Each year, the TASH Conference brings together our constituents to share resources and success stories, learn about field-driven best practices, and network within a community engaged in shared values. The Conference is attended by passionate leaders, experts, and advocates from every corner of the disability community. Conference attendees are influential in their fields and communities, and play an important role in the provision of services and supports for the millions of individuals and organizations around the world; and include professors and researchers from leading institutions; those involved in local, state, and federal governments and public policy; special and general educators, and school administrators; self-advocates, adult service providers; students, family members, and many others. This year’s conference theme, Building Diverse and Inclusive Communities, reminds us that equity, opportunity, and inclusion relies on the input of broad perspectives and experiences.
This presentation hopes to demonstrate the hallmark document of the Individualized Education Program (IEP) as a nonhuman agent, rendering students eligible for special education services in the United States as less intelligible as human, as not fully human, and as reproducing inequitable power structures in education. Bringing the IEP's agency to light, the authors will reframe the medical model of disability that prevails in special education to more in line with the social model of disability in which barriers from society, environments, and structures constitute individuals as different.
