ABSTRACT
Life histories provide complex insights into the struggles of people for identity and empowerment. Experience is an important mediator of policy and it is through experiences and actions that policy can be understood as the product of past struggles, penetrated by the struggles of the present. Of course the lives considered in this book are the lives of people at the margins of society, the lives of those with little or no power to affect national or local policy outcomes. They have not changed the course of special educational policy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Yet, their experiences of subordination and resistance do provide important insights into the development of that policy and its significance in relation to broader patterns of social continuity and transformation.
