This article introduces the special issue, Disability Studies in Education.

Baglieri, Bejoian, Broderick, Connor, and Valle assert that imagining schools as places where children can find belonging and community conjures values and ideas with which few would argue, wherein democracy is posed as the political ideal of our culture. Within the context of this broad cultural and political discourse on schooling, the authors argue that the [re]claiming of inclusive education provides a heuristic concept and political agenda around which many strands of critical educational reform can cohere. At the center of this critique is the myth of the normal child—an idea of interest to scholars in the fields of disability studies in education, and disability studies more broadly, and an idea the authors seek to explore with critical scholars engaged in allied work seeking to contest, resist, and mitigate educational inequities. The authors contend that the commonality among a wide variety of ideologies of difference is rife with underexplored promise for allied work in inclusive education reform.

Having brought together scholars to consider inclusive education within both their own and others’ disciplines, research perspectives, and agendas, the authors reflect on what these contributions say—individually and collectively—about inclusive education. Furthermore, they critically consider what all of this says to and means for educational scholarship, schooling, and society at large. In this final piece to the special issue, the authors foreground ways that interdisciplinary conversations among critical scholars can serve as powerful arenas in which to forge alliance-building across disciplines.