Unequal Opportunity Regimes: Policies, Contexts and the Everyday Experience of Disabled Students in the Nigerian HE

Against the backdrop of the (pseudo)expansion of higher education in Nigeria, this presentation develops an understanding of the everyday work that goes into enacting disability inclusion policies in higher education institutions in Nigeria. Through a decolonial institutional ethnography, it brings the social organisation of policy texts (Smith, 2005) in dialogue with the colonial matrix of power (Quijano, 2007) to explicate how and why higher education policies and practices in Nigeria are still trapped in the ideological knowing and doing of disability, inclusion and inclusive education. Drawing ethnographic interviews conducted with students with disabilities (SWDs) and other policy “actors”, such as disability unit staff, lecturers, and principal officers across three universities in Nigeria, this seminar shows how disability discourses, institutional policies, and support services are being deployed to “contain” the experience of students with disabilities in higher education institutions. It maps the daily and nightly “policy work” SWD undertake to access, participate, and transform universities that are not designed for people like them.