Conference Program

This paper examines how everyday negotiations around ‘support’ in higher education in England function as sites where democratic and equitable participation is materially enabled or constrained. It draws on the multi-institutional project Addressing Disparity of Support: co-creating CPD and guidelines on reasonable adjustments with disabled students, developed in continuity with earlier research on disabled student activism in higher education (Peruzzo and Raaper, 2024) and in collaboration with the grassroots organisation Disabled Students UK (DSUK). Using a participatory design with disabled student co-researchers, the study approaches Reasonable Adjustment Plans (RAPs) not as administrative provisions but as arrangements that organise recognition, legitimacy, and presence within university life. The paper therefore shifts the analytical question from whether support works to how institutions come to know, define, and govern disability.

To address this, the project develops an ecological approach informed by neo-materialist thought (Allan and Youdell, 2019), in which disability is analysed as an assemblage involving students, funding systems, administrative procedures, built environments, digital platforms, diagnostic documentation, affects, and embodied expertise. This perspective makes visible how participation depends on how relations between bodies, timetables, lecture capture systems, evidentiary categories, and accountability metrics are configured. Ableism thus operates infrastructurally, distributing capacities across human and non-human elements instead of residing solely in attitudes or prejudice.

Support infrastructures here function as regulatory pedagogies in which norms of normalcy and deviance are produced (Sandahl, 2003). Adjustments are typically organised through compensatory logics requiring students to repeatedly narrate impairments and establish credibility and validation (Peruzzo, 2022). In Dolmage’s (2017) terms, higher education maintains a ‘logic of accommodation’ that preserves institutional norms while relocating adaptation onto individuals. The result is conditional inclusion, according to which participation is permitted insofar as students align themselves with bureaucratic temporalities and evidence-informed practices.

The study adopts co-production extended by crip pedagogy (McRuer, 2006) and crip epistemologies (Johnson & McRuer, 2014). Disabled student co-researchers co-designed surveys, analysed qualitative responses from students and staff, and co-developed training resources. The findings reveal dynamics operating across temporal, organisational, and relational scales. First, support is temporally misaligned with embodied experience, where administrative predictability conflicts with fluctuating conditions, producing interruption and fatigue. Second, responsibility is redistributed downward, making inclusion an individual managerial task performed through reminders, explanations, and negotiation. Third, support generates relational asymmetries in which staff uncertainty is stabilised through students’ ongoing pedagogical labour.

The analysis moves from RAPs as administrative devices, to regulatory pedagogies, and finally to sites where democratic participation is organised through socio-material relations. Participation emerges not from formal entitlement but from how institutions configure time, communication, environments, and responsibility across human and non-human actors. Institutional redesign becomes necessary, in which access shifts from an individualised burden to a collectively maintained capacity. Disabled students’ knowledge and lived experience thus operate not as supplementary perspectives but as organising principles for imagining disabled futures (Kafer, 2013; Johnson & McRuer, 2014) and re-orienting higher education policy and practice toward a more equitable and democratic university experience.