Special Issue: Disability and Special Education

Special Issue: Disability and Special Education

Much research on special education remains focused on its practical elements, often evaluating present operating conditions of special education as a service system. This includes work focused on practice improvement, evaluative projects of existing interventions or programs, and examinations of educator preparation, teaching practices, and policy decision-making. This work has been and continues to be valuable in identifying gaps in existing practice, particularly in ways that are legible to policymakers and school systems, in turn creating opportunities for improvement and accountability within formal systems.  

At the same time, such research contains important trade-offs and limitations. Dominant special education research often treats disability as a fixed variable, sidestepping theories that assert the social and historical construction of disability. Conceptualizing disability as a variable also favors certain methods that are viewed as generalizable and scalable (e.g. large-scale quantitative studies). Given the research aims, these studies are typically conducted by professionals for a professional audience, and only marginally center the voices of disabled students and scholars. Therefore, this special issue calls for historical and/or critical scholarship that unsettles assumptions in dominant research. Importantly, we seek to reorient the starting inquiry point by exclusively seeking scholarship from those with lived disability experience or close ties to disability communities. Moreover, amidst a hostile federal policy landscape that de-prioritizes and attacks disabled people and their services, it is urgent to platform disabled voices and research that asserts disabled people's humanity and self-expertise. 

This special issue on Disability and Special Education welcomes contributions related to disability in education and/or special education across all three of HER's usual submission categories (research articles, essays, and voices). In particular, we are seeking scholarship in the following three areas, though these are not meant to be exhaustive:

1. Historical: work that uses historical methods (such as archival methods, oral interviews, historical ethnography, etc.) or seeks to otherwise historically situate some aspect of special education and/or the experiences of disability in education. Pieces can cover any time period and any educational setting (e.g., formal school, institutions, home instruction, community-based educational organizations).
2. Critical: pieces that challenge the assumption that disability is a fixed category of difference. Work that highlights the constructed, contested, and historically situated nature of disability as a category of difference. This work could offer structural analysis and critique, and consider questions about power, privilege, and resources. We also welcome pieces that consider abolitionist approaches to special education or other radical alternative visions of special education.
3. Disability-led: pieces about special education written by and/or centering disabled scholars. In addition to work that also falls into the other two areas, we welcome reflections on special education or experience with disability/ies in schooling, personal writings, artwork, narrative work, and poetry. We welcome work from a variety of methodologies and formats, including autoethnography and action research.

Submissions

This portal is where potential contributors will submit both their abstract for consideration and their full manuscript. 

The Call is first for Abstracts or Descriptions (250 words); due January 1, 2027 and should include

•  A description of the topic
• How the topic connects to the special issue  
• A description of the main argument or intended argument

And if applicable:

• A description of the theoretical and/or empirical work that informs the manuscript 
• A discussion of the data and methods used in your analysis  
• A discussion of the manuscript's scholarly significance to the field of education

The Manuscripts for publication: due February 15, 2027

Research articles or essays, including (but not limited to) original research based on empirical studies, and theoretical essays grounded in literature. Research article or essay submissions should be no longer than 9,000 words.

Voices: Reflective Accounts of Education, written by students, teachers, parents, community members, and/or others involved in education, whose perspectives can inform policy, practice, and/or research. Submissions of this type generally contain a detailed narrative that weaves ideas, situations, and experiences together, and highlights key learnings. Please note that for this Special Issue, Voices submissions should be no longer than 5,500 words. 

 We strongly suggest review our general Guidelines for Authors, which can be found at: https://www.harvardeducationalreview.org/page/guidelines-for-authors

If you have questions about your submission, such as its topic, relevance, or format, please contact the special issue's Managing Editor, Luci Duffy lduffy@g.harvard.edu