My line of inquiry centers on the hegemonic structures and ideologies that shape special education and unfolds along two interconnected strands:

1. System-level contradictions in special education
I investigate how legal provisions and policies—such as IDEA’s procedural safeguards and State Performance Plan indicators—reproduce long-standing regimes of disproportionality. Through critical policy analysis and mixed-methods data, I trace the migration of these hegemonic logics from statute to microsystem and individual levels, illuminating breaches between laws, policies, and lived realities that still reverberate across schools and communities.

2. Family navigation and access
Building on my work on sibling brokers—neurotypical siblings who act as cultural and linguistic intermediaries for relatives with intellectual and developmental disabilities (Jeong & Strassfeld, 2024)—I examine how families interpret, translate, and resist those same systemic structures. Their navigational labor surfaces the entanglements of intersecting identity markers, offering community-rooted epistemologies for reimagining more just and collaborative service models.

Through these two strands, I explore how hegemonic structures and ideologies shape both education policy and family experience, and I identify transformative paths for dismantling the borders they create.