What the pandemic took from us: stories from students with intellectual disabilities in COVID-19 times

Abstract

This article aims to report the experience of students with intellectual disabilities who go through their schooling in secondary schools located in contexts of urban poverty in the Metropolitan Region of Buenos Aires. From a qualitative methodology, we focus on the voices of two students who narrate their school experience in times of confinement. We argue that it is essential to recover the voices of those who are recipients of inclusion policies that assume, in times of overloaded neoliberalism, a cosmetic practice as a form of overlapping of the inequalities that people with disabilities experience every day. Strictly speaking, this is not new, but rather, the effects and effects of the policies deepened the marks of exclusion that the group experienced in times of COVID-19. This situation leads to the need to analyze and discuss the material conditions they inhabit and how schooling is developed. In the stories, the tensions they experienced are evident, in times of quarantine, as obstacles but, at the same time, of different practices that allowed them to display their powers and abilities.