Vocabulary
Stay up to date with our community’s vocabulary and the terms required to navigate a changing world. Access to the right terms to describe one’s experience is essential for understanding, adaptation, and thriving.
A
- An Abeyance Structure — A retrofit that holds disability in suspension, providing nominal access while delaying or preventing real change (Dolmage 2017).
- Ableism - Actions, words, assumptions, and ignorance based in the notion that non-disabled-bodied and/or disabled-minded ways of moving, communicating, behaving, and existing are superior to disabled ways. Learn more about ableism and how to overcome it here.
- Ableist apologia — A genre of statements that distance the speaker from responsibility for academic ableism; functions to excuse rather than confront (Dolmage 2017).
- Allistic - Refers to individuals who do not engage or experience the world through Autism; non-Autistic people. Allistic individuals can still be neurodivergent.
- Aspie - Another word for an Autistic person.
- AuDHD - Pronounced awe-dee-ach-dee; another word for an ADHD and Autism comorbidity.
- Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) - The preferred term to Asperger’s and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).
B
- Bi-tism - The experience of being both bisexual and Autistic.
C
- Calendar Fragmentation - Refers to the inefficient organization of scheduled activities, leading to a disjointed and fragmented schedule. This means that the total amount of time available for focused work or deep thinking is significantly reduced due to numerous, short bursts of time scattered throughout the day (Craft 2019). Learn more here.
- Checklistification — When Universal Design has been flattened from a process into a static list of boxes to check (Dolmage 2017).
- Cognitive homogamy — When people of similar cognitive ability (sorted by elite education) reproduce together, concentrating educational and economic advantage geographically (e.g., “SuperZips”) (Charles Murray).
- Compulsory Able-bodiedness / Able-Mindedness — The cultural mandate that all bodies and minds must conform to normative ability standards (Robert McRuer).
- Conflicts of Access — The situations where one person’s access need collides with another’s; disability access is not a single solvable thing (Margaret Price).
- Cover Your Ass (CYA) — Legal-minimum, liability-driven logic that drives most accommodation work in universities.
- Crip Time — A flexible orientation to time that “bends the clock” around bodies and minds, rather than bending bodies to fit normative schedules (Alison Kafer, Margaret Price).
- Crip Futurity — Imagining and politically demanding futures in which disability is present, valued, and central, rather than erased (Kafer).
- Cruel Optimism — Attachment to a goal (here, inclusive higher education through neoliberal “fixes”) that actually harms you (Lauren Berlant).
- Curative Time — The temporal logic that assumes disability must always be cured, overcome, or eradicated. The opposite of crip futurity (Kafer).
D
- The Theory of Diachronic Constitution of the Extended Conscious Mind - TBD
- Defeat Device — A feature that appears to provide access but is actually designed to evade real compliance; borrowed from the Volkswagen emissions scandal (Dolmage 2017).
- Disability Drift — The tendency for one disability label to slide into others, or for stigma to extend from one disability to all (Dolmage 2017).
- Disability Drop — When a nondisabled actor “plays” disabled, the audience anticipates their return to able-bodied roles; the disability is shed (Dolmage 2017).
- Disablism — The flip side of ableism; actively constructs disability as bad, stigmatized, something to be avoided. Disablism is usually wrapped inside ableism (Dolmage 2017).
E
Ableist Exceptionism — The treatment of ableism as either the only problem we won’t admit, or the only problem we’re willing to discuss, in ways that disconnect it from other oppressions (Dolmage 2017).
Eugenics — The pseudoscientific movement aimed at “improving” the human race through breeding, sterilization, and exclusion (Dolmage 2017).
Positive Eugenics — Encouraging reproduction among those deemed “fit” (e.g., elite university students).
Negative Eugenics — Preventing reproduction among those deemed “unfit” through sterilization, institutionalization, immigration restriction.
Euthenics — A related movement focused on improving “racial stock” through nutrition, hygiene, and preventive health, often through colleges and universities (Dolmage 2017).
Exnomination — The phenomenon by which the unmarked default category (whiteness, able-bodiedness, accessibility-as-absence) operates invisibly. Inaccessibility is the default; accessibility only gets named when a body cannot access (Dolmage 2017).
F
Fast Capitalism — An economic logic that demands constant change, flexibility, and speed, often used to discipline workers (and students) (Dolmage 2017).
Filmic Time — How popular film compresses, accelerates, or curates time in ways that reinforce normative, ableist tempos (Dolmage 2017).
G
- Gaytism - Describes the experience of being gay and Autistic.
- Genetic Discrimination - Discrimination based on genetic characteristics.
I
Institutional Critique — A rhetorical methodology that examines how institutions are materially and discursively constructed, and how they can be reshaped (Porter et al).
Interest Convergence — The principle that change for marginalized groups happens mainly when it also benefits dominant groups. UD often gets sold this way (“ramps help everyone with strollers”) (Derrick Bell).
M
Medical Model - This model of disability views disability as a problem inherent to the individual, typically focusing on the impairments or medical conditions that individuals have. In this model, disability is seen as something to be treated or cured through medical intervention, and the emphasis is on fixing the individual to fit into society’s norms. This approach often leads to viewing disabilities as limitations or deficits that need to be overcome, rather than considering the cultural and environmental institutions that may contribute to disabling experiences.
Melancholic Universalism — How the “universal” in Universal Design can erase the particularity of disabled experience (Dolmage 2017).
The Social Model - Contrary to the medical model, this model of disability underscores that disability does not stem merely from an individual’s impairments, but also arises from broader structural factors like culture and environmental circumstances. According to this perspective, disability emerges from both biological factors and cultural factors between individuals and their surroundings. The social model suggests that achieving accessibility involves not only medical interventions but also societal efforts to embrace diversity and learn to value and leverage the strengths derived from differences and thinking differently.
Multimodality / Multiliteracies — Frameworks for valuing multiple modes (visual, oral, tactile, written, gestural) of meaning-making, often invoked in writing studies (Dolmage 2017).
N
- Negative Eugenics — Preventing reproduction among those deemed “unfit” through sterilization, institutionalization, immigration restriction (Dolmage 2017).
- Neurodivergent - Also known as being neuroqueer or a neurominority. Represents ~20% of the population. See our explainer here.
- Neurogender - A gender and gender expression identity which cannot be otherwise disentangled from one’s neurology.
- Some neurodivergent individuals’ feel that their experience with socialization of their disability that their gender identity is most accurately described through a disability lens (e.x. Autism and Autigender Autiboy, Autienby, etc.).
- Neurotypical - The term for someone who is not a neurominority/neurodivergent/neuroqueer/.
- Neurorhetorics / Neuromyths — (Jordynn Jack, Howard-Jones) The increasingly common practice of dressing up educational claims in brain-science language (“recognition networks,” “strategic networks”) that often lacks scientific grounding.
- Normate — The fictional ideal body/mind that institutions are designed around. The “default” against which all others are measured (Garland-Thomson).
- The Not-Yet — The temporal status disability is kept in within higher education: always deferred, always future, never fully arrived (Tanya Titchkosky).
O
Ocularcentric — A culture dominated by the visual mode of communication and learning (Dolmage 2017).
Opportunity Structure — Sociology; Conditions that enable a social movement to grow (Dolmage 2017).
P
Positive Eugenics — Encouraging reproduction among those deemed “fit” (e.g., elite university students) (Dolmage 2017).
Positive Redundancy — A UD principle: providing the same information through multiple modes so that no single channel is a barrier (Dolmage 2017).
Protopublic Space — (Amy Wan, via Dewey) The idea that the classroom shapes larger public communities; what happens in classrooms ripples outward (Amy Wan, Dewey).
R
- Redundancy (positive redundancy) — A UD principle: providing the same information through multiple modes so that no single channel is a barrier (Dolmage 2017).
- Respectability Politics - “A set of beliefs holding that conformity to prescribed mainstream standards of appearance and behaviour will protect a person who is part of a marginalized group… from prejudices and systemic injustices: Respectability politics place blame on groups already hindered by discrimination.”
- Responsive Design — Designing content (especially digital) to adapt to different devices and access needs (Dolmage 2017).
- Retrofitted Accommodations — An after-the-fact modification (a side ramp, a captioning service, an accommodation letter) added to a structure that wasn’t designed for accessibility. Always supplemental, always not-original (Dolmage 2017).
- Rhetorical Space — A concept used to describe how physical spaces (classrooms, campuses) shape who is allowed to speak, think, and belong (Dolmage 2017).
S
- Speechie - A speech and language therapist/pathologist.
T
Tolerance for Error — A UD principle: design should minimize the consequences of unintended actions; there should be multiple ways to be “right” (Dolmage 2017).
Transformative Access — Going beyond letting disabled people enter a space, to letting them reshape it (Brewer, Yergeau, Selfe).
Trickle-Down Access — A related critique: the assumption that designing for the most marginalized will automatically benefit everyone, which can mask the erasure of disability (Dolmage 2017).
U
Universal Design (UD) — Originally an architectural philosophy: designing products, environments, and curricula to be usable by the broadest possible range of people without need for adaptation. A verb, not a checklist (Dolmage 2017).
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) — The educational application of UD. Three principles: multiple means of representation, expression, and engagement (Dolmage 2017).
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