Disability in the Academy : Navigating Ableism in Higher Education

Recently, attention has been paid to higher education institutions as sites of exclusion, where experiences not fitting a narrow view of intellectual life are unwelcome. Perhaps unsurprisingly, discrimination relating to the disabled identity has come very late to this discussion. But ableism in many forms pervades our institutions, casting the lives of disabled people as marginal, even irrelevant, to the academic project. Previously, most of the limited research on ableism in higher education focused on students with disabilities, with virtually no attention paid to the life-worlds of disabled teaching and research staff. This drastically limited our ability to understand how universities reproduce ableist oppression across society. Academics with disabilities, neurodiversity, or chronic illness remain starkly underrepresented in our institutions, silencing the experience of disability in curricula, university life, and the formative worlds of graduates. Disability in the Academy shifts the conversation by introducing readers to the lives of academics with disabilities facing structural and cultural ableism, achieved through the medium of candid, meticulous auto-ethnographic accounts of what it is like to fight for both basic inclusion and the recognition of one's experience in an academy with ableism built into its physical and philosophical foundations. Vibrant, moving, and deeply informative, these accounts will form the basis for an agenda of transformation in higher education, with profound implications for disability rights across society.