But You Don't Look Disabled: December HEFi Reading Group

Join this month's HEFi reading group as we explore ableism in academia with the article ‘But you don’t look disabled’: Non-visible disabilities, disclosure and being an ‘insider’ in disability research and ‘other’ in the disability movement and academia, by Elisabeth Griffiths (Chapter 7 in Nicole Brown and Jennifer Leigh's Ableism in Academia: Theorising Experiences of Disabilities and Chronic Illnesses in Higher Education, London: UCL Press, 2020).

Abstract: This chapter is a personal narrative of my getting to this point in my career, to ‘here’, as a disability law scholar and solicitor with a non-visible disability and a disabled woman working in academia. It is a self-reflection on my experience of the research process and an insider account of my position within that research. I had not anticipated that the well established philosophy of the disability rights movement of ‘nothing about us without us’ would take on a personal meaning during my research. Framed within the field of autoethnography (Ellis 2004), I am inviting you, the reader, into my world as I have engaged in the research process while completing a professional doctorate in law.