Nirmala Erevelles

HIGHLIGHTED PUBLICATIONS

Work-in-Progress

1. Developing a book-length manuscript entitled: Cripping Empire: As if Black and Brown Bodies Matter

Books

1. Erevelles, N. (Nov 2011) Disability and  Difference in Global Contexts: Towards a Transformative Body Politic.  New York: Palgrave MacMillan. (AESA CRITIC’S CHOICE AWARD 2012)

Selection of Refereed Journal Articles:

1. Erevelles, N. (2021) The Political Economy of DisAnimality. New Literary History, 51(4), 797-804.
2. Erevelles, N. (2019) “Scenes of Subjection” in Public Education: Thinking Intersectionally as If Disability Matters, Educational Studies, 55 (6), 592-605.
3. Adams, DL & Erevelles, N. (2017).  Unexpected Spaces of Confinement: Aversive Technologies, Cognitive Disability, and the “Bare Life.”  Punishment & Society, 19 (3): 348-365. 
4. Gill, M. & Erevelles, N. (2017). The Absent Presence of Elsie Lacks:  Hauntings at the Intersection of Race, Class, Gender, and Disability. African American Review, 50 (2): 123-137. (Award Winning Article)
5. Erevelles, N. (April, 2014). Thinking with Disability Studies. Disability Studies Quarterly, 34 (2).  http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/4248.
6. Erevelles, N. (2011). Coming out crip in inclusive education. Teachers College Record, 113(10), 2155-2185
7. Erevelles, N. & Minear, A. (2010). Unspeakable Offenses: Untangling Race and Disability in Discourses of Intersectionality. Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 4(2), 127-146.
8. Erevelles, N. (2005) Reconceptualizing curriculum as “normalizing” text: Disability studies meets curriculum theory. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 37(4): 421-439.
9. Watts, I & Erevelles, N. (2004). These Deadly Times: Reconceptualizing school violence using critical race theory and disability studies. American Educational Research Journal, 41(2): 271-299.
10. Erevelles, N. (2002). Voices of silence: Foucault, disability, and the question of self-determination. Studies in Philosophy and Education  21(1): 17-35.
11. Erevelles, N. (2000). Educating unruly bodies: Critical pedagogy, disability and the politics of schooling. Educational Theory, 50 (1): 25-48

Selection of Book Chapters (Invited)

1. Ben-Moshe, L.; Erevelles, N.; & Meiners, E. (2022). Abolishing innocence: Disrupting the racist/ableist pathologies of childhood. In K. S. Montford & C. Taylor (eds). Building Abolition; Decarceration and Social Justice.  (pp. 58-67). New York: Routledge.
2. Erevelles, N. (2022). Crippin’ the Long 2020; As if Disability Matters. In M. Ryan & R. Gruisin (Eds). The Long 2020. Minneapolis/St. Paul: The University of Minnesota Press.
3. Erevelles, N. (2018). Towards Justice as Ontology: Disability and the Question of (In)Difference. In E. Tuck & K. Wayne Yang (Eds), Describing Diverse Dreams of Justice in Education. New York: Routledge.
4. Erevelles, N. (2017). The Right to Exclude: Locating Section 504 in the Disproportionality Debate. In J. Allen & A. Artiles, (eds.) World Yearbook in Education 2017:  Assessment Inequalities, pp 120 -136. New York: Routledge.
5. Erevelles, N. (2016). Beyond Ramps/Against Work: Marta Russell’s Legacy and Politics of Intersectionality. In R. Malhotra (ed.). Disability Politics in a Global Economy: Essays in Honor of Marta Russell, New York: Routledge.
6. Adams, D. L. & Erevelles, N.  (2015). Shadow Play: DISCRIT, Dis/Respectability and Carceral Logics. ”  In B. Ferri, D.J. Connor, and S. Annamma (eds.) DisCrit: Critical Conversations Across Race, Class, & Dis/ability.New York: Teachers College Press.
7. Erevelles, N. (2014). Crippin’ Jim Crow: Disability, Dis-Location and the School-to-Prison Pipeline. In L. Ben-Moshe, Chris Chapman, & A. Carey (eds). Disability Incarcerated., Palgrave MacMillan.
8. Erevelles, N. (Oct, 2011). The Color of Violence: Reflecting on Gender, Race and Disability in War Time. In K Q Hall (ed.) Feminist Disability Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Editor of Books/Section Editor of Handbook/Special Issue Journal

1. Marina Morrow & Nirmala Erevelles (Section Editors) (2024)  Disability and Intersectionality. In: Rioux, M.H., Buettgen, A., Zubrow, E., Viera, J. (eds) Handbook of Disability: Critical Thought and Social Change in a Globalizing World.  Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1278-7_91-2
2. Loutzenheiser, L. & Erevelles, N. (2019). “What’s disability got to do with it?”: Crippin’ Educational Studies at the Intersections.” Educational Studies, 55 (4). 
3. Erevelles, N., Grace, Elizabeth, & Parekh, Gillian. (2019). “Disability as Meta Curriculum: Epistemologies, Ontologies, and Transformative Praxis”.  Curriculum Inquiry, 49 (4). (transformed into a book)
4. Erevelles, N & Nguyen, T. (2016) “Girlhood and Disability: Transnational Perspectives.”  Girlhood Studies, 9 (1) Berghan Journals, New York.

BIOGRAPHY

Nirmala Erevelles is Professor of Social and Cultural Studies in Education at the University of Alabama. Her research focuses on the unruly, messy, unpredictable and taboo body – a habitual outcast in educational (and social) contexts. Erevelles asks: Why do some bodies matter more than others? In raising this question “why,” the tenor of her scholarship shifts from description to explanation to highlight the implications the exploitative social/economic arrangements have for making bodies matter (or not) in diverse historical and material contexts. Erevelles argues that disability as a central critical analytic can have transformative potential in addressing issues as varied as inclusive schooling, critical/radical pedagogies/curricula, HIV/AIDS education, facilitated communication, school violence, multicultural education, the sex curriculum, and the school-to-prison pipeline. Her insistence on an intersectional analysis foregrounds the dialectical relationship between disability and the other constructs of difference, namely race, class, gender, and sexuality and its brutal implications for (disabled) students in U.S. public schools and (disabled) citizens in transnational contexts. Additionally, transforming her theoretical leanings to committed praxis, she deploys the lens of disability studies to urge her students to think harder, deeper, and more courageously outside the confines of normative modes of education and social theory that only seek to discipline bodies rather than empower them.

Teaching philosophy

Dr. Erevelles’ teaching philosophy follows closely African-American writer James Baldwin’s (1963) argument in his essay, “A Talk to Teachers”:

“The paradox of education is precisely this — that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black, or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe…. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it — at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.”