University Inclusion Practices – Re-Encountering the Status Quo: An Interpretive Approach

Abstract

My aim is to forge a feel for the importance of building critical understandings of common forms of engagement with disability and in this way work against the careless-care that seems to surround the ways disability-experience is managed in education. First, I discuss what this interpretive dse approach entails. Second, I narrate being in the University classroom with my dyslexic ways and counterpose this to “access statements” on course outlines which are now a common occurrence in the Canadian context. I then conduct an interpretive analysis of the meaning of disability as it appears through my personal story and these bureaucratic statements of inclusion. Despite these differing instances of inclusion, I show how both maintain the status quo of university work-life. Through a politics of wonder, this paper aims to invigorate life affirming relations where disability might figure as something other than a pharmakon for the status quo.