Color-evasive ideology within disability higher education research is a pressing issue. The lack of naming and critiquing Whiteness in higher education disability research is a frequent challenge that remains the status quo despite its deleterious effects on disability scholarship, practice, and education. Whitecentric disability research paints an unauthentic picture of who has access and who is thriving. There is a lack of understanding of racialized structural barriers, and in some cases, cultural deprivation that impacts disabled Students of Color from rising to their fullest potential. This scholarly paper uses Disability Critical Race Theory to interrogate color-evasiveness within disability research and practice. This paper provides a brief overview of the relevant literature, addresses the problems of the default centering of whiteness in disability research, and offers suggestions in creating inclusive solutions in disability practice and scholarship. The perpetual centering of Whiteness in higher education disability research and practice is an urgent matter requiring reform.

Deaf students are members of a linguistic and cultural minority whose background and experiences provide a unique backdrop for the navigation of higher education. Using the framework of Deaf community cultural wealth, this study examines the experiences of Deaf students in community college and their utilization of various forms of capital. Findings showed that they exhibited instances of resistant, navigational, social, and familial capital in accessing and persisting in higher education.

We seek to expand the disability theoretical toolkits of higher education scholars to include frameworks that view disability as multivalent. We start by describing limitations scholars can encounter when employing traditional medical, social, and minority frameworks. Then, we draw upon: (1) the temporal and fluid understandings of disability in critical disability theory, ( 2) the value critical realism gives to the body, impairment, and the environment, and (3) the work of Deaf epistemologies to call attention to the varied communication methods disabled college students use to encourage the use of frameworks that promote intersectional understandings that are authentic to lived experiences. We extend scholars' toolkits by encouraging the use of frameworks that value diverse human neurology and draw attention to the hegemonic dominance of Western thought. We conclude by discussing four implications and two limitations for higher education scholars.

This report was developed under a jointly funded grant through the US Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) and the Rehabilitation Services Administration (RSA), #HD326D160001. However, the contents do not necessarily represent the positions or policies of the federal government.

AbstractThis chapter explores the experiences of students in a Deaf sorority, highlighting the ways in which they resist audism through their social organization.

Research on the experiences of college students with disabilities and the extent to which student affairs practitioners and scholars are meeting their needs is sparse. This article advances the concept of Universal Research Design (URD) by discussing the application of universal design principles to research on college students. Four critical considerations that student affairs practitioners and scholars should address when conducting disability research include (a) language and operational definitions, (b) accessing participants, (c) data collection for both qualitative and quantitative research, and (d) researcher's positionality and just representation. We demonstrate how URD can be used to make research on students with disabilities more inclusive, accessible, and accommodating.

There is limited research on the experiences of Black d/Deaf (Bd/Deaf) students, and a historical legacy of discrimination. The purpose of this article is to move minoritized communities' stories, Bd/Deaf college graduates, from the margins to the center, addressing the ways they experience racist and audist microaggressions as undergraduate students. Using critical race theory and critical Deaf theory, the findings show how educators contribute to how Bd/Deaf students experience microaggressions as invisibility and trivialization.

The authors examine the social construction of language, labels, and knowledge associated with disabilities, arguing in favor of critical and intersectional perspectives on disability identity.

Approximately 30% of d/Deaf students are successfully completing college; the reasons for such a low graduation rate is unknown (Destler & Buckly, 2011). Most research on d/Deaf college students lack racial/ethnic diversity within the study; thus, it is unclear how d/Deaf Students of Color are faring in higher education or what experiences they are having. It is no longer appropriate or socially just to conduct research that does not intentionally seek out the voices of d/Deaf Students of Color. Using a fundamental descriptive qualitative methodology, this paper sheds light on a population of students, d/Deaf Women of Color, who are often invisible within the mainstream higher education literature and expands our understand of the types of experiences they are having related to their racial/ethnic and d/Deaf identity while attending college.