Embodied Refusals: Conceptualizing Dissent in Students Labeled with Significant Disabilities

I met Tracy when I worked in a day program for adults with disabilities.1 At the time, Tracy was in her thirties. She communicated by humming, groaning, flapping, or waving her hands. Tracy was often solitary, sitting for hours in a chair by the window or in the corner of the room where her day program was run. If she was asked to get up and join an activity or a meal, Tracy would sometimes refuse, gluing herself to her recliner or corner seat. Despite my role as her caregiver, I was unaware of Tracy's medical diagnosis or label; rather, I worked to interpret Tracy's needs and abilities through our developing relationship with one another and in discussing with other caregivers how Tracy engages with them. Despite not knowing her diagnosis, I am nevertheless certain that Tracy is someone who would be read to have a significant intellectual disability.2 When I worked with Tracy, I came to understand her behavior, as well as her humming, groaning, and facial expressions, as forms of communication. However, I did not interpret any of Tracy's actions as evidence of political agency. It did not cross my mind that she might be expressing politically relevant preferences, resistance, or ideas. It did not occur to me that her refusals to join in activities could be expressions of intentional or deliberate resistance or meaningful transgressions of social expectations. In short, I failed to see Tracy as potentially a political agent and to read her embodied refusals as potential expressions of dissent.

The reader may be unsurprised. After all, Tracy's actions appear to lack any signaling of political motivation. Why read this behavior as an expression of dissent rather than simple noncooperation or preference expression? Indeed, isn't it obvious that a person needs to possess “normal” or normalish cognitive capacities to engage in political action? Isn't cognitive competence a prerequisite for one's engagement in dissent? These questions emerge from the prevailing view of the democratic person — the dissenting actor — who is understood to possess a high degree of reasoning ability, social independence, capacity for verbal communication, and the social and emotional skills to appear normal.3

A growing number of scholars have challenged this construction of normalcy within conceptions of political agency, as well as the corresponding reliance on able-mindedness in defining citizenship and political participation.4 These scholars have argued that definitions of the citizen largely and unnecessarily depend on the possession of a relatively high level of cognitive capacity, on verbal communicative competencies, and on independence, which many individuals with disabilities do not possess. Conceptualizing individuals labeled with intellectual disabilities as citizens may raise reasonable concerns, including questions about the role of social cooperation, trust, and reciprocity in civic relationships, as well as the worry that the presence of those with significant disabilities in decision-making structures might undermine the confidence citizens have in one another to make informed decisions and to act in the best interests of the polity. Nevertheless, these authors assert that such important questions do not override worries about the exclusion of intellectually disabled people from citizenship and must be considered alongside questions of inclusion.5

Many concerns of democratic citizenship in educational philosophy center on what Gregor Wolbring calls “ability expectations.” Ability expectations are those capabilities, dispositions, behaviors, and virtues that are desired within a particular contextualized framework of civic education and, as such, “influence the very meaning of citizenship.”6 Gert Biesta, referring more generally to philosophical conceptions of democratic citizenship (as well as programs of civic education), argues that such expectations dictate not only valued capacities but also the kind of subjectivity that is desirable or necessary in a democratic society. That is, what matters is not just what students do or know but who they are and which norms they instantiate.7 While ability expectations are central to educational theory — we cannot conceptualize learning without them — they can nevertheless devolve into ableist expectations when they express expectations that become definitional of citizenship. I am here concerned with the often unexamined conception of able-mindedness that is taken as a defining feature of citizenship, or a prerequisite characteristic of what it means to be a citizen.

In this essay, I argue that educational philosophers lack an understanding of dissent that can capture the politically relevant expressions of students with significant disabilities; dissent has largely come to mean able-minded political expression. In response, I reframe the embodied and localized refusals and transgressions of students with disabilities as forms of politically relevant dissent. While traditional frameworks of dissent may capture many of the ways disabled activists and their nondisabled allies have challenged oppressive social structures, these models nevertheless rely on a conceptualization of dissent that fails to make sense of the political agency of people like Tracy. How should educational philosophers come to conceptualize political action in a way that recognizes students' embodied refusals as expressions of political agency? How can we resist assumptions of able-mindedness in our conceptualizations of dissent?

To explore these questions, I draw on my own observational data from a college classroom, as well as the ethnographic work of disability studies scholars and critical special educators. I am methodologically influenced by the work of educational philosophers who use empirical data to develop philosophical questions and complicate existing conceptual frameworks in educational theory.8 I draw on these sources in order to develop a richer and experientially based concept of dissent. This conception, I argue, allows educational philosophers to reinterpret the actions of people with significant disabilities as potential expressions of political agency and not merely as resistant behaviors.

I begin by discussing the popular and academic understanding of dissent as deliberate and well-intentioned public action. I discuss how individuals with disabilities and their communities have engaged in such forms of dissent in efforts to challenge ableism in social institutions but argue that such efforts often reinforce the civic outlier status of people with more significant disabilities. Next, I argue that students with disabilities regularly enact what I term “embodied refusals,” forms of resistance that, while not read as well-intentioned, still challenge forces of power in schools. However, because these actions are frequently read as evidence of pathology, and therefore as nonpolitical, they go unrecognized as potential forms of dissent. To call into question the assumption that embodied refusals are not legible as political expressions, I present a case example of a student's actions that I initially perceived as nonpolitical resistance and challenge that view, offering an alternative lens through which to make sense of these actions as dissent. Finally, I delineate the scope of this essay as providing an alternative conceptual orientation toward dissent that has normative implications for theorists and practitioners alike and that requires more thoughtful attention within scholarship on citizenship, dissent, and political agency in educational philosophy.

A Note on Definition and Terminology

I do not have space to provide a full conceptual analysis of disability, certainly not one that would suffice to show the complexity of disability as a concept. Many others have given engaging genealogical accounts of disability that, among other things, reveal the contingent nature of attributions of physical or mental impairment and of bodily normalcy.9 It is important given the subject matter of this essay, however, to provide some conceptual clarity on what I mean by “intellectual disability” and “significant disability.” To start, “intellectual disability” is a medical and psychological term used in North America (and elsewhere, with variability) and defined as “a developmental disorder with onset during the developmental period that includes both intellectual and adaptive functioning deficits in conceptual, social, and practical domains.”10 Intellectual disability is further subdivided into four categories of severity: mild, moderate, severe, and profound intellectual disability.11 These categories are meant to describe differences in degree of severity of the disability, although severe and profound intellectual disabilities are often discussed as if they indicate a different (and sometimes lesser) kind of human.12 In this essay, I do not use these categorizations but rather use “significant disability” to refer to those disabilities that are regarded as significantly impairing an individual's ability to engage in educational contexts. This term, therefore, aligns with my using “person labeled with an intellectual disability” interchangeably with “person with an intellectual disability” and is meant to indicate that these are social patterns of understanding and categorizing people that act upon individuals rather than designations that track something innate.13 Furthermore, in this essay, I compare instances in which educators fail to attribute political agency to individuals who are regarded as having behavioral and learning deficits (whether they are formally labeled with disabilities or not) with instances in which people regarded as intellectually disabled are denied political agency. Such a comparison is meant to dispel the assumption that intellectual and other forms of disability are wholly different from each other and to show that this failure to attribute political agency is a problem of intelligibility rather than a function of disablement itself.

Dissent and Disability

Dissent is a sacred feature of democratic citizenship. When more constructive mechanisms of political participation feel ineffective for many, the deconstructive nature of dissent is especially promising and, indeed, necessary. In her in-depth treatment of dissent in Teaching for Dissent, Sarah Stitzlein offers the following broad definition: “dissent occurs when a citizen openly disagrees with the mainstream sentiments or the dictates of those in power.”14 By its nature, dissent resists and opposes; it occurs as protest or civil disobedience, as rule-breaking or even law-breaking, as formal or informal discourse, as sit-ins and teach-ins and marches. To offer a broad definition of my own, dissent is opposition to forces of social authority and control, including, as I will explain, forces of normalization, pathologization, and marginalization in schools.

There is a rich tradition of this kind of “admirable” or well-intentioned dissent within the global disability community. In the United States, in particular, disability advocacy groups and parents of children labeled with disabilities have challenged the political and social systems that exclude them and have led movements to insist upon legislation to protect the rights of children with disabilities to public education and other social entitlements.17 At the same time, academic activists in critical special education and disability studies in education have expressed deep concerns over the continued marginalization of students with disabilities.18 These scholars call into question the basic assumptions of special education, arguing that special education has been responsible for perpetuating a deficit view of disability.

As with other minority rights movements, public activism surrounding disability rights has experienced its own forms of internal conflict, especially surrounding the question of what state actions serve the interests of individuals labeled with disabilities. For many parents of individuals with developmental disabilities, state institutions and segregated forms of education represented safer environments for their children, shielding them from the social stigmas and dangers they expected their children to encounter in mainstream public institutions and environments.19 For those advocating deinstitutionalization, such concessions were unacceptable; people with developmental disabilities deserved the same opportunities as so-called “typical” people to experience public life in all its meanings. Resisting their marginalization within disability activism, disabled people became increasingly vocal actors in the struggle for equality in light of disability. Indeed, the slogan “Nothing about us without us” is a mainstay of the Disability Rights Movement precisely because it captures the exclusion of people with disabilities from participating in civic practices and dissenting on their own behalf. Dissenting against not only the existing practices of social, economic, and educational exclusion, people with disabilities also object vehemently to their political exclusion, and even erasure, which prevents them from challenging these practices to begin with.

However, this vital tradition of dissent dwells largely at the level of widely recognized forms of political action, including government lobbying, protesting, voter information campaigns, public scholarship, and the publicizing of critical academic research. These actions rely heavily on strategies that often require a high degree of cognitive and reasoning capacity or that are literacy-based; indeed, they elevate competencies that tend to ignore the capacities of those who do not communicate verbally, who require significant caregiver support, or whose primary mode of communication is their bodies. Moreover, these strategies of resistance are legible as expressions of political agency not only because they employ recognizable forms of resistance but also because the deliberate and good intentions of actors can be clearly read in the actions of resistance themselves.

What happens when good intentions or public aims of dissent cannot easily be read in the behaviors or actions of individuals? Indeed, what happens when intentionality or concern with a sense of collective interest appear (at first) absent, as they did in Tracy's actions, which I described at the start of the essay? Elsewhere, I have argued that in an able-bodied society — or a society built on able-bodied and able-minded expectations of ability — interpretive barriers exist for able-bodied and able-minded individuals in recognizing the communicative competencies of people with significant disabilities, and indeed in creating opportunities for those competencies to emerge.22 Within this context, understanding the meaning behind another's behaviors or actions can be a fraught endeavor. The actions, capacities, or behaviors that we regularly use to measure the presence or absence of intentions, or to assess their goodness or badness, may not be useful across the fuller spectrum of human abilities. In fact, these heuristics might themselves enable the continued political dismissal of labeled individuals, as I will discuss below.

Therefore, while recognizable forms of dissent are exercised by members of the disability community and while some individuals with intellectual disabilities do participate in the mainstream mechanisms of shaping laws and policies that serve the common good, many more are excluded because of the ability expectations such participation entails. In self-advocacy contexts, resources, such as physical, communicative, or reasoning support provided by a caregiver or fellow participant, can be vital to participation, but these supports are often regarded as liabilities in larger political arenas.23 Here, we face the problem of the legibility of dissent in people with significant disabilities for at least two reasons. First, the intentionality of the dissenting act may be present but not recognizable through heuristics that evolve out of able-minded norms. Second, the reliance on intentionality in defining dissent may conceptually foreclose the possibility that people with significant disabilities can engage in dissent. This suggests that reimagining dissent in a way that does not totally exclude the political agency of individuals with intellectual disabilities will likely require a radical conceptual shift in citizenship education. However, we need not wait for such a conceptual shift in order to identify the structural barriers to recognizing dissent in students who are regarded as having significant disabilities. Indeed, a conceptual shift likely requires this recognition. To begin, then, we can examine which actions or behaviors are understood to indicate positive intentionality and also consider the extent to which our definition of dissent relies on intentionality tied to cognitive ability that is, to a great degree, disembodied.

Pathologized Resistance

Let's first take up the problem of the legibility of intent in individuals labeled with disabilities, or those for whom the attribution of pathology (whether through a label or not) prevents that legibility. Disability studies scholars have argued that special education is one of the most restrictive and dehumanizing sites in schooling. Understood not simply as a space but as an organizing logic,24 special education and its practices reinforce the binary between able and deficient, normal and abnormal, good and bad.25 Yet special education is an extension of the restrictive and dehumanizing forces that persist in all public schooling contexts, where students' bodies and minds are subject to rigid regulation. As Beth Ferri and David Connor write, “By conforming to normative expectations and acquiring required knowledge and skills (dictated by state and federal authorities), students become socialized, standardized, and normalized. Those who do not or cannot meet these norms are designated as below standard.”26 As I will discuss in this section, the prevalent understanding of resistance as evidence of underlying abnormality or pathology undermines any reading of oppositional behavior or actions as potential dissent.

What about the students who cannot meet those norms? For some students, their very presence challenges the norms of the classroom and schooling space because their physical, cognitive, or behavioral disabilities, along with their racial identities, on their own enact a refusal to conform to the normalizing forces of public education. As Emily Russell explains, “By their difference, anomalous figures call out the naturalized assumptions that legitimate their exclusion.”32 Those students whose “anomalous” characteristics — linguistic, sensory, motor, behavioral — position them as outliers among those who follow typical timelines of development or learning patterns represent a challenge to the legitimacy of mainstream classrooms and ability tracking in schools. Because these students' bodies, minds, and behaviors resist assimilation, they reveal the classroom as a space that was not designed to formally include them or, indeed, to support their learning. While such a challenge could be taken as sign of the illegitimacy of the institution, it is far more frequently taken as evidence of student deficiency.

Rarely do school authorities read students' embodied opposition — whether it is unwillingness to conform or inability to conform — as saying anything about the school environment. In fact, it is frequently taken as evidence of their pathology. For students who are racialized as black and brown, or whose linguistic–ethnic differences are apparent, transgressive behaviors are especially at risk of being (mis)read as bad behavior. This is because nonwhiteness has always been understood through a lens of pathology; in effect, racial difference is read as evidence of underlying disability or deficit.33 A case example is the attribution of intellectual deficiency (intellectual disability) to enslaved Africans34 or the early labeling of individuals with Down Syndrome as “mongoloid.”35 The intersection of race and disability — and the sense in which racial differences are maintained through discourses of disability — is a subject of much recent critical educational scholarship. These scholars document how the expressions, behavior, and ideas of students of color are viewed through a deficit lens that marks them as either incapable of learning (disabled) or unwilling to learn (pathological).36

Disability labels, together with referrals to special education services, are frequently used in ways that dismiss students' agency and maintain the status quo of nominally “public” education.39 In fact, elements of special education policy actually facilitate these dismissals. Beth Ferri argues that this is illustrated well by the implementation of the Response to Intervention (RTI) identification and “universal screening” program.40 RTI sets up an intervention system in schools that reinforces that idea that it is the student rather than the educational system that is deficient. As Ferri summarizes, “RTI fails to question how ‘individual differences in responsiveness to instruction are not in any sense inside students,’ but rather reflect a lack of fit between the learner and the instructional model. Instead, the lack of fit becomes the evidence of the student's disability status.”41 The failure of interventions to support students' learning would seem to suggest that it is at least as possible that there is something wrong with the interventions as that there is something “wrong” with the student. And yet students' failures to respond to the “evidence-based” interventions used under RTI are taken as evidence that they are deficient,42 a move that validates the institutional context and its practices. Furthermore, this perspective on student failure to respond to intervention supports removing the threat such students pose to the school community as a whole by moving them to more specialized, and more restrictive, settings.43

In the foregoing examples, students' resistance to systems of power fail to be understood as instances of dissent. As previously discussed, it is both students' existing identities as disabled, as well as the later attribution of disablement (pathology), that undermine their potential to be seen as political agents. Because these students' bodies are read as disabled — a reading that is also highly racialized in many instances — their behavior is seen to result from cognitive inability rather than cognitive ability. Even when behaviors are seen as intentional — “bad” choices — this intentionality is understood as evidence of a pathological mind. Both readings undermine our recognition of political agency — the first suggests that the action emerges from something an individual can't help (their disability, their culture) while the second suggests that it emerges from something wrong with that individual (pathology) — and instead reinforce our pathologization of disability generally.

This was my perspective when I worked with Tracy. At the time, I did not read her resistance in terms of political agency nor did I read her behaviors as indicating politically relevant preferences, even though these acts took place in relation to the only two areas in which Tracy could exercise control: her home and her day program. I also did not read Tracy's frequent wandering as an effort to engage in her social world; to me, it was simply minimally intentional behavior that resulted from her disability. At that time, I did not conceive of a sense of political agency tied to significant disability. What sort of transformation in how we conceptualize dissent may be necessary in order to reimagine the exercise of political agency by those with significant disabilities?

Dissenting Otherwise: Acts of Embodied Refusal

Much like the teachers in Adams and Erevelles's study who read their students' resistance behaviors as biological deficits, I read Ryan's resistance and opposition as evidence of his disability. Through this deficit framing, Ryan's activities appeared to reinforce the prevalent view that people labeled with intellectual disabilities are childlike. People with intellectual disability labels are often seen as lacking the capacities that are the defining features of adulthood, such that they are not seen as adults even in the biological sense. The notion of “mental age” — describing a person with an intellectual disability as having the mental age of a four-year-old, for example — expresses this view well. Moreover, according to this view, the absence (or perceived absence) of certain capacities disqualifies an individual from membership in a particular category and flattens the complexity of their overall abilities and entitlements. In my classroom context, the internalized prejudice of intellectual disability as failed adulthood created a barrier to my recognizing Ryan's actions as expressions of resistance to a particular social project, just as it prevented me from seeing Ryan's refusal as potential evidence of his political agency rather than his disability.

A further example illustrates this well. In a project created by Ryan's group about their experience of an inclusive college classroom, students recorded clips of themselves resisting unwelcomed attributes and claiming welcomed ones. In responding to the prompt “I am not,” Ryan states, “I am not a child.” In responding to “I am,” he states, “I am Elmo, I am Elmo.” Both of Ryan's assertions operate as dissenting assertions, yet the first is more traditionally recognizable as such. The assertion “I am not a child” calls attention to and refuses the attribution of childishness or childlike characteristics to people with intellectual disabilities. This kind of dissenting statement is intelligible through what Stacy Clifford Simplican calls “compulsory capacity,” or the enduring emphasis on cognitive competence as necessary for political participation.47 Indeed, it fits exactly with a paradigmatic understanding of dissent as a verbal utterance expressing intentional resistance to oppressive social forces. By contrast, Ryan's playful assertion, “I am Elmo, I am Elmo,” would seem to undermine the first assertion. After all, Elmo is a character developed for and marketed to children. However, in the context of a statement about identity (the students were focusing on their individual qualities), Ryan's assertion is better understood as a claim to individual agency. Ryan watches Sesame Street, I prefer Scandal. We both have preferences. That's it.

By initially reading Ryan's actions through the lens of disability, I not only reinforced oppressive patterns of thinking about people with intellectual disabilities — in terms of the lowered expectations that they experience consistently in educational contexts — I also reinforced the fallacy that less socially valued forms of knowing disqualify individuals from higher forms of knowing.48 Ryan's preference for characters or activities typically associated with childhood does not mean that he is incapable of challenging, resisting, or otherwise dissenting against the expectations for citizenship of those around him. Indeed, the conflation of his preferences with incompetence would seem to be a clear case of epistemic injustice.

Such a view of political participation would require a move away from narrow definitions of citizenship that dismiss many of the actions of a wide range of people. Certainly, an important starting point is the recognition of forms of decision-making that do not rely so heavily on cognitive ability, reasoning ability, or verbal ability. Deliberative theories of political participation are perhaps the most clearly problematic for those with significant disabilities.56 In his critique of the primacy of deliberative conceptions, Michael Walzer notes, “Politics has other values in addition to, and often in tension with, reason: passion, commitment, solidarity, courage, and competitiveness.”57 Jane Mansbridge emphasizes the role of more localized and everyday political actions. In her view, deliberative theorists are far too narrow in their descriptions of and attention to deliberative practices, usually emphasizing formal deliberation in public arenas (binding decisions) rather than informal conversations or discussions in the public sphere or in private life (nonbinding decisions).58 She suggests that it is “everyday talk” among citizens on matters of public concern that informs and enables governmental decisions. An example is the snort of derision a woman makes while watching a sexist television show with a partner or family. This “political act” tells her intimate others that something is not acceptable to her, thus entering it into their consciousness as a topic of relevance.59 One can certainly imagine the significance of this act for young people and their development of political consciousness. Similarly, we might imagine a man's refusal to come out of his room for dinner as a political act within the context of a rigid and undemocratic group home life. Mansbridge suggests that everyday talk differs from formal deliberation only in degree and not in kind.60 In other words, there exist an array of deliberative actions in which each of us is engaged. Yet, these frequently go unrecognized as political acts, much like students' “misbehavior” goes unrecognized as dissent.

Reconceptualizing Dissent

In Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School, Carla Shalaby suggests that students who are regarded as disruptive and difficult should be seen as the canaries in the coalmine of contemporary education, where they act as sirens announcing the noxious dehumanization of everyday schooling practices. She insists that, rather than dismiss troublemakers as outliers to be dealt with through discipline, medication, or segregation, we must see these students as active dissenters whose challenging behavior is the product of “clipped wings, tied feet, and the rage that people naturally and understandably experience when their freedom to live as full human beings is limited to the confines of cages.”61 Like Shalaby, I am proposing that we attend to students' embodied refusals as signaling something troubling about the institutions and structures of education, not least of which is the extent to which ableist practices impede the legibility of dissent tied to significant disability.

While we typically think of the dissenting student as deliberately countering something that they feel is unjust, I have argued here that students enact their opposition to the normalizing forces of schooling in a multitude of ways, whether through intentional embodied resistance made illegible (as in the case of Jamila or the students in Adams and Erevelles's study) or in embodied and perhaps inchoate cognitive resistance (as in the case of Ryan). A more inclusive understanding of dissent recognizes the microassertions and small-scale expressions of political agency that more accurately resemble modes of political refusal available to people with significant disabilities. Moreover, the failure to read these students' actions and behaviors as dissent can constitute a failure to open up space for such students to be regarded as citizens and to have an impact on their educational and social worlds. It is certainly clear that, while it took me longer than I'm comfortable admitting, Tracy taught me something significant about the environment that she was in. And, while I am attempting to make this legible within a context in which logics of able-mindedness prevail and to a large degree dictate the influence of authorship, the lesson itself is not mine. It is Tracy's lesson, and Ryan's, lesson and the lesson of many others whom I have taught, cared for, and known.

I am mindful that some readers will be concerned that this conceptualization of dissent may potentially weaken the meaning of political action. Certainly, one could object that redefining dissent in terms of the embodied refusals of Tracy or Ryan may result in a concept that is too broad or too thin to be meaningful. If our goal is to recognize dissent, this potentially too-broad concept creates normative and practical problems. Such a worry is perhaps especially concerning when we consider the position of teachers and other school professionals, whose job is not only to socialize young people but also to keep them safe and to create an environment conducive to learning. The realities in many schools today are that teachers are not given sufficient time or professional freedom to explore the different meanings of students' actions or behavior, nor are students enabled to safely and meaningfully express their opposition to the normalizing forces of schools without being at risk of censorship through discipline and pathologization. Moreover, as has been well documented by disability studies scholars, teachers in training, whether they are special educators or not, are often presented with a conception of disability that undermines their ability to view disability as anything but a deficit that is under the purview of medical, psychological, and legal practitioners.

My objective in this essay is to challenge educational philosophers' and educators' inability to read political agency — including dissenting action — in the apparent absence of able-mindedness. I am therefore less concerned with defining dissent than with illuminating the assumptions that render some actions illegible as political actions. This does not imply that anything goes or that any behavior is “welcomed” as a dissenting action. I am not, for example, advocating that violence be rewarded (or taught) in schools. However, conceptualizing political agency in a way that does not close off the possibility of dissent in people with significant intellectual disabilities does require us to look more closely at even those behaviors that confuse, disturb, and confound us.

This essay is part of a much larger project of reimagining the civic inclusion of individuals labeled with intellectual disabilities and other disabilities regarded as significant. An understanding of dissent that avoids assumptions of able-mindedness — including those that privilege or presume the presence of verbal communication and social and cognitive independence — must begin through critical engagement with the experiences, actions, and insights of people with disabilities themselves. Further, it requires, whether on the part of the scholar or the teacher, a deep look at the kinds of assumptions that underlie one's reading of a students' behavior. Why is the presence of disability assumed to minimize one's ability to act intentionally? Why is pathology used as a tool to prevent challenges to schooling contexts? The explanation that an action results from a disability or from pathology is very often more dangerous than the assumption that it results from individual agency.63 It is my hope that recognizing localized embodied refusals will help us to better understand political dissent across the spectrum of ability and to conceptualize political agency in a way that does not rely on able-mindedness.