The Discursive Organization of Disability as a Moral and Epistemic Construct within a University Accommodations Office

Definitions of disability abound, but it has been represented in prevailing social discourses as both proper to the individual and the medical institution. Discourses that portray disability as such are inherently interdiscursive in nature, as they draw upon, and are embedded within, larger discourses of what counts as evidence of not only knowledge, but knowledge of disability in particular. By employing a discourse analytic approach to analyzing in-depth interviews with members of a university accommodations office, I show how they locally reproduce and inadvertently reaffirm such discourses of disability, as they organize disability according to type: physical and cognitive. In their talk, these categories of disability are presented as oppositional and hierarchical constructs, with physical disability being discursively constructed as preferable to cognitive disability. I consider how this practice ties into an empiricist tradition that argues that to know disability means that it must be observable, measurable, or otherwise verifiable.