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.

This contribution aims to show the potential of Embodied Inquiry (Thanem & Knight, 2019; Leigh & Brown, 2021; Ferri, 2022) as a research methodology focused on empowerment and the possibility of being a sounding board for the voice of disabled people and bodies (Oliver, 2023; Gottardo, 2025a), thereby democratizing research and educational contexts. Starting from studies on embodiment (Gomez Paloma, Raiola & Tafuri, 2015) and Crip Studies (Valtellina, 2024; Centrone, 2025), a survey conducted with women with fibromyalgia will be presented, aimed at intercepting the knowledge generated by bodies about bodies themselves.

Crip Studies is an interdisciplinary and critical field which, starting from Crip Theory (McRuer, 2006), addresses identity, intersectional and multi-perspective dimensions (Costantino, Centrone & Bocci, 2025), often not considered within Disability Studies (Romano, 2025). The aim is to identify and unmask the construct of ability as an imposed norm, a canon that defines what is normal and desirable (Bocci & Straniero, 2020), while proposing to subvert it.

Embodied Inquiry, as a research methodology focused on the body as a perceptive, communicative, and expressive tool (Leigh & Brown, 2021), moves precisely in this direction: considering the uniqueness and specificity of everyone. This research methodology, developed from neuroscience studies, seeks to capture bodily experiences, inscribed in the body, which are often difficult to communicate in words (Gottardo, 2025b). Thus, people with disabilities do not “disappear” from research (Giaconi et al., 2000), but become its heart, and the marginality and silence of their bodies (Bocci, 2000) becomes protagonism and a living voice.

Through the presentation of a survey involving 10 women with fibromyalgia, we want to show how research can be configured as a practice attentive to the rhythms of the body, its suffering and fatigue, respectful of crip time (Kafer, 2013). A research practice conducted within a theater workshop, a protected space, a “suspension of life” (Cappa, 2016), where each woman is free to be herself, vulnerable, fragile, beyond the logic of ‘normality’ and performativity. A research practice that, through a multimodal approach using tools such as artistic performance, the production of artefacts and reflective writing, gives voice to and values the experience of women with a chronic illness that is (in)visible and often not recognized as a disability (Pieri, 2023). A research practice in which the researchers continually question their own position to avoid falling into the “easy way out” of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007), recognizing themselves as an “instrument” of amplification, at the service of women with fibromyalgia. A practical research approach that does not talk about disability but seeks to create knowledge from this perspective. A perspective that allows us to rethink places of education, to transform them into places of resistance, into democratic places (bell hooks, 1998).

Within the emerging debates in Critical Disability Studies, crip activism can be understood as a space for the production of pedagogical practices and strategies of resistance capable of interrogating the ableist logics that permeate educational and social spaces. In contexts characterized by the strengthening of neoliberal and cisheteropatriarchal norms, disabled bodies and minds are frequently subjected to regulatory mechanisms that determine who can participate, under which temporal regimes, and according to which capacities (Russell, 2019). In this scenario, crip activism develops collective practices that make these normative regimes visible and produce alternative forms of social organization and knowledge production (Kafai, 2021).

This paper situates itself at the intersection of Critical Disability Studies, Crip Theory (McRuer, 2006), and Disability Justice (Sins Invalid, 2016), placing these perspectives in dialogue with critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970; hooks, 1994; Giroux, 2011). Within this framework, crip activism is interpreted not only as a sociopolitical practice but also as a pedagogical space in which activist and educational strategies of resistance are developed for the broader community, disabled and non-disabled alike.

On the one hand, crip communities develop practices of collective care, mutual support, and coping with minority stress that challenge the material and symbolic effects of ableism and other systems of normative oppression. On the other hand, these practices generate processes of self-education and shared knowledge production that configure activism as a site of collective learning oriented toward care and social justice (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018).

Through the analysis of these practices, this paper argues that crip activism, grounded in cripistemology (McRuer & Johnson, 2014) and in the collective production of knowledge, can be interpreted as a form of critical pedagogy capable of fostering agency, interdependence, the political imagination of desirable futures (Kafer, 2013), and the democratic transformation of educational spaces. This reflection aims to contribute to the development of the field of crip studies (Centrone, 2025; McRuer, 2006), particularly to its articulation as a pedagogy of resistance. From this perspective, the analysis of crip activist practices makes it possible to explore how crip studies may offer theoretical and methodological tools for rethinking education as a relational and interdependent practice oriented toward social justice.

In humanistic and social geography, the concept of sense of place has long been used to describe the affective, symbolic and experiential relationships that people develop with the environments they inhabit (Tuan, 1977). These reflections, however, have often implicitly assumed a normative subject able to move through space without encountering structural barriers.

Drawing on Crip Theory (McRuer, 2006) and the emerging interdisciplinary field of Crip Studies (Centrone, 2025), this contribution proposes a re-reading of the notion of sense of place through the lens of disability understood as a socially produced barrier. When cities, infrastructures and institutions are organised around able-bodied norms, disabled people encounter environments that are not only partially accessible but also socially and symbolically unwelcoming.

Disability geography has shown how spatial organisation can reinforce patterns of exclusion (Gleeson, 1999). At the same time, recent transfeminist analyses highlight how urban space reflects the needs and movements of a presumed universal subject, historically aligned with cisheteropatriarchal, able-bodied and economically privileged norms (Rosenkranz, Castelli & Olcuire, 2023). Space thus functions as a dispositif that regulates visibility, mobility and legitimacy.

From a crip perspective, these dynamics become particularly evident when considering the everyday spatial experiences of disabled and neurodivergent people navigating environments that are not designed for their bodies and sensory worlds (Parrella & Villani, 2023). Repeated encounters with architectural barriers, sensory overload or normative expectations of bodily performance reshape the lived relationship between bodies and places, often generating ambivalent forms of attachment, estrangement or avoidance.

This perspective is particularly relevant for educational environments, where spatial accessibility directly affects participation, recognition and the possibility of inhabiting institutions as democratic subjects.

Bringing crip theory into dialogue with human and urban geography, the paper argues that accessibility should be understood not merely as a technical adjustment but as a political issue concerning spatial justice and democratic participation. Rethinking urban and educational environments through disabled experiences opens new possibilities for imagining spaces grounded in interdependence, care and relational forms of belonging.

Although the right to Independent Living was formally recognised in Italy through the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) via Law no. 18/2009, which commits the State to guarantee “freedom of choice and full participation in the community” (Art. 19), this right remains largely unmet. According to the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, services supporting Independent Living in Italy remain highly fragmented and characterised by strong regional disparities, with a persistent reliance on familistic care models that limit disabled people’s autonomy and opportunities for self-determination (FRA, 2022).
Within contemporary contexts marked by ableist and cisheteropatriarchal norms, care arrangements become a crucial site where bodies are regulated and democratic participation is negotiated. Familistic systems of care often function as dispositifs of surveillance and control that restrict disabled people’s capacity to inhabit social spaces as autonomous subjects.
For LGBTQ+ disabled people, these dynamics take on particular significance. Research shows that LGBTQ+ individuals frequently experience discrimination or silence within family contexts, which may become even more constraining when family members are also primary caregivers (European Commission, 2020). Recent studies further demonstrate that LGBTQ+ disabled people often encounter infantilisation, censorship and discrimination within care systems, directly affecting their capacity to express sexual and relational identities (Abbott et al., 2025; Kempapidis et al., 2024; Smith et al., 2025).
This paper draws on a qualitative research project investigating the intersectional discrimination experienced by LGBTQIAP+ disabled people (Centrone & Costantino, 2025). Through semi-structured interviews, the study explores how different care arrangements shape the possibility of self-determination, focusing specifically on the role of personal assistance as a practice of freedom and crip self-determination (Centrone, 2025; Costantino, Centrone & Bocci, 2025).
The analysis examines how the difference between accessing non-familial personal assistance and depending on family caregivers affects individuals’ ability to express their sexual identity, build relationships and inhabit their bodies in self-determined ways. Within a crip epistemological framework that interrogates the co-extensivity between compulsory able-bodiedness (McRuer, 2006) and normative regimes regulating sexuality and intimacy, the paper analyses how familistic care systems may reproduce forms of control, invisibility and segregation.
The central argument is that the possibility of choosing and training one’s personal assistant constitutes a material condition of freedom and a prerequisite for the full expression of the self. Personal assistance, in this perspective, can function not only as a support service but also as a political infrastructure enabling democratic participation and relational autonomy.
Reframing care through a crip perspective therefore allows us to understand personal assistance as a form of embodied resistance to ableist and cisheteronormative regimes of care. By foregrounding interdependence and collective responsibility, crip care practices open possibilities for reimagining autonomy, desire and participation beyond familistic and institutional models, enabling disabled LGBTQ+ bodies to emerge as political and relational subjects.

Although the performing arts are often framed as spaces of experimentation and bodily freedom where norms can be challenged, training in the performing arts continues to be structured around implicit models of corporeality, normative pedagogical practices and technical standards that presuppose a substantial uniformity of bodies. This paper interrogates artistic training as a key site where a first selection of bodies occurs, shaping which corporealities gain access to professional artistic pathways. This process affects both the presence—or absence—of certain bodies on the contemporary stage and the forms of embodied representation that the performing arts system makes imaginable.
In the Italian context — within which this research is currently situated — schools and academies of theatre and dance, like many performance venues, first present problems of architectural inaccessibility. In cases where this first obstacle can be overcome, other barriers of a pedagogical nature quickly emerge. Training techniques, curricula and teaching models continue to be built around a form of compulsory able-bodiedness that implicitly works to redraw the boundaries of who can participate in artistic training. Even if such barriers were to be surpassed, a third dimension of exclusion would still remain, operating on a cultural level: both the educational system and the professional field of the performing arts rarely make space for such bodies. As a consequence, this produces an absence of models, references and political imaginaries. As a result, many people with disabilities are unable to access institutional artistic training, turning instead to demanding informal pathways or abandoning professional training altogether. Paradoxically, performative practices often become accessible mainly through inclusive contexts and forms of so-called social theatre. While this research does not seek to demonize these experiences, it highlights how they rarely lead to professional artistic pathways and instead function as channels of access that seldom challenge this structural configuration. The result is an extremely limited presence of disabled artists. This system feeds a vicious circle: the limited number of artists with disabilities produces a reduced presence of these corporealities on stage; reduced visibility generates few models and forms of representation; and the absence of such models makes it harder for many disabled people in the audience to imagine their own bodies in those spaces. In this way, the system tends to produce a continuous self-reproduction of absence.
Building on these considerations, the paper examines artistic training as a central mechanism through which the absence of disabled bodies in the performing arts is produced, drawing on an initial mapping of training pathways in theatre and dance academies in Italy. Situating itself at the intersection of performance, disability, queer, and crip studies, the research also explores how certain contemporary artistic practices challenge this configuration by experimenting with alternative modes of transmitting and training the performative body. From this perspective, experiences developed by choreographer and performer Chiara Bersani suggest the emergence of an embodied crip pedagogy, capable of redefining access to training and performance through the use of disability as method.