Moral Failure or Structural Friction? ADHD Graduate Students Navigating Academic Belonging

• In Event: Disability in Society Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 4. Education and Work

Abstract

This study examines how ADHD graduate students construct and negotiate their academic identities across two structurally distinct national contexts, South Korea, where Confucian work ethics moralize cognitive consistency as a measure of personal character, and the United States, where a rights-based disability framework offers legal protection while imposing its own burden of bureaucratic self-advocacy. The central claim is that the same neurological traits are given radically different meanings by these two cultural systems, and that those meanings shape not only students' strategies but their inner lives.

Author

• Dahyun Ryu, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign