Assigned Territories: on the Nexus of Diagnosing and Distancing in Inclusive Schools through Goffman’s Lens

In this chapter, the educational space of school is discussed – against the background of the claim of Inclusive Education. In doing so, reference is made to what Slee has called "repetition of exclusion" (2011), when schools with the claim of shared learning include practices of separation and segregation. While in many places the phenomenon is invoked and named, it remains theoretically underdetermined. Drawing on Erving Goffman's approach to social interaction, we will use the diagnosis of autism as an example to elaborate on processes of producing spaces that can provide insights into the aforementioned problem. In preliminary work (e.g. Restayn et al., 2024) we showed how the "unruly autistic body" is shaped in relation to spatially prefigured behavioural expectations and a perceived lack of the 'right (neurotypical) bodily hexis' of autistic students lead to spatial exclusion and a withdrawal of academic expectations. Here, we discuss the relationship between autism spectrum and distancing in schools and classrooms using Goffman's theory as a critical lens.