This is an extremely important book containing a wealth of ideas and
insights and raising important questions for discussion and further
exploration. In a lucid and cogently argued analysis, the author both
challenges dominant ideas and interp- tations and provides some
alternative innovatory perspectives. These include, the making and
meaning of policy; the varied and complex ways in which inclusion and
exclusion can be understood; the nature and function of categorisation,
labelling and discursive practices within official discourse and
procedures and the position and relationship between space, place and
identities in relation to the experience of marginalized people
including disabled children and young people. Drawing on concepts and
insights from social and cultural geography Armstrong is able to
seriously examine and discuss daily activities within institutional and
social settings in England and France from several different angles. In
sensitive, thoughtful and imaginative ways the micro-politics of social
settings and encounters are explored through a process of deconstruction
and reconstruction. Subtle, overt and contradictory features of
interactions are carefully identified and critically discussed. This
covers how meanings, decisions and outcomes of such encounters are
developed, challenged and changed. Both in relation to discussions of
the history of special education and her cri- cal self-reflections on
the research process, the author challenges homogeneous conceptions and
sanitized accounts of what, she argues, is an essentially messy process.
It is the unevenness, discontinuities and contradictions of social
conditions and relations that are depicted in insightful and disturbing
ways.
