Email Address:amy.ferrell@ucdenver.edu
Lawrence Street Center
1380 Lawrence Street
Denver, CO 80204
Amy Ferrell (formerly Boelé) studies community, discourse, and literacy for people with disabilities. Her scholarship, which situates disability research in social, cultural, historical, racial, linguistic, and political contexts, has appeared in journals such as Harvard Educational Review, Reading Research Quarterly, Urban Education, Linguistics and Education, and International Journal of Inclusive Education. She is coauthor of the second edition of The Ethics of Special Education (Teachers College Press). Her current projects explore the profound need for critical literacy approaches in special education research and practice, from which all forms of texts are viewed as ideological and contestable. Additionally, she works to reframe the decades-long debate of inclusion in the field of special education leveraging a perspective of community as a site of mutual giving. Instead of viewing culturally derived and socially constructed norms of independence, achievement, and success as emancipatory, she proposes that true community counters oppression, segregation, and control.