Inhabiting the ADA: Invisible Disability, Everyday Interactions, and Exclusion in the Precarious Service Sector

• In Event: 41025 - Experiencing and Expressing Disability Identities

Abstract

Despite the expansive promises of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), workers with disabilities—particularly those with invisible disabilities—continue to face entrenched employment and wage disparities. This paper investigates the ADA’s limited impact by shifting attention from formal law and policy to the micro-level workplace interactions through which rights are enacted, contested, or foreclosed. It analyzes how people with invisible disabilities (PWID) navigate complex decisions around disclosure, rights mobilization, and everyday exchanges with coworkers, managers, and customers. Drawing from symbolic interactionism and inhabited institutionalism, this project advances a sociological account of how disability rights are experienced and undermined within precarious workplaces. In doing so, it reconsiders what meaningful inclusion requires in the contemporary labor market.

Author

• Madeline C. Anderson, Stanford University