Critical Ethnography of Disability, Schooling, and Power in Rural Northern Nigeria

This doctoral study conducts a critical ethnographic investigation of the relationships between disability, schooling, and power in rural communities in Northern Nigeria, generating original sociological insights into how educational exclusion is produced and maintained at the intersection of structural disadvantage, cultural practice, and institutional power. Critical ethnography, which combines the observational depth of traditional ethnography with an explicit commitment to interrogating power relations and advancing social justice, is well suited to exploring the complex, historically embedded realities of disability in Northern Nigerian villages. Over eighteen months of intensive fieldwork across four rural communities in Sokoto, Zamfara, and Katsina States, the researcher conducts participant observation in schools, community spaces, and family settings, and collects interview data from forty-eight participants including children with disabilities, parents, teachers, community leaders, and local government officials. Data are analysed using critical discourse analysis and reflexive thematic analysis, with findings interpreted through post-colonial disability studies and critical pedagogy frameworks. The study uncovers the mechanisms through which families, communities, and schools collectively construct educational exclusion as natural or inevitable, and documents acts of resistance and agency by disabled children and their advocates that challenge these constructions. The study makes an original contribution to African disability studies scholarship and to the critical ethnographic study of education in contexts of intersecting disadvantage. Keywords: critical ethnography, disability, power, rural Northern Nigeria, educational exclusion.