Enabling University: Impairment, (Dis)ability and Social Justice in Higher Education

by Tara Brabazon

This work takes the most recent, interdisciplinary research and demonstrates how to make higher education institutions open, accessible and socially just for staff and students with disabilities. Combining the scholarly fields of media platform management, information literacy, internet studies, mobility studies and disability studies, this book offers a guide and method to consider how students and staff with differing needs move through university processes, spaces and interfaces. It captures the challenges and potentials of both the online and offline university. The key concept of the book is universal design. This term and theory is used to move beyond the medical and social model of disability that disconnect and separate the issues of disability and impairment from core societal concerns. This book confirms that most of us will be touched by impairment through our lives. When matched with the necessity to retrain and gain new skills for a post-recession future, there must be a renewed commitment to not only the widening participation agenda of higher education, but also the enabling of universities for men and women with impairments.

144 pages, Paperback

First published December 9, 2014

About the author

I am the Professor of Cultural Studies at Flinders University. I have written 22 books, 12 audiobooks, over 350 refereed articles and book chapters, and over 600 research outputs. I have podcasted since 2008 and vlogged since 2016.

Reviews

[Cathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Refreshing to see from an authors point of view, that universities should be accessible for all walks of life in the disability world. Everyone has a right yet many get forgotten about. Everyone needs to walk a mile in someone else's shoes to fully understand.