Abass B. Isiaka

This paper presents the everyday textual relations of students with disabilities in a Nigerian university. Using institutional ethnography as a method of inquiry, it takes the standpoints of students with disabilities as an epistemological entry point in understanding how these students' daily and nightly experiences are mediated textually within the institutional discourse of access, equity, and inclusion. While challenging the assumptions of the institutional power matrices of who, why, and how inclusion should be done in higher education, I consider the ‘work’ that students as street-level bureaucrats in their rights do in engendering their inclusion and participation in an institution undergoing transformational challenges.

 

Through a textual analysis of documents collected during my six-month ethnographic fieldwork in a Nigerian university, I illustrate the experiential knowledge of how students think, plan, and feel about using texts to meet their daily demands as stakeholders in the university. Second, I present a work-text-work sequence of the inclusion process using some selected cases of students’ textual struggles to activate institutional courses of action. The findings suture the intersections and complementarities of different informants’ understanding of how their social, political, and textual relations coordinate their work. Finally, I identify the points of ‘disjuncture’ between the actualities of students’ experiences and the intentions of protocols and policies in including and accommodating students with disabilities in a higher institution.