Disabled students doing activism: Borrowing from and trespassing neoliberal reason in English higher education

Abstract

The neoliberal rationale in English higher education promotes institutional and individual competition for economic success, often at the cost of equity and universalism. Within such context, there is a tendency to formalise student voice, for example, through professionalisation of students’ unions. This paper argues that neoliberalism and its effects on university practices enforce ableist culture, further marginalising disabled students. More specifically, the paper is concerned with how Disabled Students’ Officers – official full- or part-time student representatives of disabled students in English students’ unions – practise activism in response to universities’ neoliberal agendas. By utilising Foucault’s concept of governmentality and qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with Disabled Students’ Officers, we explore the ways of doing disability activism in their experience. The findings indicate that activism as it is practised by participants is complex and contradictory, combining neoliberal ways of acting, i.e., evidence production, committee-based work and lobbying, with more subtle forms of critique and resistance related to collectivism, arts and ethics of care. By enabling critical reflections on participants’ experiences, this paper strives to encourage debate on renewed strategies and complexity and contradiction in activism, but also to highlight the potential for trespassing the dominant neoliberal rationale in higher education.