(Dis)ability Deconditioning: Challenging Ableist Articulations of Professionalism in University Career Centers

ABSTRACT

When drawing from dominant norms, university career centers can promote ideas of professionalism that systematically train marginalized identities to suppress embodied knowledge. I analyze five career center websites using thematic coding to identify how career centers can circulate ableist notions of professionalism on their public-facing websites. I then offer a theory of (dis)ability deconditioning to encourage collaborative interventions between technical and professional communicators and career center professionals to challenge ableist norms and center embodied intersectionality.

KEYWORDS:

• Technical and professional communication
• career centers
• professionalism
• disability justice
• social justice
• intersectionality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10572252.2024.2340433

Notes

1. I use disability-first language (i.e., “disabled individuals”) rather than person-first language (i.e., “individuals with disabilities”) to prioritize disability as an integral aspect of one’s lived experience. Person-first language reinforces the idea that disability is separate from personhood and thus frames disability as lack (Cherney, 2019).

2. The term bodymind articulates a connection between the body and challenges logics that the two are distinct entities (Price, 2014).

3. In discussing career center documents, I refer to university name and document number. For example, Kansas State 6 refers to Kansas State University Document 6. Refer to Appendix A for a full list of documents.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kristin C. Bennett

Kristin C. Bennett is an Assistant Professor of Technical and Scientific Writing at the University of Oklahoma. She received a PhD in Writing, Rhetorics, and Literacies at Arizona State University. Her research examines the intersections between technical and professional communication, disability studies, rhetorics of health and medicine, and digital rhetoric. Her work has appeared in IEEE: Transactions on Professional Communication, Technical Communication, ImageText, The Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Composition Studies, and Teaching English in the Two-Year College.