Chapter 3: The Normative Trajectory of Academics and Class-Based Disablism in Higher Education

Despite growing bodies of work on both disabled academics and working-class academics in Higher Education, there is little research on precarious disabled academics, or their trajectories through academia, a place where they are likely to be found by dint of circumstances which tend to render them as ‘other’ to organisational norms. Drawing primarily on a 10-year autoethnography, which was supplemented by informal conversations with disabled academics, and more recent formal interviews with disabled academics and recruiters, this chapter begins to unpick some of the ways in which expectations of disabled academics, and the non-disabled ‘unencumbered’ worker ideal, blend with the class-based assumptions of academia, to perpetuate the ethnocentric ideals which continue to render working-class disabled people as an ill-fit for academic roles and careers.