Discourse and the containment of disability in higher education: an institutional analysis

Abstract

We use a social model of disability to examine disability discourse at a regional university in the mid-western United States. Using an institutional unit of analysis and several different information sources (e.g. interviews, federal regulations, syllabus texts, surveys), we illustrate the ways in which disability-as-difference is governed by an architecture of containment at the university.

Keywords:

• disability studies
• higher education
• containment
• social model
• Foucault
• discourse