Conference Program

Disability-inclusion has become a central commitment within global education and humanitarian policy.[i] Within the field of Education in emergencies (EiE), children with disabilities are increasingly framed as a priority, invoking the principle of “leaving no one behind.” Yet in practice, they remain among the most marginalised within education interventions.[ii] Across many displacement contexts, they are significantly less likely to enrol in school, frequently redirected toward parallel segregated services, or deemed “unsuitable” for existing educational provision. The persistent gap between policy commitments and lived realities raises critical questions about how inclusion is conceptualized and operationalized within EiE systems.

Drawing on critical disability theory, the paper examines EiE as a field in which the educability of displaced bodies and minds with disabilities is continuously negotiated, classified, and regulated through Western ableist vulnerability assessments, disability hierarchization processes, and programmatic inclusion frameworks. These mechanisms operate as governance technologies that implicitly determine which children are considered includable and educable within educational spaces. Displaced children with disabilities thus occupy a paradoxical position: they are indispensable to humanitarian actors to get funding, yet marginal to the operational logics that structure educational provision.[iii] In humanitarian contexts, educational provision typically unfolds across fragmented institutional landscapes composed of NGO-run learning centres, rehabilitation services, temporary classrooms, and specialized support programmes. While these arrangements are frequently justified as mechanisms for accommodating diverse needs, they reproduced forms of exclusion. Rather than transforming pedagogical practices or institutional structures, these systems tend to evaluate children according to their capacity to comply with existing ableist norms of learning, behaviour and performance.

The analysis builds on empirical research conducted with Syrian refugee families, their children and local disability organizations in Lebanon in 2022. Interviews with parents, children, and different organizations’ representatives, revealed a widespread perception that EiE responses prioritize children with disabilities considered easier to include—particularly those with mild or physical impairments—while children with severe or complex disabilities remain largely excluded from both mainstream and specialized educational provision. Parents often reported that their children had been refused by both mainstream schools and specialized institutions, highlighting how some children are positioned as effectively beyond the limits of educability within existing humanitarian systems.

The paper argues that these differentiated regimes of inclusion are closely linked to the political economy of humanitarian governance. Within an increasingly competitive humanitarian quasi-market[iv], organizations are incentivized to prioritize interventions capable of demonstrating rapid, measurable outcomes and cost-efficiency. Disability inclusion is therefore often incorporated into project proposals as a marker of compliance and competitiveness, while the structural transformations required to include children with more complex disabilities remain largely unaddressed.[v] At a moment marked by escalating conflicts and displacement alongside significant funding contractions across the humanitarian sector, critically reassessing how inclusion is conceptualized and implemented in EiE becomes particularly urgent. By examining how humanitarian education systems produce differentiated regimes of inclusion and exclusion, the paper contributes to debates on disability, spatialized educational inequalities, and the limits of inclusion in contexts of displacement.