“It Looked Like a Jail Cell”: Policing Racialized and Disabled Students’ Bodyminds in Higher Education

• In Event: Cripping and Queering Advocacy and Experience

Abstract

This qualitative study explores how carceral logics manifest for undergraduate students who are racialized and who identify as or have the lived experience of disability. Using Disability Critical Race Theory, a crip-of-color critique, and carceral ableism and sanism as lenses, we challenge color-evasive ideology and explore how services that purport to ‘help’ or ‘support’ students —like mental health resources or disability support services— track, surveil, and police racialized and disabled students’ bodyminds on college and university campuses. We identified three overarching themes: Disability Resource Centers enactment of administrative violence; and (2) how students were positioned as expendable and disposable on their campuses, and (3) students reimagining futurities rooted in care.

Authors

• Claudia Chiang-Frost, University of Nevada - Las Vegas

• Danielle Mireles, University of Nevada - Las Vegas