Wizards and witches: parent advocates and contention in special education in the USA

Drawing on interviews with parents of children with significant disabilities, as well as administrators and special education consultants, between the early 1990s and 2008 in a mid‐Atlantic US state, this paper examines the work of parental advocates as they translate special education policies to negotiate concessions for parents, bring issues into public debate, or attempt to incite other parents to activism. Advocates, we suggest, act as bridging agents in generating networks, connecting parents with others, articulating their knowledge with other parents’ knowledge, and bringing additional communicative resources to encounters. The paper illuminates approaches to advocacy work and traces the tensions and shifts from adversarial/participatory constructions of advocacy work toward more professionalizing/meditational constructions as the articulations of local institutional arrangements and national disability law and politics evolve.