For instance, many universities in the United States require medical documentation of a diagnosis to receive accommodations, and that that medical documentation have been obtained within a certain number of years before the students start at the university (anywhere from 4-7), for students with limb differences, or disabilities where their functional limitations won't have substantially changed since birth, it may be just another bureaucratic hoop to have to jump through, and cause them to incure additional costs related to obtaining medical documentation.

Example of Institutional Harms through Protocols

Yoon and Chen build on the concept of the organized possibility of not perceiving by positing that harms can be done by an institution following its own protocols and often in committing these harms the individual person following the protocols gets obscured through passing of responsibility to another department, or naming a decision as coming from an office rather than an individual person.

University of Wisconsin - Madison

Tanya Titchkosky points out that academic spaces that harm disabled people are not often made with the expressed intent of being harmful to disabled people - rather, they have been organized by the possibility of not perceiving how the situations are harmful. In an organized possibility of not perceiving harm - e.g. not having a door large enough for a wheelchair user - the harm is not intended, but the environment is set up in a way where the harm is not readily perceived by those not experiencing it. Price notes by foregrounding harm we can work to undo this organized possibility of not perceiving.

Organized Possibility of Not Perceiving

Yoon, Irene H., and Grace A. Chen. 2022. “Heeding Hauntings in Research for Mattering.” In weaving an Otherwise: In-relations Methodological Practice, edited by Amanda Tachine and Z Nicolazzo, 76-91. Sterling, VA: Stylus

Heeding Hauntings in Research for Mattering

Foregrounding this harm that is erased threatens not just non-disabled but also settler-colonial and white-supremacist framing of time and space. This is because settler-colonialism, white-supremacy, and ableism are built into the terrain and spaces we exist within and by centreing that violence currently existing, we can't fully unpack that violence without paying attention to the histories of violence and harm that have made our institutions and the role reconciliation and repair need to play in those practices.

Learn Before

Related

Learn After