Bodies of knowledge: Faculty members with disabilities in higher education

In recent decades, feminism, race, and other contemporary studies have introduced perspectives that reflect upon social justice issues for minority and oppressed groups. Yet the experiences and views of people with disabilities have received limited attention within these perspectives. This concern is noteworthy since people with disabilities are in all these groups. Indeed, people with disabilities represent the world's largest multicultural minority.; This research draws upon the experiences of faculty members who have a disability and currently teach in college or university settings. Despite (or perhaps because of) significant legal mandates, many administrators still approach disability largely in terms of accommodation and policy matters. The personal, political, and lived aspects of disability are still relatively unstudied inside higher education environments. Scholars with disabilities in the academy occupy a unique position to interrogate disability as both socially constructed and personally experienced.; The project uses elements of feminist disability studies and corporeal phenomenology (a means for studying one's social and embodied experiences of impairment). In depth, semi-structured interviews with faculty members who have disabilities ground the analysis, emergent themes, and theory. Experiencing disability crosses each of these planes. The respondents' experiences form a basis for interrogating university practices as they relate to disability. These interrogations offer critical possibilities as disabled and nondisabled people engage each other in higher education.