A Foucaultian critique of learning disability discourses: personal narratives and science

In this article, I present a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of two discourses in learning disabilities (LD) – the academic research literature on emotions of students labeled as LD and retrospective autobiographies from adults labeled as LD writing about their emotions as students. Drawing mainly on Foucaultian explanations of power, I investigate how these two discourses differentially position persons labeled as LD as human subjects. I raise research and theoretical concerns to further interpret power as discursively and historically situated and point out opportunities for resisting ways the dominant positivist, scientific discourse positions students labeled as LD.