Nafn nemanda: Xizhen Wang
Námsleið: International Studies in Education, MA
Heiti verkefnis: Ableism in Nordic Higher Education: A Qualitative Interview Study with Disabled Students at the University of Iceland
Leiðbeinandi: Jón Ingvar Kjaran
Sérfræðingur: Kristín Björnsdóttir

Ágrip/efni (drög): Nordic higher education systems are widely regarded as models of social equality, yet the everyday experiences of disabled students reveal a persistent gap between institutional commitments to inclusion and the conditions of actual academic participation. Drawing on Critical Disability Studies and crip theory, this study examines how ableism operates in Nordic higher education through a qualitative inquiry into disabled students’ lived experiences at the University of Iceland. The study combines reflexive thematic analysis of interviews with five disabled students and critical discourse analysis of six institutional and legislative policy documents. The findings show that disabled students’ participation is shaped less by whether formal support exists than by the processual demands of accessing it: fixed course schedules that conflict with bodily rhythms, standardised assessments that assume stable cognitive performance, and fragmented institutional communication together generate cumulative temporal, emotional, cognitive, and identity burdens. The policy analysis further reveals that Icelandic higher education policy produces what this study terms positional inclusion, recognising disabled students as rights bearing subjects while leaving the normative academic standards against which participation is measured structurally intact. In response, students deploy crip tactics, deliberate micro-interventions that constitute institutional navigation and refusal rather than individual coping, yet carry a substantial, unacknowledged academic tax that the institution neither recognises nor redistributes. One participant’s account of sustained, coordinated departmental resistance is examined separately as an analytically extreme case that illustrates the outer boundary of this processual burden. The study makes three theoretical contributions: a processual understanding of inclusion as enacted practice rather than policy outcome; a demonstration of the analytical productivity of crip theory within Nordic higher education research; and, most distinctively, an argument that policy texts actively construct, rather than merely describe, the conditions of disabled students’ participation. Moving from positional to processual inclusion requires institutions to interrogate the ableist assumptions embedded in their most routine, apparently neutral academic practices.