Institutional Counter-surveillance using a Critical Disability Studies Lens

This study examines policy and procedure documents related to Disability at 3 U.S. institutions of higher education over a 25-year time frame. Policy and procedure documents are the foundation that govern how institutions "handle" Disability, outlining expectations and guidelines for providing services and establishing bureaucratic channels used to determine who has access to those services. This research employs a comparative case study mixed methods approach. The found documents and their online contexts are analyzed according to four qualities: findability, cohesion, consistency, and transparency. A document's findability refers to the ability of a user to locate the original document, and a document's cohesion, consistency, and transparency, refer to respectively where, what, and how these documents persist from their original creation date. As I collected these documents, I constructed comparative matrices to track these qualities within and across three different universities.

The initial findability of documents demonstrates two key results: 1) during the overall 1990– 2015 time frame, there was a marked change in the availability of materials in a digital format, and 2) the emergence of a way to describe documents via the phrase "Does Not Exist." These materials definitively did not exist prior to a given time frame, but later versions of such documents included an earlier start date. Cohesion results indicate that the documents most likely to be presented in a single source were broadly usable to a large portion of the university population: the general student body. Consistency results address a major issue with the document search: while these materials were likely to exist, at each of these institutions and time frames (barring the DNE documents), they are very difficult to track down. Transparency across found, single-source documents was ubiquitous; if it could be found, it had searchable text.

Beyond the findings of my document collection, I created two major products as a result of this dissertation work: key recommendations for different stakeholder groups and a curated exhibit of VT-specific materials collected for this study.