Crip Places: Dismantling Disability Discourse in the 2-Year College Literature

Representations of disabled students—by both disabled and abled people—are vital to disabled futures because they hold important implications for how abled people conceive of, and thereby support, disabled students. For years, scholarship on disability in postsecondary education has failed to interrogate the problematic narratives perpetuating inequities for disabled students. In this study, we used critical concepts of place and techniques of diversity management to analyze how disability is represented in existing scholarship. We engaged in a systematic literature review to locate 72 articles on disability and 2-year colleges and then selected 15 articles as data for a Critical Discourse Analysis. Our findings surfaced four themes that enable scholars to determine what narratives are given legitimacy: justification stories; disability as binary; localized power asymmetries; and accommodations as solution. Our findings suggest that existing scholarship uses justification stories to reinforce the idea that smartness is property leaving the pattern of disproportionate disability enrollment unexamined. We extend prior critiques of legal accommodations to include the idea that accommodations are a process by which institutions absorb, and thereby manage, disabled bodyminds. We also demonstrate how ableism happens within existing scholarship through silence (e.g., lack of positionality statements) and binaries (e.g., constructing disability as a dualistic experience). Ultimately, we lead scholars to engage in many actions, including reflecting on the roles they possess to disrupt normative narratives about disproportionate representation of disability on 2-year college campuses, interrogating limitations for disabled individuals engaging in waged labor, and elevating disabled perspectives.