ERIC Number: EJ1470149
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2025-Mar
Pages: 14
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: EISSN-1757-7438
Available Date: 0000-00-00
'Wellbeing' and the Production of Disability in the University: Erasure, Effacement and Institutional Exceptionalism
Vivienne Orchard1; Eleanor K. Jones1
Power and Education, v17 n1 p53-66 2025
This article uses 'wellbeing' as deployed within UK higher education as a starting point for examining the relationship between disability and the university. We explore various strands of scholarship that seek to critique wellbeing, universities, and/or connections between disability and these institutions. Work on 'wellbeing' identifies the harmful logics underpinning its political appropriation, but erases disability by declining to consider it as political experience. Critiques of the university efface disability by considering disablement only insofar as it affects the non-disabled, and reify 'intellect' as neutral entity and sole true purview of higher education. Work on the political economy of disability exposes crucial connections between disability and capitalism, and the role of economic and political institutions in upholding them, but relies on a distinction between worker and surplus that cannot reckon with institutional complexity. Finally, scholarship that directly confronts the university as disabling institution accounts for complexity, but hinges on an ultimately utopian vision of the university as an exceptional, salvageable space, neglecting key mechanisms by which it continues to marginalise disabled people. We suggest that reaching a fuller understanding of the university as producing disability must involve moving away from this exceptionalism and toward dialogue with critiques of other institutions.
Descriptors: Well Being, Higher Education, Attitudes toward Disabilities, Foreign Countries, Students with Disabilities, School Personnel, Disabilities, College Environment, Social Bias
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: United Kingdom
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: 1Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK