Beyond Accommodation: Access Problems and Responsibilities
Open Access
- Author:
- Lajoie, Corinne
- Graduate Program:
- Philosophy
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 20, 2024
- Committee Members:
- Nancy Tuana, Major Field Member
Sarah Miller, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Ted Toadvine, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Ami Harbin, Special Member
Michael Bérubé, Outside Unit & Field Member
Sarah Miller, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- disability
accessibility
inclusion
higher education
responsibility - Abstract:
- nce its bipartisan adoption in 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has been widely recognized as a momentous turning point in U. S. disability history. Modeled after previous civil rights legislation, the ADA expressly prohibits discrimination based on disability and guarantees equal opportunities for disabled people. To comply with non-discrimination requirements, public and private entities are legally required to provide reasonable accommodations to disabled people unless doing so would generate undue hardship. Using higher education settings as a case study, I show that the system for accommodations exacerbates the inequalities it has been tasked to resolve. Instead of transforming the background conditions that produce systemic inaccessibility for disabled people, institutions treat disabled people’s needs as exceptional and seek to accommodate disability within the status quo. Within the current landscape, nondisabled people and institutions must only give thought to accessibility when they are legally required to, and many only do so retroactively, after disabled people have identified failures of compliance. In contrast, and as the necessary counterpart to this predicament, disabled people are required to consider access and guarantee its actualization everywhere they go. The individualization of the responsibility for access results in significant costs and burdens for disabled people. Achieving meaningful access at a societal level (rather than merely access-as-compliance) requires that we move beyond a narrow focus on accommodations and transform existing practices of responsibility around access.