Ensuring that Social Justice includes Disability

Chapter excerpt:

As higher education practitioners continue to create and develop social justice frameworks and strategies, disability identity needs to be included with other historically marginalized populations such as race, gender, socioeconomic status, sexuality, citizenship status. Kim and Aquino (2017) stated,

Viewing disability as a characteristic of diversity and examining how it intersects with other diversity memberships may not only share revealing information related to the potential salience of diversity identities, but also elucidate the role of disability in overall identity development, self-perception, and success in college. (p. xii)

This contextualization of disability as diversity is important to identity development. Disability and ableism are an identity and system that directly affects all higher education stakeholders, and thus challenges our understandings of student development and success. Yet, disability is often omitted from the social justice discourse within U. S. higher education. Instead, disability is commonly only understood from a medical standpoint, which is problematic and is discussed further in the next chapter.