In a famous reflection, Foucault once asked ‘What are we today?’ (Foucault, 1984). It seems an easy question to answer. However, in an era of post-truths, in which political uncertainties, economic instability and social insecurity seem to accompany us on the relentless road from welfarism to neoliberalism (Ball, 2015a), the answer to this query needs particular sociological attention. How can policy sociology help us make sense out of our present? Where do we begin to investigate the fleeting operations of truth in an increasingly performative, neoliberal, knowledge society?

I chose to contribute to this ‘history of the present’ (Foucault, 1977) by focussing on disability in higher education. If, on the one hand, disabled students’ rights are upheld through international documents such as Education Transforms Lives (UNESCO, 2017) and the Convention for the Rights of Persons with Disability (UN, 2006); on the other hand, on a state government level, neoliberal positions are undermining disability services and financial provisions in academic setting.

Disability is a very new topic in the Italian policy sociology of education. Despite a number of policies upholding the legal right to and equal and accessible education to all disabled students, disability in Italy is still discursively constructed as an individual problem, ‘as a consequence of defective or disordered individual pathology’ (Moore and Slee, 2012:228). A sociological, political, and social constructivist perspective on disability still struggles to gain ground and pedagogical approaches that situate the attention on the individual needs are still dictating the dominant discourses and approaches on disability issues in education.

The Italian Disability Studies are beginning to raise their voice (D’Alessio, 2011), drawing attention on the contextual, pedagogical and curricular factors that produce and reproduce disability in compulsory education. However, when it comes to explore disability in higher education, sociological approaches are scant (Ferrucci, 2004; Masiello, 2015), not to mention research from a post-structural perspective.

With my paper, I want to start filling this gap, investigating disability from a sociological and discursive account. In order to do this, I focus on a specific situation, the entrance exam that students are asked to take to enrol at university in some departments. Analysing the encroachment and enactment of policies that regulate the access to university studies, I problematize disability not as something disabled students have to overcome, to compensate or rehabilitate from; but as a discursive formation that finds its truth in local and contingent knowledge, expertise, and power relations, constituted by practices that do not comply with a given and disciplined norm. 

Framed within studies on governmentality (Burchell et al. 1991), Critical Disability Studies (Goodley, 2013; Campbell, 2009; Tremain, 2001) and policy sociology in education (Ball et al., 2012), with my paper I seek to find alternative solutions to processes of exclusion of disabled students in higher education. Rather than appealing to pre-wrapped epistemological approaches in studying disability and higher education (Riddell, et al. 2005; Beauchamp-Pryor, 2013), which consider disability as an already objectified subject of research, my study takes an ontological stance on it, exploring the how power relations actively produce disability and disabled students as respectively object and subjects of policy and practices in the everyday academic routine. In order to do this therefore I ask myself: what is the disabled student today? How is disability governed in Italian higher education and how do disabled student govern themselves as such? By focussing on the event of the entrance exam, I aim to begin to address these questions and sparkle discussion on the issue. 

To research disability in higher education, the paper takes an analytical approach that operationalizes Foucauldian methods into an ethnographic setting in Italy, providing a detailed present unfolding of the materialist and contextualised object of disability. However, my intent is not to carry out a Foucauldian critical discourse analysis such as scholars in the field already attempted (Grue, 2015). With my paper, genealogical and archaeological methods are deployed to develop an original tool called disability dispositif (Foucault, 1980; Bussolini, 2010; Bailey 2013), which describes a permeable and fluid combination of discourses, subjectivities, policies and practices, institutions, legislative and philosophical disposition, feelings and behaviours, ‘which is both strategic and technical’ (Foucault, 2006, p.xxiii). It allows to investigate the coexistence of modernist and postmodernist processes, managing to merge the structural and institutional drivers with the subject agency and self-formation. The disability dispositif intends to become an analytical tool to investigate the history of the present of disability in academia, researching in details power enacted through the bodies of disabled students by collecting data from: (i) the university setting; (ii) programme and placement for further job opportunities; (iii) interviews with disabled students and disability personnel; (iv) analysis of public policy and discourse and regimes of practices about disability (Pillow, 2015; Ball, 2015b).

A genealogy of disability does not provide policy answers (cf. Pillow, 2015), nonetheless it can provide a unique ‘history of the present’ that narrates the government and self-government of disabled students as subjects of deficit and ableist practices. With my analytical investigation of the disability dispositif during the university entrance exam, I therefore show the generative power in the enactment of disability policies. The Foucauldian approach has been criticised for leading to a power impasse and to a subject passively constituted by discourses (Fraser, 1989). However, my paper proves that the disability dispositif has a concrete potential to become an innovative analytical tool to research the very historically and locally placed nature of disability, providing an effective platform for collecting data and assessing the present of disabled students in any higher education settings, connecting the ad hocery of truths with structural, although changeable, systemic features. Although disability appears as a homogenous concept on the surface, disability research necessarily needs to be contextual to be effective. For this reason, the disability dispositif as an analytical tool opens up for further research in different higher education settings. The analytical outcomes of my disability dispositif aim to address two intertwined drivers of change. First, by fighting the historically placed and fleeting power of individualising neoliberal practices, change can spring from disabled students rethinking what constitutes them as disabled. By refusing the ways in which they are spoken, students can rethink themselves as subjects of particular practices, retracing their own university experiences and practices and to start thinking about their subjectivities otherwise. Second, the dispositif intends to supply a ‘snap-shot’ on the present of disability practice in higher education, challenging the transient nature of truth and offering an evidence-based space to rethink policies to support disabled students educational access and attainment.

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