Executive Summary
This critical examination of ableism in academia reveals how neoliberal university structures actively produce and maintain disability through impossible productivity demands, exclusionary accessibility frameworks, and normalized ableist epistemologies. Rather than viewing disability as individual limitation, the authors frame ableism as systemic oppression that ranks certain bodies and minds as superior while devaluing others. The text explores how disabled academics—particularly those with invisible and fluctuating conditions—navigate disclosure decisions, encounter procedural violence through “reasonable adjustments” frameworks, and experience humiliation and ontoviolence that attack their fundamental dignity. Both disabled and non-disabled academics are constrained by these ableist structures, creating shared interest in resisting ableism to create sustainable, inclusive academic environments.
Understanding Ableism As Structural Oppression
Definition and Framework
Ableism operates as a “network of beliefs, processes and practices that produces a particular kind of self and body (the corporeal standard) that is projected as the perfect, species-typical and therefore essential and fully human.” Disability then is cast as a diminished state of being human. This framework extends beyond individual prejudice to create a soma-epistemological system that determines whose bodies, minds, and ways of being are valued as legitimate, productive, and fully human.
The system works through three key components: differentiation (ranking certain bodies as superior), notification (making differences visible and therefore suspicious), and prioritization (rewarding alignment with the benchmark body). This creates structural hierarchies that privilege some embodiments while marginalizing others.
Ableism encompasses far more than physical disability. It includes invisible disabilities and chronic illnesses, fluctuating symptoms and contested diagnoses, neurodiversity and mental health conditions, as well as cognitive dysfunction and sensory processing differences. The framework recognizes that disability is socially produced through environments designed for mythical “normal” bodies and minds.
Neoliberal Academia As Ableist System
Transformation of Higher Education
The shift from publicly-funded institutions to market-driven businesses has created constant pressure for productivity and measurable outputs. Performance metrics like Research Excellence Framework (REF) and Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) transform academic work into quantifiable data points. Academics face demands to be “agile, economical and highly performing” while invisible labor like mentoring and emotional support is systematically devalued.
The “normal” Academic Body
Neoliberal academia creates implicit standards requiring perpetual productivity measured in publications, citations, and funding. Visible health is assumed, with any sickness signals interpreted as reduced productivity. The system expects cheerful adaptability to changing demands and independence from care responsibilities—creating a narrow benchmark that excludes vast numbers of potentially capable academics.
Those who cannot meet these impossible standards are framed as individual problems rather than evidence of systemic ableism. The structure produces disability by defining academic value through neoliberal productivity metrics that privilege specific embodiments and life circumstances.
Disclosure and Strategic Information Management
The Double Bind
Disabled academics face impossible choices around disclosure. Disclosure risks discrimination, perceived weakness, and career consequences, while non-disclosure means unable to access reasonable adjustments and may face unexplained absences. This is not merely individual hesitation but systemic discouragement—less than 4% of academics disclose disability compared to 16% of the working-age population.
Job security profoundly shapes disclosure decisions. Early-career academics on precarious contracts face higher risk, while those with visible disabilities may not have the option to “pass.” Intersectionality compounds these risks as race, gender, and class affect how disability is perceived and punished.
Disclosure Dances
Rather than binary choices, disabled academics engage in complex strategic information management. This might involve disclosing pain to HR for accommodation purposes while concealing cognitive dysfunction from academic colleagues. Academics manage different narratives for different audiences, constantly assessing risk and recalibrating what information to share, with whom, and in what contexts.
Knowledge Production and Gatekeeping
Historical Gatekeeping
Professional bodies like medicine and law have historically controlled who has legitimate knowledge, whose experiences count as valid, and what constitutes “expertise.” This gatekeeping extends to academia, where traditional epistemologies exclude disabled ways of knowing and being.
The Social Model and Its Limitations
The social model of disability challenged medical gatekeeping by separating impairment (biological variation) from disability (social construction through environmental barriers). However, poststructuralist approaches argue both disability and ability are performatively constructed through discourse and power relations. This means knowledge production itself is implicated in creating and maintaining ableist hierarchies.
Participatory Research Frameworks
Feminist participatory action research (FPAR) offers alternatives by prioritizing reciprocal learning, democratic validity, ethical validity, outcome validity, and process validity. These approaches challenge traditional academic hierarchies by valuing lived experience as expertise and creating more inclusive knowledge production practices.
Invisible and Fluctuating Disabilities
Unique Challenges
Invisible disabilities create two critical problems: automatic assumption of non-disability, and the non-static nature of many conditions. The phrase “but you don’t look sick” emerged repeatedly as undermining credibility and understanding, particularly for conditions like fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, autoimmune illnesses, and neurodivergent conditions.
Cognitive Dysfunction in Academia
Cognitive difficulties carry particular stigma in academia where intellectual capacity is foundational to professional identity. Symptoms like difficulty processing information, problems following conversations, concentration difficulties, and getting lost on familiar routes threaten academic self-concept and invite questioning of professional competence.
The fluctuating nature of many invisible disabilities means academics may be able to work some days but not others, creating suspicion about authenticity and inconsistency in performance expectations that don’t account for variable capacity.
The Problem With “reasonable Adjustments”
Framework As Procedural Violence
The “reasonable adjustments” framework under UK Equality Act 2010 operates as enumerative passport system requiring diagnosis to access services, generates suspicion about disability authenticity, and meets technical standards without ensuring genuine accessibility. The legal test conflates disability with burden, making equality provisional and contingent rather than universal.
Examples of Failure
Venues deemed “accessible” while excluding disabled staff from full participation demonstrate the gap between technical compliance and actual inclusion. Gaslighting disabled academics who point out inaccessibility, and providing support that doesn’t address actual barriers, shows how the framework protects institutions while failing disabled people.
The system creates procedural violence by requiring disabled people to repeatedly prove their disability and justify their needs, while institutions meet minimum legal standards without creating genuinely accessible environments.
Humiliation and Ontoviolence
Understanding Ontoviolence
Fiona Kumari Campbell defines ontoviolence as “violence that seeps into the interior spaces of a person’s beingness, attacking their fundamental dignity and self-respect.” This goes beyond discrete discriminatory incidents to accumulate harm that attacks core identity and sense of worth.
Elements of Humiliation
Humiliation occurs through calling into question a status claim, public failure of that claim, the degrader possessing higher status, and rejection of the status itself. Examples include being required to scoot down stairs rather than using accessible rooms, having complaints redirected as evidence of problematic attitude, and colleagues withdrawing support due to uncertainty about extended illnesses.
These microaggressions accumulate over time, creating chronic stress and undermining professional participation while protecting ableist structures from meaningful challenge.
Intersectionality and Compounded Oppression
Multiple Marginalization
Disability cannot be abstracted from race, gender, sexuality, and class. Disabled women, disabled people of color, and disabled LGBTQ+ people experience compounded exclusions. Historically, disabled women were marginalized by mainstream feminism focused on able-bodied concerns, while disability metaphors were weaponized against marginalized groups.
Systemic Barriers
Professional advancement and political activism are “resource heavy,” favoring those with structural supports—overwhelmingly middle-class, well-connected, able-bodied people. Working-class disabled people lacking structural supports available to privileged groups face compounded barriers to academic participation and advancement.
The recognition of intersectionality reveals that ableism cannot be dismantled without simultaneously addressing racism, sexism, classism, and other interconnected systems of oppression.
Universal Design and Anticipatory Accessibility
Beyond Retrofitting
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles include multiple formats for content (text, audio, video), multiple means of engagement and participation, and reducing barriers not essential to learning objectives. This shifts from individual accommodation to universal design that benefits everyone.
Implementation Requirements
Real accessibility requires clear policies backed by high-level strategy, specific resource allocation for accessibility, building in flexibility at design stage rather than retrofitting, and cultural shifts assuming good reasons for non-participation. The goal is anticipatory accessibility that designs for diverse embodiments from the beginning rather than responding to individual requests after the fact.
Practical Strategies
Individual Practices
Setting sustainable work boundaries, recognizing that perfect output isn’t necessary, building peer support networks, and strategic disclosure based on risk assessment can help disabled academics navigate ableist structures. However, individual coping strategies cannot substitute for systemic change.
Institutional Changes
Participatory knowledge production frameworks, comprehensive accessibility planning, anti-retaliation policies with enforcement, and resource allocation for accessibility coordination create structural supports for disabled academics. These changes require institutional commitment rather than individual goodwill.
Collective Action
Questioning productivity metrics, documenting hidden labor, insisting on alternative evaluation criteria, and organizing resistance to impossible demands builds collective power to transform academic structures. Both disabled and non-disabled academics have shared interest in refusing ableist demands that harm everyone.
Shared Interest in Refusing Ableism
Non-Disabled Academic Responsibility
Both disabled and non-disabled academics are shaped by ableist power structures, but in different ways. Disabled academics are constrained by inaccessibility and performance demands, while non-disabled academics are constrained to endless performance and productivity. Neither group benefits from systems that reduce human value to measurable outputs.
Mutual Liberation
Resisting ableism serves everyone’s interests by creating sustainable work practices, valuing diverse contributions, recognizing embodied knowledge, and building alternative academic values. The transformation requires recognizing that ableism constrains all academics while disproportionately harming disabled people.
The shared interest in refusing ableism creates potential for coalitional politics that transcend single-issue activism and build more inclusive academic environments for everyone.
Mental Health and Systemic Factors
Contextual Understanding
Rising mental ill-health in academia reflects profession-wide pressure and culture, neoliberal demands for constant productivity, and precarious employment conditions. These are structural problems, not individual weakness or pathology. Medicalizing individual academics or promoting “resilience” without changing demands places responsibility on those harmed rather than systems causing harm.
Shifting Responsibility
Solutions require examining workplace cultures and structural demands, not individual coping strategies. This means challenging productivity metrics, creating sustainable workloads, addressing precarious employment, and building genuinely inclusive academic environments that recognize diverse embodiments and ways of working.
Resources and Support
Organizations
Disability Rights UK provides employment advice and legal guidance, while Mind offers mental health support. ACAS handles workplace rights and employment relations, and the Centre for Action Research in Professional Practice provides participatory research examples.
Theoretical Frameworks
Crip theory offers disability resistance and interdependency frameworks, while poststructuralism provides power and discourse analysis tools. Disability justice brings intersectional disability politics, and embodied practice integrates body awareness into academic work. These theoretical resources provide tools for understanding and transforming ableist academic structures.