Question of Access

Tanya Titchkosky is an associate professor and an associate department chair at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.

• AcknowledgmentsPreface1 Introduction: Accessas an Act of Perception2 ‘Who?’: DisabilityIdentity and the Question of Belonging3 ‘What?’: RepresentingDisability4 ‘Where?’: To Pee or Not to Pee5 ‘When? Not Yet’: TheAbsent Presence of Disability in Contemporary University Life6 Towards a Politics of Wonder inDisability StudiesNotesReferencesIndex

‘In this brilliant and accessible book, Tanya Titchkosky deploys a “politics of wonder” to explore the more “intimate” experience of disability that is often missing unless it is pointed out.  Titchkosky’s questions offer a nuanced and yet very hard-hitting phenomenological analysis of embodiment in higher educational institutions. This transforms the discussion of “access” as a bureaucratic procedural legality into a wonderful concept that relies on the intimacy of narrative, metaphor, and embodiment to foreground a politics of transformation. I suggest that this text be required reading in courses in higher education administration as well as all sociology courses.’ - Nirmala Erevelles, Department of Educational Leadership, Technology, and Policy Studies, The University of Alabama ‘The Question of Access provides a very critical deconstruction of disability, disability studies, and even what it means to be dis/abled… This is a brilliant text that asks the readers to rethink their own critical understandings of accesses, even in the supposedly diverse and understanding settings of academia.’ - Allison Hitt (The Canadian Journal of Disability Studies vol 01:01:2012) ‘Through narratives of struggle and analyses of policy and everyday practice, The Question of Access presents a thoughtful, important perspective. The book is a much needed resource with which to generate further discussion and positive change in and outside of the academy.’ - Nancy Hansen (CAUT Bulletin, vol 59:03:2012) ‘The Question of Access is exemplary both in its development of useful concepts for Disability Studies and as a methodological demonstration of how storytelling, perception, and rationality produce new ways of understanding disability.’ - Aimi Haliraie (Disability Studies Quarterly vol 33:01:2013) ‘Tanya Titchkosky offers a thoughtful discussion of disability related issues…This book is relevant to diverse audiences, scholars, policy makers, students, and anyone interested in examining socio-political constitutions of disabled subjects and issues of access.’- Mark Castrodale (Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, vol 3:01:2014)