BEYOND INCLUSIVE SALVATIONISM: EDUCATIONAL MANAGEMENT AND THE CAPTURE OF DIFFERENCE IN THE CONTEMPORARY SCHOOL

Abstract

This article analyzes school inclusion as an imperative of contemporary educational policies, problematizing its effects on the production of difference within the school. Using a genealogical approach, inspired by Foucaultian studies in education, it examines how school inclusion, articulated with neoliberal rationality, operates less through explicit exclusion and more through the capture of difference in the form of manageable diversity. The study focuses on the centrality attributed to educational management in public inclusion policies, highlighting how principles such as democratic management, co-responsibility, and the training of inclusive managers function as mechanisms for governing difference. It argues that, when taken as diversity, difference loses its political power and comes to exist as an object of intervention, monitoring, and regulation. In this arrangement, Special Education is repositioned as technical knowledge supporting the governance of inclusion, risking the emptying of its critical dimension. By challenging the naturalization of inclusion as an inherent good, this article proposes conceptual shifts that allow us to think about educational management, Special Education, and difference beyond inclusive salvationism and the logic of capture, betting on the possibility of another Special Education, committed to difference as a human potential.