Accepting Educational Responsibility for Disability Injustice in Higher Education: Disabling Barriers and Recommendations Toward Justice

• In Event: Enacting Disability Justice in Higher Education

Abstract

Disability accessibility services legally protect educational institutions and provide partial access to eligible students by responding to identified barriers with prescribed “reasonable” accommodations. However, we must move towards proactively providing all disabled students with the accessibility and inclusion that is automatically experienced by their nondisabled counterparts in such areas as education, extracurricular activities, and housing. The autoethnographic data expose barriers that disproportionately disable students of historically marginalized groups. This scholarly activism justifies an urgency for change and prepares leaders to identify, hold ourselves accountable for, and go on to change our institutions’ disability injustices during and after COVID-19 in a way that removes burdens from students who already face the barriers exposed in this paper.

Author

• Deanna Parvin Yadollahi, Community Activist & Graduate Student