct meaning in collaboration with the work of BIPOC and disabled scholars and self-advocates (Holman Jones, 2016). It also demands that I do not treat my reflexivity as a one-time disclosure, but as an ongoing, iterative process (Boylorn & Orbe, 2021).
Research Question: What is my transformative process in internalizing, perpetuating, and deconstructing normativity in my teacher education experiences?
By examining my journey from a four-year undergraduate degree in education to a graduate student and researcher in education, I aim to explore the impact of normative thinking embedded in schools, analyze my own process of paradigm shift, and generate accessible research through a multimodal website. I will analyze educational artifacts through Arts-Based Research (ABR) and Reflexive Thematic Analysis (RTA) through a critical conceptual lens, operationalizing anti-racism, anti-ableism, DisCrit, InCrit, and Neuroqueering (hooks, 1994; Annamma et al., 2012; Cruz et al., 2024; Walker 2021b).
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