Inaccessible Access: Rethinking Disability Inclusion in Academic Knowledge Creation

Inaccessible Access ethnographically addresses barriers to inclusion within knowledge-making. It focuses on the social, environmental, communicative, and epistemological barriers that people with disabilities confront and embody throughout the course of their learning and living and in the specific context of their higher education institutions and in research. It is presented by a neurodiverse, disabled, and non-cis cohort of authors, all of whom acknowledge a continuum of (in)access that is available to each contributor contingent on their inherent intersectionalities and alterities. The authors and editors of this book foreground the work that has yet to be done on recognizing the value of nonnormative ways of approaching, being in, and knowing research and higher education, particularly in cases where disablity-centered epistemologies are sidelined in confrontation with institutional norms, even within existing discourses concerning equality and alterity.

KELLY FAGAN ROBINSON is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow and an affiliate lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.

MARK T. CAREW is an assistant professor at the International Centre for Evidence in Disability at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He is a coauthor of Disability and Sexual Health: A Critical Exploration of Key Issues and coeditor of Physical Disability and Sexuality: Stories from South Africa.

NORA GROCE is the Leonard Cheshire Chair of Disability and Inclusive Development at University College London. She is the author of Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha’s Vineyard and a coauthor of Accessible Connecticut: A Guide to Recreation for Children with Disabilities and Their Families.