Through the Eyes of the Institution: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Decision Making in Two Special Education Meetings

In this article, I present a critical discourse analysis of two Committee on Special Education meetings for one adolescent girl. Drawing on two years of ethnographic data, I look across the two meetings and demonstrate that the second-year CSE meeting is wrought with three contradictions. This article suggests the need to look to institutional discourses and cases of subjective experiences in order to understand the process of social reproduction in the anthropology of disability.