Let’s Talk about Disability: Disability Justice in Engineering Librarianship

Abstract

Despite efforts to improve DEI on college campuses, bias and discrimination still exist in higher education settings, particularly for disabled students, who are often forgotten or less emphasized in DEI efforts. In some disciplinary areas, such as in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields, disabled students are more likely to experience discrimination due to a reportedly more competitive and less flexible and supportive environment. Academic librarians and other educators can make a difference for these students by contributing to a more inclusive campus environment for disabled people in STEM by implementing universally accessible and inclusive pedagogy, resources, services, and spaces. Such efforts are more effective when they incorporate a disability justice perspective, which provides an intersectional framework to understand how individuals experience disability. This paper will present a disability justice-informed perspective in hopes of allowing librarians who work with disabled STEM student to gain a more nuanced understanding of ableism and the many barriers disabled people encounter in STEM fields as well as more broadly in higher education.[6]. Exclusion and bias are particularly prevalent in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, where research has found that people with dominant identities (i.e., male, non-disabled, white, heterosexual, cisgender) disproportionally benefit from societal support and encouragement, financial rewards, and preferential access to educational, research, and professional opportunities [7]. In a technologically-oriented global economy, STEM fields offer a growing number of employment opportunities that could be beneficial for a more diverse workforce, who, in turn, would enrich and enhance these disciplines with their knowledge, perspectives, culture, experience, skills, and creativity [8], [9].Disabled students and scholars are among those who experience ongoing discrimination and underrepresentation in STEM disciplines. Despite the fact that approximately 20% of Americans have disabilities [10] and that disabled students enroll in higher education at a similar rate of representation (19%) [11], they are significantly underrepresented in STEM fields [12], [13]. The National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) [2023] states that there is limited information on how many STEM students are disabled, but their data show that in 2021, doctoral degree recipients with at least one disability had lower representation in STEM (10.8%) than in non-STEM fields (13%). The discipline with the lowest rate of degree earners with a disability was engineering (8.2%) [14]. Additionally, the National Science Foundation [15] reports that disabled scholars receive less funding and had lower employment rates than their non-disabled peers, and the National Institute of Health (NIH) [16] found that the percentage of disabled people in professional STEM fields grew only 3% (from 6% to 9%) between 1999 and 2019, but that the number of pe...