Unlearning and Noticing: Reflections on Critical Disability Studies By Chhavi Arora

Before I enrolled in this course, I thought I understood disability reasonably well. What these eight sessions did, however, was something more unsettling and necessary. The course dismantled the intellectual scaffolding I had built around disability and encouraged me to reconstruct it from ground up. This course came as a new lens to see the world. It challenged many of my preconceived notions and dismantled the idea of "normalcy" I had carried without ever questioning it.

The first session introduced what became a recurring provocation across all eight weeks: that disability exists as an "absent presence" in public life (Goodley et al., 2021). It is everywhere and yet systematically made invisible, accommodated only enough to be technically acknowledged, never enough to genuinely belong. What struck me most was the distinction drawn between disablism and ableism. Disablism refers to active discrimination and prejudice directed at disabled people. Ableism, by contrast, is subtler: the structural assumption that everyone shares the same set of abilities, that the able body is the default, the norm, the unmarked category against which all others are measured (Meekosha and Shuttleworth, 2009). As I engaged with this, I realised how deeply ableism is woven into the fabric of everyday life, not only in systems and structures, but in language, attitudes, and even the smallest social interactions. Disablism can be addressed by targeting bad actors. Ableism requires us to look at the assumptions baked into how institutions are designed, how knowledge is produced, and how human worth is evaluated. It requires, as Goodley (2024) argues, nothing short of depathologising the university itself.

Session two, by Dr. Antonios Ktenidis and Dr. Karuna Rajeev, without question, moved me the most. The central question, who is the university designed for and who is left out, sounds simple but opens into something vast. Sitting in that session, I found myself thinking about my own school. Many classrooms were on upper floors with no functioning lifts. The water coolers at heights a wheelchair user cannot reach. The bathrooms that technically exist but were locked. Titchkosky's (2008) essay on washroom access in university environments suggests that ordinary talk around extraordinary exclusions, the way institutions perform inclusion while maintaining the conditions of it. Beyond physical access, inaccessible reading materials exclude disabled students from their fundamental right to education. Research that claims to be for public access exists only in dense written forms, inaccessible to the very communities it purports to serve. This raises questions of epistemological justice. 

What Ghai's work indicated is how this plays out particularly acutely in the Indian context. Quota admissions exist, but accommodation rarely happens (Ghai, 2018). Speed is treated as a sign of intelligence. Productivity is fetishised. Neoliberal academic environments are organised around norms of efficiency that structurally disadvantage disabled students, not because of malice, but because the system was never designed with them in mind. Ktenidis sir, in the session, offered anti-ableist pedagogies (Ktenidis, 2025) as a corrective, one where eye contact is not mandatory, stimming is welcome, and students are invited to listen to their "bodymind." Reading that, I thought about how radical those principles are, and how they should not be radical at all. Access, as Karuna ma’am framed it, is not merely a technical problem. It is an ethical, anti-eugenic, and epistemological commitment. The concept I found myself returning to most was Mia Mingus's notion of access intimacy (Mingus, 2017), that elusive, hard-to-describe feeling when someone else genuinely "gets" your access needs, not as an obligation but as an act of genuine care and solidarity. I had never had a word for this before. Now I do. 

Session three moved into the workplace, and the continuities were striking. The myth of the ideal worker, the assumption that the "normal" employee is continuously present, physically able-bodied, and able to perform at a standardised pace, structures most employment environments. We learnt in the session that "disability hire trap" reflects how the performance of inclusion at the point of recruitment, followed by a complete failure to accommodate once the person is in the role. The curb cut effect also clarified itself for me (Hamraie, 2017). The idea that disability drives innovation genuinely amazes me. Ramps built for wheelchair users assist people with prams and luggage. Closed captions created for hearing-impaired people are widely used in noisy environments. Audiobooks, designed for people with visual impairments, are used by everyone. Disability-related interventions shape the world to be more inclusive and more convenient for all. Thus, universal design is a design principle that improves conditions for everyone, and the session asked us to humanise workplaces, to stop equating speed with intelligence and hours with impact.

The next session was on disability and the medical humanities. One thing I cannot stop thinking about from this session is the statement, “life is short, mine is 25% shorter.” The distinction between illness as disease and illness as experience, central to narrative medicine, was also discussed (Lau, 2018). Medicine has always treated disability as a problem of the body to be corrected, ignoring the texture of a life lived in a world not designed for it. Medical ableism is a very common phenomenon. I can't help but think how foundational medical texts shape how clinicians think about disabled bodies, largely as bodies to be fixed. The session's critique of calling disabled people "inspiring" for navigating systems designed for their exclusion, while doing nothing to hold those systems accountable, also landed hard. 

Reflecting on this brought me back to my own internship experience at an inclusive school and holistic care centre, where I worked with children with Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, intellectual disability, and autism, among other conditions. In retrospect, I realised that despite best intentions, my behaviour showed subtle biases that were infantilising. I recounted one instance where a child who studied in seventh grade came to occupational therapy to improve his motor skills, as he had half limbs. I treated him just the same as children with impaired cognitive abilities, assuming all disabled people to be one homogeneous group with similar needs and abilities. I also used to talk about how grateful I should be as an able-bodied person, not realising how transient that is, and not realising how ableist it is to compare myself with disabled people to feel better about myself. I hate to admit that now. I deeply regret that now.

The next session, on disability representation, introduced a set of conceptual tools I found genuinely useful.  We discussed how the media represents disability as tragedy, karma, comic relief, charitable object, or "feel good" diversity (Friedner, 2017), and how these are not innocent choices. They are affective strategies through which audiences are controlled, and ways that leave the structural conditions of disabled lives entirely unexamined (Sinha, 2024). Mitchell and Snyder's (2006) concept of narrative prosthesis suggests that disability functions as narrative device, where the actual lived realities of disabled lives remain invisible. The question of language surfaced here too. Terms like divyangjan or "specially abled" are used with the intention of honouring disabled people but are problematic. Language reflects the model one positions oneself in to conceptualise disability. Using disability-first language, as most disability scholars advocate, signals a positioning in the social model and a recognition that disability is not dehumanising (Longmore, 1985). I myself am writing this essay using disabled-first language, indicating my positioning in the social model and my support to disability advocates.

I also came to understand that disability cannot be viewed in isolation but through the lens of intersectionality. Patriarchy and caste compound ableism, shaping the experiences of disabled women and lower-caste disabled individuals in deeply interconnected ways (Ghai, 2018). 

The final sessions on research using inclusive methods were very interesting. Ankita ma’am and Nikita ma’am delivered these beautifully. In these sessions, "vulnerability" was reframed to be seen not as an inherent trait of disabled people but as something produced by systems and contexts. This shift from a protection-focused to an agency-focused research ethic reflects awareness and commitment. We discussed inclusive and participatory methods. Kara (2020) insisted creativity in research is not ornamental but epistemological, adding elements of human knowing, intuition, imagination, and wonder that conventional academic methods structurally exclude. Zine-making as dissemination, participatory data analysis, arts-based research are expansions of rigour in research, as it helps produce outputs in formats that disabled communities can actually access. This is where academic accessibility comes in, and answers my question if research that claims to be public but exists only in inaccessible forms is actually public.

What I carry forward from this course is not answers but a changed set of questions. The perspective I have received is deeply transformative, instilling values I could not have received elsewhere and awakening a sense of ethical responsibility that goes beyond academic understanding. Disability has been the "absent presence" in nearly all domains long enough, our work as critical disability researchers, is to make that absence visible, and then to refuse to leave it as is.

References 

Friedner, M. (2017). How the disabled body unites the national body: Disability as “feel good” diversity in urban India. Contemporary South Asia, 25(4), 347–363. https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2017.1382440

Ghai, A. (Ed.). (2018). Disability in South Asia: Knowledge and experience. SAGE Publications India.

Goodley, D. (2024). Depathologising the university. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2024.2316007

Goodley, D., Lawthom, R., Liddiard, K., & Runswick-Cole, K. (2021). Key concerns for critical disability studies. The International Journal of Disability and Social Justice, 1(1), 27–49. https://doi.org/10.13169/intljofdissocjus.1.1.0027

Hamraie, A. (2017). Building access: Universal design and the politics of disability. University of Minnesota Press.

iHuman. (2023). Equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in research ethics. University of Sheffield. https://sheffield.ac.uk/ihuman/prn/output-hub/edi-ethics

Jackson, L. (2023). Doctors must challenge ableism in healthcare. The BMJ, 383, p2968. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.p2968

Kara, H. (2020). Creative research methods: A practical guide (2nd ed.). Polity Press.

Ktenidis, A. (2025, January 13). Questioning ableism in education through anti-ableist pedagogies. BERA Blog. https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/questioning-ableism-in-education-through-anti-ableist-pedagogies

Lau, T. C. W. (2018, March 14). Taking stock: Disability studies and the medical humanities. Synapsis. https://medicalhealthhumanities.com/2018/03/14/taking-stock-disability-studies-and-the-medical-humanities/

Longmore, P. K. (1985). A note on language and the social identity of disabled people. American Behavioral Scientist, 28(3), 419–423. https://doi.org/10.1177/000276485028003008 

Meekosha, H., & Shuttleworth, R. (2009). What’s so “critical” about critical disability studies? Australian Journal of Human Rights, 15(1), 47–75. https://doi.org/10.1080/1323238X.2009.11910861 

Mingus, M. (2017, April 12). Access intimacy, interdependence and disability justice. Leaving Evidence. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/access-intimacy-interdependence-and-disability-justice/

Mitchell, D. T., & Snyder, S. L. (2006). Narrative prosthesis and the materiality of metaphor. In L. J. Davis (Ed.), The disability studies reader (2nd ed., pp. 205–216). Routledge.

Sinha, P. (2024). Scripting disability as the “new” Bollywood: Pitching, reflecting, researching and negotiating. Media, Culture & Society, 46(4), 725–744. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437241234567 

Titchkosky, T. (2008). “To pee or not to pee?” Ordinary talk about extraordinary exclusions in a university environment. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 33(1), 37–60. https://doi.org/10.29173/cjs17581