Emil Søbjerg Falster

The term ‘special needs’ encompasses various definitions of what is considered ‘special’ for children with functional variations. These definitions reflect societal views shaped by politics, economics, governance, and knowledge, all of which significantly impact how children with varying abilities engage in society, how they are treated, and what positions are available to them. This article explores the dominant categorizations of special needs in Danish legislation and practice, highlighting the tension between these definitions and different disability models. These models differ in their approach to how special needs are understood, explained, and situated in relation to a child’s challenges within an institutional context. Using a Foucauldian governmentality approach, we examine the term within Denmark’s legislative framework for daycare and education and conclude that the term (still) fosters highly individualized and functionalistic approaches. Concerns are raised about the concept of special needs, emphasizing the need for critical reflection on how it influences processes of inclusion and exclusion in modern societies.

This chapter elucidates how COVID-19 has affected the everyday lives of children and young people with physical impairments. The chapter challenges one-sided accounts of the pandemic as an inequality-reinforcing event and presents a more ambivalent, surprising, and potentially transformative picture. While a social crisis such as a pandemic is often conceived as a temporary condition demonstrating a sense of loss of balance and control, such a disordered state of being is ‘the normal’ rather than an exception for many disabled children and young people. The analysis reveals how the pandemic has opened new opportunities and ways of participation and inclusion while at the same time not radically altering the everyday lives of disabled children and young people, as social isolation is already a part of their lives as a result of both disablist barriers and impairment effects. The chapter discusses how such insights can form a basis for improving the lived citizenship of disabled children and youth. The analysis is based on empirical contributions from 19 children and young people, including interviews and written texts. Theoretically, the chapter draws on concepts from the literature on lived citizenship and the social-relational model of disability.

Using a Foucauldian governmentality approach, this article examines the connections and tensions between rationalities relying on recognition and democratic ideals, and the educationally and developmentally oriented rationality that characterises the pedagogical regime of practice in Denmark. The conclusion is that rationalities of recognition and democracy are subordinated to an educationally and developmentally oriented rationality. Thus, in practice, the former are transformed into an instrument for fulfilling educational and developmental objectives, with a primary focus on the child achieving an age-appropriate level of development.