In October 2013, the Center for the Study of Diversity hosted an international conference on disability disclosure in higher education. The slate of plenary speakers included a remarkable line-up of scholars and leaders at the cutting edge of current disability scholarship.
Conference directors Stephanie Kerschbaum and Margaret Price have written an excellent account of the conference on our blog, DiversityUS. It begins as follows:
What does it mean to “disclose” a disability? This is a question relevant at all levels of university life. Students with disabilities must discuss their accommodations with their professors, with fellow students, and with disability services offices; disabled faculty and staff members must figure out how to arrange accommodations, although they may not be sure whom to approach or if it’s even safe to do so, due to concerns about how they may be perceived as a consequence of disclosing a disability. Our ongoing research on disability and disclosure has revealed that the process of disclosing a disability in a higher-education setting is multi-layered, often risky and generally not well-understood. In October 2013 we joined nearly 100 other scholars and activists to explore these issues and more at the Disability Disclosure in/and Higher Education Conference sponsored by the Center for the Study of Diversity and held at UD’s Clayton Hall.
We encourage you to read the post-conference reflections of Professors Kerschbaum and Price in full. Please click here to read the entire blog post.
Finally, conference sessions were live-tweeted with the hashtag #UDdiscon. Read the collected tweets on our Storify page.