In the decades since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), postsecondary institutions have institutionalized approaches to disability-related access that privilege individual, academic accommodation. However, the ADA creates an imperative for institutions to facilitate meaningful access to all aspects of campus life, not just the classroom. While disability studies scholars have examined and theorized access outside the classroom, this scholarship has privileged high-stakes spaces like academic conferences or research labs.

This qualitative project utilized an instrumental case design to explore how Student Affairs and Academic Affairs staff at a single research institution engaged in access practices and processes as they developed events and programs. To analyze the approaches to access in these spaces, I conducted individual interviews with staff and disabled students. I also gathered digital access artifacts, examples of access labor related to the promotion of events and programs. These artifacts included access statements and the alternate text created by staff in promoting events. I used a mixture of structural, pattern, and attribute coding and content analysis to analyze these data and weave them into a narrative about how access happened in these decentralized campus spaces.

My findings demonstrated that staff and students perceived the following practices as most salient: a) securing a physically accessible event space, b) coordinating access to event audio, 3) weighing the accessibility of various virtual platforms, and d) communicating an accommodation process for participants. Access processes were largely reactive, replicating traditional structures of case-by-case accommodation and relying on disability-focused offices to support the coordination of event access. These approaches were influenced by various dynamics, including a) how access infrastructure was centralized at the university and b) relationships with disabled staff and students that were the primary source of access learning for campus staff.

These findings revealed two approaches to access: rights-based, focused on individual accommodation and institutional compliance, and, to a lesser extent, justice-based, focused on access as a collective project that prioritized connectedness. I concluded the study by considering how practitioners might move towards a justice-based approach by deepening practices of mutual attunement and shared responsibility around access labor.

Karpicz, J. R. (2023). Set in Our Ways: Disorienting Approaches to Access in Campus Events and Programming (Doctoral dissertation, UCLA).