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ScholarWorks > HHS > Social Work > JSSW > Vol. 51 > Iss. 1 (2024)

 

Keywords

punishment, disability, ableism, disability justice

Abstract

The absence of disabled students in higher education, including social work, is a problem not only because of the missed educational opportunities and adverse effect on their earning potential but because disabled people’s knowledge, lived experiences, and skills can enhance social work services, advance innovation in knowledge production, and contribute to transformative organizational and movement leadership. School punishment, including suspensions, expulsions, and arrests, contributes to the absence of disabled people in higher education and begins as early as preschool. However, even for disabled students who graduate from high school and enroll in higher education, punishment continues covertly throughout higher education. Using Patricia Hill Collins' (2002, 2020) approach to theorizing intersectionality through the matrix of domination, including the understanding of disciplinary power, and incorporating the concept of crip time (Ljuslinder et al., 2020), the authors aim to illuminate how the cumulative impact of punishment over a life course contributes to the underrepresentation of disabled students in MSW programs. This underrepresentation, in turn, reinforces ableism in social work and beyond. The authors, a disabled MSW student and a temporarily non-disabled social work professor, then integrate their lived experiences, literature, and social work ethics to call social work educators, practitioners, and students to action grounded in a disability justice framework.

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