Unequal Opportunity Regimes: Policies, Contexts and the Everyday Experience of Disabled Students in the Nigerian HE
- Abass B. Isiaka, University of East Anglia
Against the backdrop of the (pseudo)expansion of higher education in Nigeria, this presentation develops an understanding of the everyday work that goes into enacting disability inclusion policies in higher education institutions in Nigeria. Through a decolonial institutional ethnography, it brings the social organisation of policy texts (Smith, 2005) in dialogue with the colonial matrix of power (Quijano, 2007) to explicate how and why higher education policies and practices in Nigeria are still trapped in the ideological knowing and doing of disability, inclusion and inclusive education. Drawing ethnographic interviews conducted with students with disabilities (SWDs) and other policy “actors”, such as disability unit staff, lecturers, and principal officers across three universities in Nigeria, this seminar shows how disability discourses, institutional policies, and support services are being deployed to “contain” the experience of students with disabilities in higher education institutions. It maps the daily and nightly “policy work” SWD undertake to access, participate, and transform universities that are not designed for people like them.
Booking
Event Notes
Please find the General Privacy Policy of UCL, one of our partner universities, here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/legal-services/privacy/general-privacy-notice
Share this event
Abass B. Isiaka (PhD) is a Senior Research Associate in Widening Participation at the Centre for Higher Education Research Practice Policy and Scholarship (CHERPPS) at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom. He is interested in the sociology of inequalities in higher education, policy research and impact evaluation, internationalisation, disability and institutional ethnography.
