Xuan Thuy Nguyen (YCAR Research Associate; Mount Saint Vincent University) is the author of the recently published The Journey to Inclusion (Sense Publishers).
Professor Nguyen’s book offers insight on the politics of inclusion in Vietnam through a Foucauldian and post-colonial perspective on disability and education. Drawing on a socio-historical analysis of the inclusion of disabled people in Vietnam in the twenty-first century, the book guides readers through a ‘history of the present.’ By reflecting on the treatment of disabled people in Vietnamese social history, the book argues that this journey to inclusion calls for critical reflections on the challenges and possibilities for policies to transform exclusion for disabled people. The book unveils the problematics of social and educational institutions in governing disability and difference through a critical reflection on discourses and power in the global and local juncture, in relation to its engagement with disability in the global South. The intersection between the global politics of disability rights and development and the local politics of inclusion in Vietnam shapes the cultural politics of education. The ways inclusive education is historically constructed, within this socio-historical condition, reflects the challenges of inclusive thought and action for transforming injustice.
The book is part of Sense Publishers’ Studies in Inclusive Education series. For more information, click here.
The book will be launched in Toronto on 14 January 2016 at 5pm at the Tranzac Club, 292 Brunswick Avenue.