Introduction
Participation in student clubs and organizations is a key component of the college experience for many students, and research indicates that membership in an extra-curricular organization may offer a variety of benefits, including a greater sense of belonging, enhanced self-confidence, and overall well-being (Buckley & Lee, 2018; Finnerty et al., 2021; King et al., 2021). Extra-curricular organizations are diverse in focus and may be service- or identity-oriented. Among these are disability-focused campus organizations (DFCOs), whose activities and purpose focus on the disability community on or off campus. While disabled people are more present than ever in higher education (National Center for Education Statistics, 2023), many still report experiencing discrimination and prejudice rooted in ableist, deficit-oriented beliefs about disability (Milner & Kelly, 2009; Olkin et al., 2019), suggesting that not all members of higher education communities have developed critically conscious (Freire, 2018) understandings of systemic disablement. This problem is particularly important to consider in relation to DFCOs, as members may have contact with disabled individuals or offer programming through their organizations’ work, which may perpetuate harm due to deficit-oriented attitudes rooted in a lack of critical consciousness.
Existing research about the attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge of college students involved in DFCOs offers mixed results: while some studies have shown that college students’ explicit attitudes toward disabled people improve over the course of their organizational involvement (Carter et al., 2019; Harrison et al., 2019; Kropp & Wolfe, 2018; Westling et al., 2013), others have been unable to demonstrate any meaningful change in implicitly held negative beliefs (Harrison et al., 2019). Research examining non-disabled students’ attitudes toward disabled peers during the course of a peer mentoring program have yielded similar results, with stark differences between participants (Bialka et al., 2017). Though longer-term members demonstrated greater awareness of institutional and social barriers to the inclusion of their disabled peers, newer participants often utilized ableist rhetoric and described disabled people through deficit lenses (Bialka et al., 2017).
Research specifically focused upon college students’ development of critical consciousness, a concept developed by Paulo Freire to describe one’s “ability to recognize and analyze oppressive political, economic, and social forces shaping society and to take action against these forces” (Seider et al., 2020), offers similarly varied results. Critical action, one of three domains of critical consciousness, has been shown to be positively associated with academic success among minoritized graduate students (Cadenas et al., 2022), while another, critical reflection, was correlated with higher levels of hope among LGBTQ+ college students during the COVID-19 pandemic (Castro, 2021). Salazar and colleagues (2024) found that a service-learning course regarding immigration justice increased students’ awareness of the systemic nature of immigration issues and their desire to take action. Still, students reported feeling unable to take action beyond altering their interpersonal interactions, suggesting that the political self-efficacy dimension of critical consciousness remained unchanged.
These varied and conflicting findings suggest that there is still much to learn about how college student members of DFCOs conceptualize disability and disablement, and how critical consciousness may be related to their understanding of their organizations’ purpose. Within the neoliberal context of higher education (Giroux, 2014), in which extra-curricular involvement is viewed as a means of increasing future employability (Jackson & Dean, 2022), it follows that students may join organizations without necessarily holding a particular passion or understanding for their work, and that organizations may do more to build students’ resumes than their critical consciousness. In order to learn more about how students in DFCOs conceptualize disability and the purposes of DFCOs, this study utilizes dysconscious ableism (Broderick & Lalvani, 2017) as a conceptual lens to examine student discourses.
Dysconscious Ableism
Dysconsciousness, “an uncritical habit of mind (including perceptions, attitudes, assumptions, and beliefs) that justifies inequity and exploitation by accepting the existing order of things as given” (King, 1991, p. 135), is a conceptual device developed by Joyce King to describe the ways in which her teacher education students conceptualized race and racism. King and Ladson-Billings (1990) asked students in two teacher education courses to explain the origins of racial inequity, and then categorized the responses based upon the ideologies reflected therein. Their analysis resulted in three ideological categories, representing the range of students’ understanding of the systemic roots of inequity: Category I: “conservative assimilationist ideology”, Category II: “liberal assimilationist ideology” (King, 1991, p. 138), and Category III: “structural and ideological” understandings of inequity (King & Ladson-Billings, 1990, p. 21). King (1991) utilizes these categories to describe the concept of dysconscious racism, demonstrated in Category I and II explanations which fail to question or even acknowledge the structural, systemic, and ideological origins of racial inequity.
In their 2017 study of teacher education students, Broderick and Lalvani adapted King’s (1991) concept to examine students’ understandings of disability and educational segregation. Following King’s (1991) observation that dysconsciousness may manifest in relation to a number of oppressive systems, Broderick and Lalvani (2017) described their adapted concept “dysconscious ableism” as an “impaired or distorted way of thinking about dis/ability… that tacitly accepts dominant ableist norms and privileges” (p. 895). The three categories along the continuum of (dys)consciousness first identified by King and Ladson-Billings (1990) are adapted within this model to reflect “conservative” (Category I), “liberal” (Category II), and “radical” (Category III) understandings of disability (Broderick & Lalvani, 2017, p. 897). In what follows, I will use Category I, Category II, and Category III to refer to each conceptual category of (dys)conscious ableism. The following categorical descriptions are summarized in Table 1.
Drawing upon Gabel and Connor (2014) as well as King (1990) and King and Ladson-Billings (1991), Broderick and Lalvani (2017) define Category I (conservative) and II (liberal) understandings as those that uphold the status quo, although how they do so differs. Category I responses identify individual deficiency and abnormality as the root of inequity, and view “disability as a deficit, beginning and ending with individual impairment” (Broderick & Lalvani, 2017, p. 898). Additionally, Category I responses describe the educational segregation of disabled students as not only a natural arrangement, but also one that is clearly beneficial for disabled and non-disabled students. Students whose responses were categorized as Category II still reflected an assimilationist worldview, failing to acknowledge the ideological and structural elements of ableism, despite their tendency to focus on the importance of individual prejudice and (in)action. Though those with Category II conceptions of inequity do not identify oppressed people as the source of their own oppression, they still “fail to call into question the basic structural inequity of the social order” (King, 1991, p. 138). Instead, Category II responses describe disability as an aspect of diversity, a “sociocultural phenomenon,” or as a consequence of social labels (Broderick & Lalvani, 2017, p. 898).
In contrast, Category III responses, which Broderick and Lalvani term “radical,” acknowledge the “systemic, structural, and institutionalised ways in which ableist discourses and practices are made to be normative” (2017, p. 899). These descriptions of disability acknowledge the ways in which the very framework of society disables and oppresses disabled people while privileging the non-disabled (Broderick & Lalvani, 2017). Unlike Category I and II responses, which reflect “assimilationist” (King, 1991, p. 138) perspectives and fail to question the naturalness of the social order, Category III responses demonstrate a complete and critical understanding of ableism as a structural and/or ideological phenomenon, reflecting a state of mind that could be described as critically conscious.
Study Purpose
This study seeks to extend Broderick and Lalvani’s (2017) research by applying the lens of dysconscious ableism beyond the realm of teacher education to that of extra-curricular college student involvement. The majority of research on dysconscious ableism has thus far been conducted with pre-service teachers (e.g., Drelick et al., 2023; Hancock et al., 2021; Siuty & Beneke, 2020), a logical trend given the impact of educator attitudes on student well-being and achievement (Denessen et al., 2022). King (1990) and Broderick and Lalvani (2017) cite the impact of dysconsciousness on educator practice, noting that dysconsciousness may result in failing to interrupt, or even perpetuating, systems of oppression in one’s classroom. It is plausible that the same could be said for students engaged in advocacy, activism, and action through a campus organization, particularly if a marginalized group is the focus of that organization’s work.
In order to better understand how students in DFCOs conceive of disability and ableism, and how discourses aligned with each level of (dys)consciousness represent the purposes of DFCOs, this study is guided by the following questions:
How do college students in disability-focused student groups describe disability and the challenges disabled people face?
How do Category I, II, and III student discourses describe the goals and actions of their student organizations?
Method
This study utilizes semi-structured interviews with college student members of DFCOs to explore how they understand and describe disability, the challenges disabled people face, and the work of DFCOs. Ethical approval for this study was granted by the Institutional Review Board prior to participant recruitment.
Participants
Participants include 27 undergraduate and graduate students involved with DFCOs at colleges and universities in the United States. First, I identified disability-focused campus organizations by examining publicly accessible listings of student clubs and organizations on four- and two-year college and university websites, which I located through web searches with the following combination of search terms: (college OR university) AND (club OR organization). I contacted organizations via email and asked that they distribute study information to their members. To ensure the greatest level of participant anonymity possible, organizations from my own institution were not contacted. In an effort to recruit a racially diverse sample, websites for all accredited Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), as identified by the U.S. Department of Education’s College Navigator database, were searched for campus organization listings. Despite these efforts however, recruitment from HBCU-affiliated organizations was unsuccessful, likely due to a number of interrelated factors, including my own identity as a white researcher. The well-established risks associated with disability disclosure, particularly for people of color and others with intersecting marginalized identities, may have been a pertinent factor as well (Brown et al., 2019).
For the purposes of this study, I considered student organizations disability-focused if their name, description, or mission statement included disability-related language such as disability, disabled, accessibility, inclusion, special needs, exceptional, neurodiversity, or terms related to a particular disability (ex. ASL, blind, rare disease). Only organizations with public-facing contact information, such as an email address or direct contact form, were contacted. Participants were required to be 18 years or older at the time of the study, currently enrolled as a graduate or undergraduate student, and a current or former member of a DFCO. Disability status was not used as a means of exclusion, and participants include both disabled and non-disabled college students. In thanks for their time and contributions, participants were offered a choice of a $20 Amazon or Visa gift card.
Eighteen of 27 participants provided demographic information. The majority of participants were female undergraduate students; all but two participants who provided demographic information identified as white. Approximately half of participants identified as disabled or having a disability. Additional participant demographic information is presented in Table 2.
Data Collection
This study employed one-time, semi-structured interviews as a means of data collection. The semi-structured format allowed for in-depth discussion guided by the study’s research questions and conceptual framework, as well as the flexibility to explore statements more deeply or make adjustments for participant comfort. I interviewed each participant through their preferred communication method, and all participants elected to be interviewed via phone or video call. All interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. Interviews were 25 to 90 minutes in duration, with an average interview lasting approximately 50 minutes. Questions addressed participants’ definitions of disability, the challenges they believe disabled people face, and their perceptions of the goals of their DFCO.
While King (1991) and Broderick and Lalvani (2017) used student writing as a data source, and asked students to explain particular inequities related to racism and ableism, respectively, this study utilized different prompts to seek similar information about students’ (dys)consciousness. Specifically, participants were not asked to explain the origins of a particular challenge or inequity disabled people face. Instead, I asked each participant to identify challenges they believe disabled people face. In doing so, I hoped to not only learn more about how participants explained, and in some cases justified, inequities, but also which inequities they were aware of and chose to discuss.
To increase accessibility and participant comfort, I provided participants with the interview questions via email in advance of their scheduled interview. One participant requested additional support in processing the questions during the interview, and it was mutually agreed that I would type each question into the video call chat as it was posed. At the beginning of each interview, I reminded the participant that they were free to skip any question they did not wish to answer or return to any question they wished to elaborate upon. I also informed participants before the start of their interview that they would receive a copy of the transcript for review, and that if they wished to, they could request additional anonymization of any transcript details or elaborate further on their comments via email. One participant chose to provide additional written responses following their interview, and these responses were appended to the transcribed interview for analysis.
Data Analysis
Drawing upon Broderick and Lalvani’s (2017) approach to qualitative data analysis, I engaged in a three-phase analytic process, depicted in Figure 1. In the first phase of analysis, I utilized Dedoose to code each transcript using both descriptive and value codes (Saldaña, 2013). Descriptive codes, which identify the topic, rather than the latent content of a piece of data (Saldaña, 2013), were applied to participant statements about barriers disabled people face and activities with which their organizations engaged. Value codes, which “reflect a participant’s values, attitudes, and beliefs, representing his or her perspectives or worldview” (Saldaña, 2013, p. 110), were used as analytical labels for participant descriptions of disability and disabled people, as well organizational mission and impact.
Following this first coding phase, I addressed Research Question 1 by reviewing each coded transcript and assigning it to one or more categories along the continuum of (dys)consciousness. To do so, I examined descriptive codes related to perceived barriers and value codes related to descriptions of disability and disabled people to determine their alignment with the features of each category (see Table 1). Like Broderick and Lalvani (2017), I chose to assign a transcript more than one categorical label if its coded contents reflected characteristics of more than one category of (dys)consciousness; while the categories have distinct features, critical consciousness development is a process rather than a linear progression (Seider et al., 2020), and the nuances of students’ responses did not always fit neatly within a single category. Though a thorough accounting of the potential for overlap among or expansion of these three categories is beyond the scope of this study, the findings do describe the complexity of some participant responses, particularly those of disabled students who challenged social model understandings of impairment versus disablement (Shakespeare, 2017).
To address Research Question 2, the final phase of analysis involved pattern coding, a second-phase coding technique that aims to develop broader thematic categories (Saldaña, 2013). This phase of analysis focused on descriptive codes applied to statements about organizational work and activities, as well as value-coded statements about organizational mission, impact, and importance. After gathering together the coded excerpts from transcripts assigned to each category, I used pattern coding to develop potential themes from related coded excerpts within each category. Throughout the pattern coding process, I returned to the original transcripts to contextualize participant statements as I refined preliminary themes. As I finalized the themes generated in this stage of analysis, I drew upon Braun and Clarke’s (2006) definition of an effective theme, aiming to convey analytic importance rather than summarize the contents of participant statements.
Researcher Positionality
As a disabled researcher, I was mindful of my positionality throughout the research process and sought to be attentive to both the benefits and limitations of my identity, knowledge, and experiences. While my willingness to disclose my disabled identity to participants may have increased the comfort of some participants, the inherent power dynamics between researcher and participant, as well as the limited nature of my own individual experience were always present. As a white researcher, and therefore someone who benefits from privilege despite my disability status, I sought to be attentive to the ways in which race is both historically and currently intertwined with notions of disability, and to attend to the presence (or absence) of race in participant discourses, while also acknowledging that my lack of lived experience as a racialized disabled person limits the depth of my analysis in these areas.
While exploring the dual and complex nature of my role as both an insider and outsider in relation to my participants (Mohler & Rudman, 2022), I also worked to acknowledge and reflexively attend to assumptions I may have about participants and the work of college students in DFCOs. Like Bialka et al. (2017), I sought to avoid assumptions about participants’ beliefs and attitudes toward disability based upon their disability status, and I engaged in frequent memoing throughout data collection and analysis in order to reflect upon the complexities of participants’ responses and my emerging analysis. I offer this information not to be absolved of privilege or subjectivity (Pillow, 2003), or to suggest that we can move past positionality once it has been acknowledged. Rather, I offer these contextual details in the spirit of transparency, and to explicitly acknowledge the active role that I have played in the research process.
Findings
Based upon Broderick and Lalvani’s categorical descriptors (see Table 1) I assigned four transcripts to Category I, eleven to Category II, and seventeen to Category III. The sum of the transcripts in these categories exceeds the number of participants because, like Broderick and Lalvani (2017), I chose to assign participant responses to more than one categorical label if their discourse contained features of multiple conceptual categories. It is interesting to note that not only did the majority of responses reflect the characteristics of Category III, many, though not all, of the participants represented in this category identified as disabled. Though it is beyond the scope of this work to expand upon the three categories of (dys)consciousness, the fact that the categories were insufficient to reflect the nuances in some participant responses, particularly those with chronic health conditions, is of note and is described later in this section.
Though I offer the quantity of participant discourses assigned to each conceptual category for the purposes of transparency, it is important to note that this study did not seek to estimate proportions of each type of dysconscious ableism within the college student population. Rather, this study seeks to characterize student discourses along the spectrum of (dys)consciousness. I also offer this information in order to contextualize the relative depth to which I am able to describe the features of student discourses within each category. In the following section, I present the findings from my analysis of interviews with students involved in DFCOs. For each category, I first describe the particular ways in which student discourses reflect the characteristics of that conceptual level of (dys)consciousness. Then, I present the themes generated from students’ descriptions of their organization’s activities, goals, and purpose.
Category I
Following the first phase of data analysis, I labeled four transcripts as Category I based upon their description of disability as inherent, negative, and originating within the individual (Broderick & Lalvani, 2017). These descriptions employed negatively-charged verbs to describe the experience of being disabled, such as “suffering” or “struggling,” and many included functioning labels (“individuals who are low functioning”), which are controversial within parts of the disability community due to their reductive, vague, and often inaccurate characterizations of disabled individuals' abilities (Bottema-Beutel et al., 2021). Few, if any, external factors appear in Category I descriptions of the challenges participants believe disabled people face. Rather, the cause of the “difficult time” disabled people have in the world was typically attributed to the disabled person’s existence, with one participant explaining that disabled people face challenges “just because that’s how they are.” These descriptions simultaneously locate the problem of disablement within disabled people, and position disabled existence as both abnormal and inherently inferior to non-disabled ways of being.
Participants described barriers as “challenges that each individual has to overcome,” explicitly identifying disability as an individual problem that could be remedied by the disabled person, tacitly absolving society of any responsibility to better accommodate disabled people. One participant reinforced this notion, claiming that challenges disabled people face are actually beneficial to them in the long run:
I think that people that have disabilities are, it's actually a blessing in disguise… I think these people are a lot stronger than the average person due to the challenges that they face, and I think that that benefits them in the long run.
Despite the dominant description of disability as negative in Category I discourses, some statements identify positive characteristics of disabled people, albeit in problematic ways. One participant noted that a disabled program member “brightens [their] day every single day” because “he has nothing but a good word to say.” Another described their overall experience in a DFCO as thought-provoking, because interacting with disabled people “brings out, like, the small moments of life that you, like, take, you take for granted.” Though these descriptions describe the positive impact disabled people have had on participants, they do so in a way that is both objectifying and dehumanizing, denying their role as individuals with complex identities and realities (Botha & Cage, 2022). Though these descriptions utilize positive language and describe positive outcomes (at least for college student participants), dehumanizing and objectifying rhetoric has been shown to have real-world consequences for disabled people (Ilyes, 2020; Parker et al., 2020).
In describing their organizations’ goals and purposes, Category I discourses were primarily focused on the work members of DFCOs engage in, absent significant description of the outcomes or impact of their efforts.
Exposure Equals Inclusion
In Category I discourses, students described their organizations as “getting students on campus involved with individuals with disabilities” by creating opportunities for (non-disabled) college students and disabled people to interact. This phrasing suggests that disabled people would not otherwise be present on campus, a surprising misconception given the growing number of disabled students seeking higher education (NCES, 2023) and the flourishing of Inclusive Post-Secondary Education (IPSE) Programs (Becht, et al., 2022). In the participant quotation above, “students on campus” are also implicitly positioned as non-disabled, reinforcing the idea that being a campus community member and being disabled are mutually exclusive.
Beyond “getting students…involved” with the disability community, Category I discourses offer few details about the purposes of increasing contact between college students and the disability community. Some participants referred to inclusion as a goal, including one who said that their organization’s “goal is honestly just inclusion with members with IDD in the community.” Follow-up questions about what inclusion looks like or why it was an important goal resulted in vague descriptions; one participant said they hoped to build a “melting pot” of people through their events, while another said their organization sought to “have that sense of inclusion.” The use of inclusion terminology without being able to define the concept or describe practical outcomes is reminiscent of other surface-level inclusion efforts, which have been critiqued in K-12 education for being more focused on optics than impact (Graham & Slee, 2008, p. 278).
All About Activities
Though all participants were asked to describe their organizational activities, what members typically do together, and to recall a memorable event or moment, Category I discourses were uniquely characterized by their nearly sole focus on organizational activities and events without accompanying explanations of purposes and goals. One participant described how “we get together and do fun things. We made cookies last month for Valentine's day. We have a talent show where [people with IDD] can showcase their talents and interests and just other fun activities like that.” Whether participants described arts and crafts, scavenger hunts, trivia nights, or community outings to go bowling or shopping, their discourses contained only details about the activities themselves, and my follow-up questions were largely unsuccessful in eliciting a description of purpose or impact.
It is important to note that the activities Category I discourses describe are not inherently problematic, and in some ways, are similar to organizational events described in Category II and III discourses. In some Category I discourses, activities were described as being chosen by disabled participants, or selected by a college student participant based upon their understanding of the interests of the disabled people their organization worked with: “it doesn't need to be like an entire huge thing, but it's just like whatever they want to do, usually.” Another described taking an disabled organization participant shopping at a favorite store because it was a way to “get [her] out of the house.” Despite the focus on participant interest that these descriptions demonstrate, they continue to lack descriptions of the purposes and impact of their organizations’ work.
Involvement Is Easy and Fun
Because descriptions of activities and events feature prominently in Category I discourses, it is perhaps unsurprising that participants highlight fun as a more motivating factor for membership than an organizational mission. One participant identified how the promise of fun and low-effort participation motivated them to join a DFCO: “I went over and the girls were explaining it, and they were like, you know, it's pretty low commitment. Just kind of some fun events you do with the community.” Other Category I discourses describe similar language used to recruit new participants or increase attendance at organization events, with one participant recounting that she told potential recruits that membership was “fun. And it's like a meeting a month, and like three events. That's like, not more than ten hours of your life.”
It is of note that these rationales for membership and engagement in Category I discourse are, like descriptions of events and activities, disconnected from a larger purpose. Instead, these discourses describe participation as low-effort and low-commitment, allowing participants to easily add a line to their resume without ever having to engage with the broader implications of their organizations’ activities or the oppression of the people their DFCOs aim to work with. These motivations for involvement with DFCOs are prime examples of the ways in which higher education prioritizes neoliberal values, framing participation in co-curricular activities as tokens to exchange for future professional success, and leading students to “invest exclusively in relationships that serve only one’s individual interests” (Giroux, 2014, p. 6).
Category II
For participant discourses I determined were aligned with a Category II understanding of disability, dysconscious ableism presented itself more subtly. While Category II discourses described disabling forces outside of the disabled person, participants described these forces as primarily individual and interpersonal without consideration for the relationship between systemic oppression and individual behavior. Often, participants described disabling individual behavior as a consequence of misinformation or ignorance, implicitly conveying that the participant themselves held more informed beliefs and externalizing blame in a way Broderick and Lalvani (2017) identified in their teacher education students.
A lack of critical engagement is also reflected in the ways that Category II discourses describe disabled people contending with the reality of disablement. In contrast to the descriptions of inspirational disabled people overcoming hardship that appear in Category I discourses, Category II discourses portray disabled individuals as overcoming the daily struggles disability poses through the support of family, technology, or medicine. A participant described a disability “as something that requires assistance with your peers and family members’ energy, because it's something that can be worked on to the point where you may not have that disability after a while.” Overcoming one’s disability is still tied to notions of a normal (non-disabled) life in Category II discourses, though they engage more critically with the concept of normality than do Category I discourses. One participant immediately problematized the way in which the term ‘normal’ is used as an antonym to ‘disabled’ (Davis, 2016), describing disabled people as “anyone who thinks differently or like engages with the world in a different manner than like what we want to define as…the way we normally do it, even though I hate that word.” Descriptions like these reflect an awareness of a socially-constructed (non-disabled) normal but are still incomplete (King, 1990). Though these participants identified a societal component to how disabled people are defined and perceived, they did not yet reach the level of considering how social structures and systems created, and continue to perpetuate, one ‘normal’ way of being (Davis, 2016).
Despite the fact that participants from a variety of organizations were represented within this study’s pool of Category II discourses, descriptions of organizational goals and impacts within this category shared several key features and were very often tied directly to the barriers and challenges identified in these discourses. Overall, Category II discourses described organizational activities as responding to and, ideally, mitigating the challenges disabled people face as a result of individual behaviors and attitudes.
Peer Education as a Solution
Category II discourses described efforts aimed at educating members of their campus communities about disability, and one participant noted that they hoped to “enlighten some other people” through their organization’s events. Educational efforts were described as countering the misinformation and ignorance that Category II discourses problematize, and participants described events and campaigns aimed at “spread[ing] the message that…disability is a lot more common than people think” and that others’ “preconceived notions on disabilities are often wrong.” Other peer education initiatives aimed to provide information about and reduce stigma surrounding underutilized on-campus resources like therapy.
Though many Category II discourses failed to acknowledge wider social conditions and ideologies contributing to disablement, several Category II discourses did mention culture, including one participant who described an organizational sub-committee that “focuses on the cultural aspects of disability and how disabilities can be perceived by international students.” Though descriptions like this take into account how social norms and cultural beliefs can influence individual attitudes and behaviors (Barnes, 1996), it is interesting to note that these educational efforts remain externally focused, and in the case of the above quotation, focused specifically on non-American cultures. This feature of participant discourses is a prime example of how Category II dysconscious ableism often identifies others as the source of ableism, rather than examining how ableism and other forms of oppression are built into society writ large.
Fostering Mixed-Ability Friendships
Unlike Category I discourses, Category II discourses described friendship, not just exposure, as a goal of their DFCO, typically with the purpose of countering isolation in the disability community. A participant stated that because disabled people are “typically an isolated group,... the idea is just they come to campus and we do fun activities with them and hopefully form some meaningful relationships.” Category II discourses often described building authentic relationships between people with disabilities and college student members, and many, as in the above quotation, described the desired impact of forming meaningful social connections. Though Category II discourses acknowledge and describe how DFCOs attempt to remedy major barriers to disabled well-being, such as social isolation (MacDonald et al., 2018), they do not often acknowledge the broader social conditions that contribute to the ongoing segregation of disabled people (Steele, 2023).
As in many participant responses, Category II discourses described activities and events hosted by DFCOs. In Category II discourses, events are described as being selected based upon what would be enjoyable for all participants, as well as what would provide opportunities to form authentic mixed-ability friendships. One participant described how witnessing poorly-designed organizational events led her to take on a leadership role within her DFCO and plan more engaging group activities for members, including a scavenger hunt that allowed disabled organization participants to exert more agency and have meaningful conversations. Descriptions of organizational activities such as these include clear connections to organizational goals, which are often rooted in an understanding of disabled group members as peers, a stark contrast to the activity descriptions in Category I discourses.
An understanding of disabled people as the peers and equals of non-disabled people was also apparent in how some Category II discourses described decision-making within their organizations. In many of these discourses, organization members with disabilities were described as key collaborators and active participants in planning organization events and activities. While some Category I discourses described DFCO activities based on the expressed or assumed interests of disabled participants, Category II discourses describe disabled participants as offering ongoing feedback through multiple channels and shared decision-making. One participant described how they “go around events, and I'll like, say, like, ‘Oh, we're thinking of planning this type of event. What do you think?’... They are involved in the planning decision.”
Category III
Discourses aligned with a Category III understanding of disability demonstrated a critical and complete understanding of the structural and systemic roots of disablement. One participant described how “we continue to build things for the 90%, which itself is a flawed phenomenon,” while another noted that most challenges disabled people face originate in the “world instead of the individual.” A number of systems, including the educational, healthcare, and legal systems, appear in Category III discourses as the driving forces of disablement. One participant described how many systems are intentionally disabling, noting an inherent paradox: “if you're on SSI, you can't have a job, and that like caps you at an income…where it isn't super feasible to pay for your healthcare.” The source of the daily, often intersectional (Crenshaw, 1989) oppression experienced by disabled people? As one participant succinctly put it: “capitalism, colonialism, all that bullshit.”
Several participants described how social perceptions of disability affect whether individuals adopt the disability identity label, even if they did not perceive the term to be negative. For participants with lower support needs, claiming the disability identity felt inappropriate because their own experiences of ableist oppression were mitigated by their perceived value in a capitalist society (Chapman, 2023): “I have, like certain skills that society thinks are like valuable enough that they like offset like extra challenges. And so they're like willing to accommodate me, versus like a lot of people aren't willing to accommodate my brother.”
Category III discourses located systemic disablement in both the past and present, tracing disability ideologies and policies over centuries. One participant noted that non-disabled people are not used to seeing or interacting with the disability community because “for such a long time disabled people were shunned away from society, locked up someplace, even just straight up dead.” Another cited “ugly laws,” legislation that prohibited the public appearance of anyone who appeared disabled (Schweik, 2009), as a historic contributor to the ongoing lack of social integration for disabled people in society.
Interestingly, while Category III discourses from this study’s participants aligned with Broderick and Lalvani’s (2017) description of a critically conscious understanding of ableism, participants’ descriptions of disablement did not always fit neatly into the social model of disability (Shakespeare, 2017) in which the concept of dysconscious ableism is grounded. Specifically, some participants who described the systemic and historical roots of ableist oppression also argued that their experiences of disablement were not entirely socially constructed. For those with chronic pain conditions, for example, social change would not fully alleviate negative physical experiences that they find to be disabling:
No matter how accessible the world is, that it's not going to change the fact that I cannot do everything that I want, because I'm in pain. Nothing is gonna help that. There is no cure for my condition. We're just kind of rolling with things. But on the flip side, if we address the social model of disability, and we make the world a more accessible place, it's still gonna be a more accessible place, and I will be less disabled by that definition, but that is never going to cure my disability.
Though expanding upon the three conceptual levels of dysconscious ableism is beyond the scope of this work, these features of some Category III discourses reflect ongoing disagreements within the disability community regarding the nature of disablement and impairment. Models of disability are a frequently-debated topic within the disability community (Silvers, 2020), with some critics of the social model arguing that it does not account for the experiences of those who find their impairments to be disabling (Shakespeare, 2017).
Despite the tensions present in some of the discourses assigned a Category III label, their acknowledgement of how ideology and social structures contribute to the disabled experience, especially for those with intersecting identities, distinguishes them from others in this study. Based upon these critical understanding of systemic disablement, Category III discourses describe their organizations’ focuses on addressing barriers through community-building, mutual support, and advocacy efforts.
Community-Building With Purpose
Hosting social events was described in nearly all participant discourses, but Category III was unique in featuring descriptions of building community amongst disabled students. In addition to combatting the isolation described in Category III responses, being in community with other disabled people fostered a sense of belonging and mitigated the psychological effects of social stigma:
Knowing somebody else has dealt with similar things just makes you feel less alone and already, with the stigmatization of [disability], if you feel less alone, and you can connect with people about it, it’s gonna make that stigma feel less overwhelming if you don't feel alone. So that is my goal.
Participants also described the relief of being among peers who “get it,” a powerful experience for those who typically have to justify or explain their needs. These findings align with recent research that suggests disability advocacy organizations support disabled college students in developing affirmative disability identities (Broido et al., 2023). For some participants, even using the word disability was challenging until they had community support through their campus organization: “it's helped me a lot to embrace how to embrace the word disability, and also try to embrace my disability, and in turn like embracing myself as a person.”
The support of a community was also described as instrumental in developing critical consciousness. For one participant, learning about the variety of challenges other disabled students faced on campus helped them to better understand that their experiences were less the result of a “personal failing versus like an issue with how the institution is going about its work.” Building “cross-disability” community has been described as not only essential for developing a better understanding of disablement as a political phenomenon, but also as an act of resistance that resists the isolation disabled people are often subjected to (Brown et al., 2019).
Advocacy for Today and Tomorrow
Though not all participants were members of campus organizations specifically devoted to advocacy and activism, Category III discourses included descriptions of organizational efforts to improve the lives of disabled students in a variety of ways. Overt activism was often described as inherently collective, drawing strength from the community to challenge disabling institutional policies and practices:
If one person goes in and complains, like, it's not really gonna do much. But if every single one of us is going in and complaining one after the other, they're kind of gonna be forced to listen to us. So I think kind of just using our combined voices to make change is definitely a long term goal.
Engaging with campus administration collectively also took the form of smaller-scale efforts, as was the case for one student who described how members of their organization would accompany peers to potentially stressful meetings “so students will feel more comfortable talking to administrators if we’re also there.” Even when members of an organization were not described as providing direct support for advocacy efforts, one participant noted, the community and its influence helped disabled students to self-advocate more effectively and be “much less apologetic about what their needs are.”
In a marked contrast to Category I descriptions of organizational activities, which made little mention of potential short- or long-term impacts, the advocacy within Category III discourses aim to have far-reaching effects for both current and future students. Participants described programming aimed at supporting their own members’ transition to the workforce after college, including advocacy efforts aimed at educating future employers about accommodations and disabled employees’ rights in order to address systemic employment barriers. Other efforts, including leadership transition planning within participants’ organizations, was focused on supporting future members and their well-being. Though advocacy, activism, and engagement often require additional labor for disabled students (Linder et al., 2019) who must already exert additional effort to exist in ableist spaces, one student characterized these efforts as truly worthwhile: “Everything that I've done will make it easier for the next person to come along.”
Discussion
This study sought to extend Braderick and Lalvani’s (2017) analysis to learn more about how college students in DFCOs describe disability and ableism, and how they conceive of their organizational goals, work, and impact. Viewed through the lens of dysconscious ableism, participant discourses represent a range of definitions of disability and beliefs about the origins of challenges disabled people face, with Category III discourses reflecting an understanding of systemic disablement that Category I and II discourses lacked. Analysis of descriptions of organizational goals and activities within each conceptual category reveal connections, both implicit and explicit, between participants’ perceptions of organizational activities and their discursive construction of disability.
In the case of Category III discourses, which reflected participants’ critically conscious understandings of disabling systems (Keefe, 2022; Valdez & Swenor, 2023), participants often explicitly described how organizational activities such as building community, sharing knowledge, and engaging in collective action addressed systemic disablement. These findings are consistent with prior research on the positive impact of community-building for disabled individuals, and the ways in which disabled communities foster affirmative disability identity development and critical consciousness among members (Broido et al., 2023; Kimball et al., 2016; Miller, 2017). The dysconsciousness embodied in Category I and II discourses, however, meant that participant positionings of both disability and their organization lacked critical engagement with how systems and structures marginalize and oppress disabled people. The goals and activities described in dysconscious discourses, therefore, did not engage with these issues and systems, and their “assimilationist” nature could potentially perpetuate them even through well-intentioned action (Broderick & Lalvani, 2017; King, 1991).
For Category II discourses, this tacit acceptance of systemic oppression (King, 1991) meant that participants described directing their critical energy toward the beliefs and actions of individual others, rather than toward problematic systems or their own dysconscious ableism. This external focus is characteristic of Category II dysconscious ableism, which views individual attitudes and actions as the primary cause of disablement (Broderick & Lalvani, 2017). Category II dysconscious ableism among members of DFCO poses multiple problems. First, it is particularly difficult to eradicate dysconsciousness of this kind, as those with such mindsets often reject suggestions that they may harbor prejudiced beliefs (King, 1991). Second, because Category II discourses in the present study describe activities aimed at educating and enlightening peers about disability, it is possible that dysconsciousness is nevertheless being perpetuated through these well-intentioned efforts.
Category I descriptions of organizational activities also suggest that they may perpetuate harm due to members’ impaired consciousness regarding disability and ableism. Specifically, because Category I dysconsciousness views disability as inherent to the person, and the responsibility of the disabled person, it is not surprising that these responses did not identify many external barriers or describe any plans to address barriers through organizational actions. With roots in the medical model (Marks, 1997), Category I discourses implicitly denied any responsibility for challenging disabling systems or behaviors. Instead, descriptions of organizational activities focused on inclusion, though this concept was defined only as contact between disabled and non-disabled people, reinforcing a binary understanding of disabled and non-disabled identities (Campbell, 2009).
The vague descriptions of inclusion within Category I discourses are problematic in their assumption that contact between disabled and non-disabled people is equivalent to true inclusion and that this contact can be assumed to be beneficial to disabled people. Though studies have shown that disabled people are at particular risk for experiencing social isolation and loneliness (MacDonald et al., 2018), Category I discourses in the present study do not actually engage with the reality of exclusion or its systemic origins, and instead focus on the assumed benefits disabled organization members will derive simply from their proximity to non-disabled college students. Ironically, the infantilizing and patronizing microaggressions disabled people report experiencing (Keller & Calgay, 2010; Olkin et al., 2019) are similar to the disability ideologies reflected in Category I discourses, which often described disabled people as inherently inferior and lacking compared to non-disabled people. As a result, it is possible that the social activities described in Category I discourses may put disabled individuals at risk of further marginalization, rather than offering them the opportunity for meaningful participation and full inclusion as equal, respected members of participants’ organizations (Hammel et al., 2008; Milner & Kelly, 2009).
Though analysis of Category I and II descriptions suggests that their organizational activities may prove problematic given their potential to perpetuate dysconsciousness and harm, it is important to note that this study analyzed participant speech, rather than the published mission statements and goals of the organizations themselves. For example, while Category I discourses largely lacked any description of organizational purpose, participants whose discourses were assigned to this category all belonged to chapters of larger organizations that have detailed mission statements. There may, therefore, be discrepancies between member perceptions and organizational goals that are beyond the scope of this study. However, the potential incongruence between the two raise the question of whether an organization is fulfilling its mission if its members are unable to understand or articulate it.
The findings from this study suggest that the discourse of some students engaged in disability-focused organizations reflects incomplete understandings of disability and its connections to broader social systems and structures. Given the tendency of pervasive ideologies to become naturalized and taken for granted (Fairclough, 2010), it is unsurprising that even students who have voluntarily engaged in disability-related work may reflect and perpetuate ableism in their discourse, perhaps even unknowingly. Furthermore, while more disabled students are attending higher education than ever before (NCES, 2023), inaccessible systems and spaces (Griful-Freixenet et al., 2017; Wertans & Burch, 2022; Woolf & de Bie, 2022) and the risks of disclosure (Ball & Traxler, 2023; Miller et al., 2018) mean that true inclusion of disabled college students has yet to be realized. This ongoing marginalization of disabled people in education serves to perpetuate dysconscious ableism among students, whose discourse both reflects and perpetuates these inequities.
Implications
There is some disagreement among scholars regarding whether non-members of a group are able to develop critical consciousness of the group’s oppression, or if their understanding of oppression would amount only to allyship (Seider et al., 2020). Like King (1991) and Broderick and Lalvani (2017), I argue that individuals whose actions may perpetuate or help to dismantle oppressive systems must be provided with opportunities to develop critical consciousness, and therefore the opportunity to make fully informed choices. Much as educators cannot make fully informed decisions in the classroom while harboring an impaired consciousness about race or disability, student members of DFCOs whose discourse reflects dysconsciousness cannot truly engage in informed and intentional work through their organizations.
While the discourses of individual college students are the subject of this study, it is important to note that the issue of dysconsciousness in higher education is not an individual problem, but a systemic and structural one. Discourse and social reality reflect and perpetuate one another, and the notions presented within Category I and Category II discourses are linked to broader societal and educational conditions. For example, many of the ideologies embedded within Category I discourses, including the implication that disabled people and college students are two separate groups, reflect a higher education system that presents numerous barriers to the full and meaningful inclusion of disabled people (Dolmage, 2017).
Despite the “hostile, oppressive environments” higher education poses for disabled people, especially disabled people of color (Comeaux et al., 2021, p. 747), disabled students continue to represent an ever-growing group in higher education. Given the insightful contributions of many student participants in this study, as well as the community-building and advocacy efforts they are engaged in, higher education institutions would do well to heed their recommendations and requests, rather than penalize those who seek to improve current and future prospects for disabled students (Linder et al., 2019).
Limitations and Future Directions
Findings from this study are limited by the homogeneity of the participant sample, which is predominantly white and female. As noted previously, though efforts were made to recruit a racially diverse sample, my own identity as a white researcher was likely a barrier to recruiting students of color. Publicly adopting a disability label is particularly risky for those with additional marginalized identities (Brown et al., 2019), and identifying oneself to an unfamiliar researcher as disabled or affiliated with a DFCO may have, understandably, been deemed too great a risk for some potential participants. Future research should seek to address (dys)consciousness within a more racially diverse sample, in part because students of color likely have lived experience of systemic oppression based upon race that could contribute to their development of critical consciousness regarding disability. In particular, the discourses of disabled students of color may take different forms than those of white disabled students and may explicitly center the problem of white supremacy in relation to disability and other intersectional experiences of marginalization (Schalk, 2022).
Furthermore, as noted in this study’s findings, the majority of participant discourses in this study were classified as Category III, which limited the depth to which I was able to analyze Category I and II discourses. While this study was not intended to quantify categories of (dys)consciousness among college students, future studies would benefit from recruiting students from a wider variety of organizations, and perhaps from purposively recruiting from organizations similar to those described in Category I discourses. Finally, I sought only to explore student perceptions of disability and their organizations’ activities, and comparisons between these perceptions and organizational mission statements was beyond the scope of this study. Because participants’ responses suggested that there may be discrepancies between their perceptions of their organizations’ work and the publicized mission of parent organizations, future studies may seek to compare participant perceptions and organizational messaging.
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Table 1
Overview of Dysconscious Ableism Categories
| Category I (Conservative) | Category II (Liberal) | Category III (Radical) |
| Aligned with medical model of disability | Aligned with sociocultural and relational models of disability | Aligned with critical, power-conscious critiques of disablement |
| Focus upon individual impairment | Focus upon attitudes, beliefs, actions of individuals | Focus upon systems and structures that privilege some while marginalizing others |
| Disability as deficit | Disability as diversity | Disability as political, structural |
| Uncritical invocation of normality and typicality | Absence of systemic and ideological factors | Critique of systems of marginalization/oppression and related ideologies |
Note. Categorical descriptions adapted from Broderick and Lalvani (2017), King and Ladson-Billings (1990), and King (1991).
Table 2
Participant Demographics
| n | |
|---|---|
| Gender Identity | |
|
17 |
|
1 |
| Race | |
|
13 |
|
3 |
| Student Status | |
|
17 |
|
1 |
| Identify as Disabled | |
|
11 |
|
6 |
|
1 |
Note. Demographic information was available for
18 of 27 participants. The
values of some demographic
categories (e.g., race) have been collapsed to
preserve
participant anonymity.
Figure 1
Data Analysis Process
