‘Nothing for us without us’: Exclusion of students with disabilities in disability policy review at a South African institution of higher education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The prominent disability rights slogan ‘nothing for us without us’ which was adopted from the 16th-century Polish revolution ‘nihil de nobis, sine nobis’, means that persons with disabilities, should be involved in anything that concerns their welfare so that they speak for themselves as people with a lived experience of disabilities. This empirical paper explores the participation of students with disabilities in the review of an institutional disability policy in a single institution of higher education in South Africa. Qualitative data were collected through interviews with twelve students with disabilities and seven disability unit staff members. Informed by critical disability theory, the finding was that there was limited participation by students with disabilities in the formulation of institutional disability policy meant for their welfare. While contemporary scholarship on disability seeks to address the exclusion of historically disadvantaged social groups such as those with disabilities but without privileging the voice of those with a lived experience of disability in policy issues, the ‘nothing for us without us’ slogan will remain elusive, fragile and cliché merely chanted. The paper thus aims to contribute to the understanding that limited participation in policy formulation could negatively affect the learning of students with disabilities and consequently their timeous graduation. For genuine inclusion, all students, including those with disabilities will fully participate in higher learning.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".