Educating with Transborder Families: Dis/ability and Im/migration across Borders

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Drawing from a study with mixed-status families with children with dis/abilities in Mexico, Gallo will discuss how educators can join families as co-agitators to actively work against interlocking systems of oppression that deny educational opportunities to children with dis/abilities across the countries they call home. She will engage a transborder DisCrit (Annamma et al., 2013) framing to bring explicit attention to how undocumentedness compounds how race and dis/ability shape children’s educational experiences. A transborder DisCrit framing is anchored in the mobility and multiplicity of people’s lived realities to better reflect families’ movement, dreaming, and exclusions within and across the national systems of their diasporic homes. Gallo will argue for the urgency of practices that engage with border-crossing parents as co-agitators to collectively begin to unhinge the interlocking systems of oppression within and across national contexts that deny bilingual children with dis/abilities rigorous educational experiences, family support, and their humanity. In the final part of this session, she will invite educators into conversation to imagine the possibilities of how we can begin to un-do deficit discourses about transborder families and their children with dis/abilities to break open spaces within educational systems to agitate in solidarity.

Speaker:

Sarah Gallo
Associate Professor of Bilingual & Im/migrant Education
Graduate School of Education, Rutgers University