Blazing trails, being us: A narrative inquiry with five high school students with autism who type to communicate

This dissertation chronicles the experiences of five high school students with autism who type to communicate as they navigate the terrain of high school, adolescence, and identity through collaboration and dialogue with one another, their school support team, and the inquirer (researcher). This study employs a multilayered approach to narrative inquiry to unravel and (re)present the students’ (co-inquirers) individual and collective stories as constructed through observation, performance, dialogue, and art. While acknowledging the importance of families and school personnel, the students’ storied lives and perspectives—as well their participation in constructing the inquiry process—are foregrounded to supplement research dominated by adult, and/or spoken voices. Grounded in a disability studies in education framework, this work traverses the institutional, performative, and dialogic landscapes that the students help to shape (and are shaped by) to reveal the complex interplay between diverse ways of being and communicating, dominant discourses of normativity, and resistance through advocacy, inclusion, and research. The reader is invited to follow along as the students cultivate community through (inter)action grounded in shared experience, inclusive educational contexts, and emerging ownership of their situated identities as individuals with autism who communicate in diverse ways. They/we feel compelled—by default and/or design—to put these perspectives and stories into the world as counter-narrative(s). In both content and form, the (re)presentations emerging within/out of this inquiry start a conversation about the constraints of research and inclusion understood solely as practice, advocating for a broadened conception of both as co-constructed, relational experiences

Chosen Nation: Biblical Theopolitics and the Problem of American Christian Nationalism

Christian theopolitics presupposes that every salvation narrative entails a politics, and that every politics presumes a story of salvation. This means that the church faces a host of theopolitical structures contending with the Christian story for the allegiance, formation, and identity of Christians. However, theopolitical scholarship has largely overlooked or misunderstood one of the church\u27s major challenges today: nationalism. Moreover, this scholarship is unable to properly address the challenge of nationalism due to an inadequate engagement with biblical theopolitics--particularly that of Old Testament Israel--which, in distorted form, is central to nationalism emanating from within the church. In order to supplement theopolitical studies in this regard, this dissertation engages nationalism scholarship to better understand the phenomenon and its relationship to Christianity. It finds that within certain nationalist movements, theological moves are at work that make possible both the formulation and propagation of a national identity that places the nation squarely within the Christian salvation narrative, usually as an extension of Israel, and thereby supplanting the church. In response to this problem, the study develops a biblical theopolitics from both Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible. This theopolitics presents Israel as the elect and covenanted People of God whom Yahweh establishes as a visible sign of salvation to the nations, the definitive social, political, and economic human community. While Israel diverges from this vocation, Yahweh still provides for its fulfillment by incarnating both Israel and Yahweh in the person of Jesus Christ, culminating in Christ\u27s suffering and exaltation. Christ subsequently establishes the church to carry on the embodiment of covenant fulfilled, dissertationing it to the rest of humanity. By way of example for the theopolitical scholarship it is intended to supplement, the final part of the dissertation examines Christian nationalism in the United States, both in the form of popular narratives put forth by the American Christian Right, as well as more sophisticated academic political theologies. It evaluates these discourses, determining that their attempts to authenticate a particular national identity inevitably distort Christian understanding of the biblical narrative, and thus the identity and practices of the ecclesia