“Which door should I go through?” (In)visible intersections of race and disability in the academy

Abstract

Institutional inclusivity and diversity have been an increasing focus of debate within the academy. For the discipline of geography and universities more broadly to become fully inclusive, greater attention is warranted within these debates on the intersection of race and disability. An existing lack of discussion on relations between race and disability in the academy draws attention to the invisibility of disabled academics of black and minority ethnic backgrounds. Drawing on examples of spaces of (mis)recognition and of indifference inside and outside the space of the British academy, this paper calls for greater attentiveness in geography and beyond to the socio‐cultural and spatial issues faced by ethnic minority disabled members of the university community that are otherwise hidden. A focus on these hidden issues in research agendas, institutional practices, and the academy more broadly is warranted to enable the university to strive towards greater inclusivity.

Equity/Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) in Universities: The Case of Disabled People

“…Many academic articles providing the data that are needed to make EDI for disabled students, non-academic staff, and academic staff a success should have been found in articles that focus on EDI for several reasons: disabled students, non-academic staff, and academic staff encounter severe problems and barriers in post-secondary institutions [25][26][27][28][29][30]68,[70][71][72][73][74][75]79,[82][83][84][85][86][87][88][89][90][93][94][95][96][97][98][149][150][151][152][153][154][155][156][157], including the lack of ability identity security (have a positive identity about ones set of abilities) [22,68,[70][71][72][73] and the numbers of disabled academic faculty are too low (for Canada see [31][32]…”

“…Many problems also exist for disabled graduate researchers and faculty in many countries [22,23,27,72,79,82,83,[92][93][94][95][96][97][98][99]. For example, according to Statistics Canada, 35% of disabled university professors, instructors, teachers, or researchers "experienced unfair treatment or discrimination in the past 12 months" and 47% saw themselves "subjected to at least one type of harassment in the past 12 months" [100].…”

Anti‐racist learning and teaching in British geography

“…Yet this chicanery ignores that, compared to their White peers, domestic BME students are more likely to attend a university outside of the “elite” Russell Group (Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), 2019), when they do enter university they face obstacles to their academic progression, graduate with a poor degree even when entry‐level qualifications are accounted for (Universities UK and National Union of Students, 2019), encounter racist abuse, have feelings of alienation while studying (Arday, 2018; Doharty et al, 2020; Tate & Page, 2018), and face obstacles to career progression (Bhopal & Pitkin, 2020; HEPI, 2019). We make reference to domestic BME students to highlight that while they and international students are often racialised as non‐white and therefore thought of collectively under the BME banner, racism affects students in a range of ways that are shaped intersectionally by factors such as gender, (dis)ability, and religion (Bhakta, 2019).…”

“…The first set of contributions from Ahmet (2020), Bhakta (2020) and Byron (2020) focus on the experiences of BME students and staff, and how these experiences are shaped by racism in our learning and teaching spaces. These discussions examine topics around belonging, well‐being, retention, and exclusion.…”

Social geography III: Committing to social justice

“…There are many ways that social geographers are challenging the social injustices found within institutions and within institutional practices. Hawthorne and Heitz (2018: 148) see ‘the academy as a site for the reproduction of epistemic violence against women and people of color’, Johnson (2019) refers to the ‘white background of academia’, and Bhakta (2019) urges attention be given to the troubling intersections of race and disability.…”