Disability Studies and Ableism in Academia

One aspect of Dolmage’s introduction to Academic Ableism that I found particularly interesting to think about and relevant to our inquiry in this class was the conversation about how the discipline of disability studies has “emerged” within academia, the system in question that is so heavily implicated in the creation of modern structures of ableism. Dolmage frames two realities that seem to form a paradox: while disability studies can be used to “critique education”, “disability is still actively submerged or controlled within academia, in which there is no more ableist location than the university” (Dolmage, 7). Therefore, while disability studies works to deconstruct ableist systems of power, it is actively supported and maintained, as a discipline, through those systems. It was interesting to begin talking in class about how this conflict can be addressed as learners of disability studies in a higher education context. While academia has come to symbolize particularly mental/cognitive exclusion and inaccessibility, from its image to its expectations, as Price intricately expands on, it can not be separated from the overarching constructs of ability and disability. Subsequently, it seems that though disability studies can help to acknowledge where ableist constructions come from and how they are embedded into societal frameworks, it can not move to address or deconstruct them fully, as it still exists within academia. There seems to be a differentiation here between disability studies and disability justice. Though disability justice can be informed by disability studies, it encompasses much more and involves breaking down the barriers between traditionally “academic” and “non-academic” spaces and experiences, disability studies being primarily an “academic” space. To break down these distinctions, or at least challenge academia’s place in engaging with disability, both Price and Dolmage bring up the importance of stepping outside of an academic lens and including a more expansive array of voices. Dolmage emphasizes prioritzing the experiences and community-level justice-work happening outside of academia, asserting that the emergence of disability studies “cannot overwrite the activist, community-based roots of the disability rights movement, even when these connections and roots are often ignored” (Dolmage, 6). Price also surfaces, in the end note to the introduction, a belief that “incorporating narratives of experience is one way to improve access to academic prose” (Price, 23). Within disability studies work, centering personal narratives of those actually experiencing and working against the oppression and ableism being studied, becomes an important step to making academia more inclusive and accessible, perhaps comparable, under Dolmage’s framework, to flipping the traditional dynamic of academia as the “studier” and disability as “studied”.