Chronic Illness and Educational Equity: The Politics of Visibility

By using the university's disability policy, chronically ill women become visible in ways that subsequently determine aspects of their undergraduate and graduate careers. This constitutes an exercise of power normally understood as the university acting in the interests of students with disabilities. Using an institutional ethnographic approach, this inquiry starts with the embodied experience of chronically ill women pursuing post-secondary education in order to shed light on the broader social processes that produce systemic inequities for people with disabilities. Specifically, I contend that the requirement that chronically ill students identify themselves as disabled in the context of the university, subjects them to normative, prognostic, diagnostic, and other judgments and assessments that may disorganize their future student and career opportunities.