Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education

✍ Scribed by Jay T. Dolmage

• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Year: 2017
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 255
• Series: Corporealities: Discourses Of Disability
• Edition: Illustrated
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Academic Ableism brings together disability studies and institutional critique to recognize the ways that disability is composed in and by higher education, and rewrites the spaces, times, and economies of disability in higher education to place disability front and center. For too long, argues Jay Timothy Dolmage, disability has been constructed as the antithesis of higher education, often positioned as a distraction, a drain, a problem to be solved. The ethic of higher education encourages students and teachers alike to accentuate ability, valorize perfection, and stigmatize anything that hints at intellectual, mental, or physical weakness, even as we gesture toward the value of diversity and innovation. Examining everything from campus accommodation processes, to architecture, to popular films about college life, Dolmage argues that disability is central to higher education, and that building more inclusive schools allows better education for all.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Introduction
Disability Studies and Rhetoric
Eugenics and Colonial Science
Snapshots of Exclusion
A Note on (Plain) Language and (Open) Access
Coda: Ableist Apologia
1. Steep Steps
Steep Steps to Ivory Towers
Eugenic Mergers
Sickness and Wellness
Climbing the Steep Steps
Creating Steep Steps
2. The Retrofit
Defeat Devices
Cover Your Ass
The Affect of Accommodation
From Eradication to Negotiation
Digital Curb Cuts (to Nowhere)
#AcademicAbleism
“A Rights-Demanding Bunch”
3. Imaginary College Students
Somnolent Samantha
Super Samantha
Slow Samantha
Critical Multimodality
4. Universal Design
Deep, Transformative, Tolerant, Redundant
On Futurity
Bringing Disability, Usability, and Universal Design Together
Histories
Critiquing Usability and Universal Design
Futures for Disability, Usability, and Universal Design
We Need to Talk about Universal Design
Posing Problems
Interest Convergence
We Need to Talk about Universal Design in the Neoliberal University
Landmarks
The Digital Lives of Universal Design
Checklistification and Neurorhetorics
5. Disability on Campus, on Film: Framing the Failures of Higher Education
Segregating Difference
The Educational Construction of Disability
Failure and Refusal
The Disabled Professor: How to Win an Oscar
Not Yet
Commencement
Notes
Bibliography
Index