The journey serves as a key metaphor for the book and from the start, Nguyen takes us on a journey with her vivid ethnographic descriptions, one that promises and succeeds in highlighting the exclusionary logics of inclusion. For Nguyen, the journey serves to "[reconnect] our past and present, our global and local… [and serves as means to see] the constructions of discourses and power" (9) within education. The reader is taken from the streets of Vietnam to international discussions around development and back again to the schools of Vietnam. The reader will learn that this journey is one that Nguyen takes as she grapples with her own embodied histories and struggles towards inclusion.

Nguyen's The Journey to Inclusion is a landmark work that highlights an area that is little studied within the field of disability studies. Even as scholars have called for more attention to be paid to theorize disability in the Global South, Southeast Asia has remained curiously under-examined. Thus, Nguyen's The Journey to Inclusion is one of the first monographs that studies disability within a Southeast Asian nation-state.

By focusing on the specific case of education in Vietnam, Nguyen examines the ways in which the politics of education "in/exclude school populations" (3), within the frame of the "hegemony of inclusion" (108). The paradigm shift towards the inclusion of disabled people is gaining speed globally, and Nguyen's monograph serves as an important call to examine how inclusion can also serve to exclude, both internationally and in Vietnam. Taking a Foucauldian approach, the book examines how "social, political, and educational institutions have shaped inclusion and exclusion through a normative system of thought, values, and ideologies about social difference" (3), situating disability in Vietnam within transnational discourses of disability, human rights, and development. The book thus argues that the "normative standards of human rights and freedoms" (12) espoused within both international and local discourses of inclusive education must be exposed to uncover the problematic logic based upon ableism and the market.

Chapter Two begins by tracing a genealogy of disability in Vietnam, focusing on education and examining how inclusion and exclusion of disabled people can be understood across the pre-colonial, colonial, postcolonial, and socialist regimes. Across different epistemes, she shows how the disabled body is considered and managed. In traditional Vietnamese culture, she notes how the tale of Sọ Dừa marks the normalisation of disabled bodies. But with the emergence of colonisation, a biopolitics of disability emerges, one which surveils, regulates, and differentiates the disabled body through colonial education. The administration of the disabled body carries on in the postcolonial period with rehabilitation and importantly, with the economic reform and opening up of Vietnam to global markets, there is an emergence of international discourses around development and education. Across these periods, she would argue that normalisation is the aim of these technologies, as disability came under the gaze of the state and its institutions.

Chapter Three moves from Vietnam to the global. Discussing the global framework of inclusion, Nguyen shows how a new form of governmentality of disabled bodies has emerged with the rise of development. She traces the emergence of "inclusion" as a discourse in the World Bank and argues how the focus on development instead serves to enhance human functionality. Within this biopolitical logic, international development regimes function to exclude disabled people. Importantly, Nguyen calls for us to challenge the "benign concept of inclusion" (86) and to consider the "sets of values and ideologies framed within the global agenda on human rights to inclusion" (66). She points out the neoliberal logics of these international ideologies aimed at maximizing the cost-effectiveness of the development dollar, which focused on the mainstream of disability within local practices. Through an analysis of these international discourses, Nguyen argues convincingly that while inclusion serves to grant "disabled people rights and equal opportunities, the new framework of inclusion institutionalizes the bio-medical model of disability in both global and local contexts (82)".

In Chapter Four, Nguyen examines the case of inclusive education in Vietnam, situating it at the "convergence of global and local histories" (92). She critiques educational programs administered by international NGOs in Vietnam, arguing that it constitutes a particular form of social mapping where problems are constructed through the practice of schooling. She goes on to examine how inclusive education constructs the Other and how it is reproduced in educational institutions in Vietnam. Lastly, she goes on to highlight the tension between the discourse of inclusion and the managerial regime of governance within such schools. Here, she pays special and careful attention to draw out how international policies around development are cascaded into the local and how the disabled body is imbricated within such networks of power and subject to surveillance and discipline. Nguyen argues that these international programs on disability and inclusive education, while well-meaning, saw a continued focus on the normalization of the disabled child. The problem that she highlights is not that we should abolish such developmental programs, but rather, there is a need to adopt a critical and reflexive lens towards them. As a means to challenge such hegemonic discourses of inclusion, Nguyen shows how a critical praxis can begin to question the politics of participation and representation of disability in Vietnam in Chapter Five. Using participatory visual research, she highlights how key principles such as grassroots monitoring, engagement and recognition of local communities and disabled people as knowledge producers can contribute to a critical praxis which aims to challenge "objectified representations of [disabled] bodies in dominant discourses" (147).

After bringing the reader on a journey across different spatialities, Chapter Six returns to the question of inclusion and pivots the journey towards the future. Nguyen affords a critical reading of her own political project in the book; one which uses the text as a voice to rethink "the politics of knowledge – the way knowledge constructs social, political, and educational institutions; and the way constructive, critical, and political knowledge could take an important role in re-imagining the human world through imagination and criticality" (174). Her critique of inclusion must then be seen as an invitation to think about social justice, to give voice to the global South and to engage in "an inclusive and transformative dialogue where [the] politics of engagement can begin to make change" (175).

In this call for a critical praxis, Nguyen succeeds in bringing us full circle in this journey, offering the reader not only an insight into the reification of inclusion but also possible ways to challenge it. In seeking to illuminate discourses around inclusive education and international development, the metaphor of the journey then also serves as an invitation for future scholars to explore on these stops that she takes us on. This is in fact her major contribution. Within the global South, many nation-states today have embraced neoliberal logics of development; the implications on disability within this frame of inclusion has yet to be properly understood. At the same time, as Nguyen brilliantly shows, the Foucauldian approach in tracing a genealogy of inclusion serves as a key opportunity to consider the normalization of the disabled child within inclusive education. Future work should consider the ways in which such frames of inclusion within different regimes of governance, such as employment or assistive technology, also serve as a means to manage the disabled body.