Episodic disability in the neoliberal university: Stories from the Canadian context

Abstract

This article explores how episodic disability (ED) is created and intensified by, present within, and pushed out of the neoliberalized academy in Canada. ED is an umbrella term for a range of physical, mental, and neurological conditions characterized by fluctuation and unpredictability. Over two million working‐age Canadians are affected by ED, with women more likely to be impacted. To consider how ED interacts with post‐secondary education, we put feminist disability theories of embodied precarity, crip time, and disability justice into conversation with multimedia stories created by post‐secondary women workers with EDs, with story‐makers contextualizing and theorizing their creations, and revealing their complex embodied and embedded experiences. We chose these from stories generated in two research projects focused on transforming negative concepts of disability to serve as an “archivy” of embodied precarity that challenges ED's erasure in the academy. We think with the stories to analyze power and resistance in and on gendered and raced academic bodies along three overlapping themes: debility and vulnerability in the neoliberal university; fault‐lines of neoliberal time and embodied time; and EDs as produced in, and pushed out of, the neoliberal academy. Considering interrelations between ED and post‐secondary education under neoliberalism, we argue that feminist disability theory and justice praxis challenge debilitating and exclusionary expectations that harm people with EDs in and outside of the academy.