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Disabled students in Canadian universities are usually taught that they must develop the ability to discuss their disabilities and assert their rights if they want to achieve academic success. Yet this individualized skills-based approach can privilege deficit-focused methods and impose hierarchical and mutually anxietyprovoking student-faculty relationships. This study documents the experiences of disabled students and their professors arranging academic accommodations by exploring the relational necessities of student self-advocacy and how they shape experiences of teaching and learning at three Nova Scotia Universities. Findings expose the existence of formal self-advocacy teaching alongside informally communicated behavioural expectations. They also make evident the often unrecognized relational complexities inherent in claiming disability rights, navigating university process, and meeting expectations around student sharing of disability and accommodation information.

Self-advocacy has arguably become one of the most centrally positioned priorities in Canadian post-secondary disability service-provision frameworks. It is widely understood to be an indispensable skill for disabled students working to implement academic accommodations at university, and it has become the focus of numerous efforts to prepare them for transition from high school settings. This article draws on findings from a doctoral study that explored the self- advocacy experiences of disabled students and their professors in three small liberal arts universities in Nova Scotia, Canada in order to theorize self-advocacy as precariousness. Detailed research findings are reported elsewhere, but this account offers a theoretical analysis of participant experiences in order to broaden understandings of self-advocacy as a relational access requirement that generates persistent uncertainty for disabled learners.

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