Educating for Disabled Futures: The Role of Disability Studies in Decarcerating Higher Education
Thu, April 11, 2:30 to 4:00pm, Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, Floor: Level 3, Room 307Abstract
Research on diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education is largely attentive to social class, race, and gender. Knowledge of disability, by contrast, is filtered through case law, technical assistance, and bio-medical interpretation. Disability is perceived as the “expensive” diversity, often framed as an individual issue, and therefore accommodations and services only benefit the person requesting them (Emens, 2013). In student affairs and campus safety, students with disabilities, particularly those with the labels of intellectual, developmental, or psychiatric disabilities are even framed as a liability. Whereas other socio-cultural identities are acknowledged in affinity groups, cultural programs, academic disciplines, alumni events, and campus celebrations, the discourse around disability is often, “What do we have to do to not get sued?” (Emens, 2013, p. 42).
The perception of disability in higher education is predominately deficit-based, but this is not how people with disabilities describe themselves. Disability is a valuable identity, community, cultural/communicative tradition— and a troubling outcome of power. To the latter point, the historic use of segregation, isolation, and excessive force is routinely justified by constructing the “other” as though they seem disabled, not smart, and lack a “potentially worthy life” (Campbell, 2015, p. 12). The signaling of diminished capacity makes retribution, exclusion, even incarceration appear necessary, particularly in educational spaces where multiply-minortized communities are framed as underprepared and lacking motivation. Disability rights statutes and student activists made important strides to hold universities accountable, but disability is still largely considered on a case-by-case basis. This is further evidence that hostile and ableist structures of post-secondary life falsely position disabled and otherwise minoritized groups as “unfit”.
Although, it is often denigrated in a higher education context, the field of disability studies is one such transformative possibility because it exposes the for-profit arrangements and related practices of monetization and control that are pervasive in medical and school-related fields of study. Disability Studies is a field for and by people with disabilities that focuses on the health disparities and infinite creativity of a people subjected to ableism. In disability studies, disability is understood as a nuanced identity and lens through which one learns how to live differently (Ben-Moshe, 2017). As such, disability is essential to justice work and coalition building.
Disability studies is key to practices of decarceration given the historical precedent of deinstitutionalization in the 1970s and 1980s, even as it has been a fraught process and cautionary tale of success. Our critically reflexive approach to understanding higher education practices (Author, 2020) examines how two departments at a Hispanic Serving Institution in the northeast United States worked to decarcerate a newly launched disability studies program that is offered both on campus and inside carceral facilities. This paper documents the strategic partnership and curriculum development in tandem with the university’s Anti-Eugenics Project and related community-based partnerships on environmental justice, college access, reparations, and racial justice.