13. What can Special & Mathematics Education Learn from Prison Abolition Movements?

In this episode, DES co-host Paulo Tan shares a presentation he recently completed on abolitionist mathematics practices at Purdue University. Drawing on Black Feminist thought on prison abolition, Dr. Tan forwards three crucial tenets (i.e., imagining utopian futures, intersectional struggles, and immediate change making) to guide the fields of special and mathematics education. Dr. Tan argues that these tenets are necessary to eliminate harms disabled students encounter in special and mathematics education while collectively building more just futures. Situating this argument in elementary schooling contexts, Dr. Tan implicates mathematics education in its complicity and perpetuation of containment, a form of incarceration that denies opportunities to certain disabled students. As such, Dr. Tan calls on educational researchers and practitioners to take up leadership in this disability freedom struggle. 

Link to view the slide deck

Books mentioned: Abolition. Feminism. Now.

Decarcerating Disability: Deinstutionalization and Prison Abolition

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