Despite increasing societal awareness of the challenges faced by students with disabilities, students with invisible disabilities have received relatively little attention. This study explores these students’ experiences, relying on interviews with 15 participants with various invisible disabilities who recently attended Israeli higher education (HE) institutions.

Invisible disabilities ‘are not visible or apparent to others, in complex ways that vary based upon the nature of the disability’ (Kimball et al. 2016: 100), and may include chronic health conditions, learning disabilities, or mental health problems.  The experiences of people with invisible disabilities are distinct from those of other disabled individuals, primarily because the former face a choice to disclose or not disclose their disabilities (Stanley et al. 2011; Olney & Brockelman 2003). Previous research shows that compared with students whose disabilities have obvious physical expression, students with invisible disabilities, require different types of accommodations and adjustments and experience different challenges related to understanding, validity and trust (Mullins and Preyde 2013; Hamilton, Hulme, and Harrison 2021).

The current study aims to shed light on the experiences of students with invisible disabilities and, specifically, to analyze the manner in which they construct their identity as students within HE institutional settings. We draw on the social model of disability (Oliver 2013), which focuses on the sociocultural production of ability and disability and the resulting societal attitudes and barriers towards the disabled. Our analytical approach is grounded in the theoretical framework of identity work, that refers to the processes ‘by which people signal, label and define who they are, and how they maintain, strengthen, protect, revise and repair these constructions in social interactions’ (Brown 2021, 3). This framework enables us to examine the processes through which students with invisible disabilities construct and reconstruct their identities, as they attempt to make sense of who they are and how they want to appear to others in the physical and socio-cultural environments of HE.

We show that students with invisible disabilities largely practice identity work over two continua: between presence and absence in academic spaces; and between revealing and concealing their disabilities in the context of an institutional climate underpinned by values of individualism, competition and performativity. They employ spatial identity work—negotiating presence versus absence in physical spaces—in the context of physical barriers such as low temperatures, long distances, and closed spaces coupled with strict timetables and attendance requirements.  Students’ strategies of managing disability within academic space—navigating between presence and absence, developing their own restricted map of the campus, avoiding certain social spaces and academic spaces—are closely related to self-reflection, feelings of ‘otherness’, inclusion and exclusion. These students’ spatial experiences affect their sense of worth and their feelings of belonging to the HE institution, and they create a limited experience of academic life. In this regard, some interviewees experienced the Covid-19 pandemic as an equalizing mechanism, which created a new, shared, virtual space for disabled and non-disabled students alike.

Students with invisible disabilities also engage in discursive identity work—negotiating disclosure versus concealment of disabilities—in the context of institutional expectations and requirements constructed around the image of ‘normal’, that is, able-bodied, students. We show that each interviewee’s decisions and strategies with regard to disclosure versus concealment of disability were related to the kind of person, and the kind of student, that the interviewee considered or wanted himself or herself to be. Most participants did not fully disclose or fully conceal their disabilities: they tried to create a balance that would enable them to receive accommodation and minimize experiences of misunderstanding, stigma and shame.

Aiming to explore a variety of experiences and perspectives, we recruited participants with a range of different disabilities, from a variety of academic disciplines and HE institutions. Recruitment efforts consisted of postings on social media as well as snowball sampling. The second author conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with 15 participants (13 females and 2 males). At the time of the interviews, five participants were undergoing undergraduate studies, four were undergoing graduate studies, and six participants had graduated and provided a retrospective account of their experiences. Participants studied in 12 different HE institutions: 5 universities, 5 academic colleges and 2 teachers’ colleges. They were diagnosed with different types of disabilities: familial Mediterranean fever (FMF; n = 4), Crohn's disease (n = 3), asthma (n = 1), asthma and fibromyalgia (n = 1), arthritis (n = 1), nephrotic syndrome and stroke (n = 1), celiac disease (n = 1), brain tumor (n = 1), fibromyalgia (n = 1), endometriosis and fibromyalgia (n = 1). The interviews were aimed at understanding the interviewees’ experiences and insights as students with invisible disabilities. Questions concerned the student’s disability, the experience of living with it, the decision to enroll in HE, and the student’s experiences during his or her studies. Each interview lasted for approximately an hour and was digitally recorded and fully transcribed. Data collection was followed by thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke 2013) with reference to the literature on invisible disabilities and identity work. The first and second authors independently read and analyzed all interview transcripts, identifying emergent categories, and writing analytic memos. Excerpts taken from the transcripts were placed in Word documents under category headings. In the second stage of coding, following further iteration between the literature and the identified categories, it became clear that the categories corresponding to identity work could be classified under two conceptual themes. These themes relate to two types of identity work we identified: (i) spatial identity work, carried out in relation to academic space; and (ii) discursive identity work, carried out in relation to academic culture.

The purpose of this study was to understand the identity work of students with invisible disabilities. We argue that the identity work of these students is largely carried out over two continua: between presence and absence in academic spaces (spatial identity work); and between revealing and concealing disabilities to others—peers, lecturers, and disability support staff—in the context of an academic culture of individualism, performativity and, indeed, ableism (discursive identity work). Each form of identity work is associated with a variety of (spatial or discursive) strategies. Students’ strategies of spatial identity work essentially involved decisions regarding whether to participate in various academic spaces. Thus, students with invisible disabilities simultaneously construct academic space—as they develop their own map of the campus composed of short routes and restricted spaces—and construct their student identity. In particular, the decision to be present implies compliance with institutional expectations and requirements constructed around the image of ‘normal’, that is, able-bodied, students. Absence, on the other hand, means self-care and the opportunity to recuperate in cases in which students did not feel well. Yet absence is also detrimental to students’ sense of belonging and self-worth. Students’ discursive identity work, in turn, takes place in the context of the dominant social and cultural environment in HE: an environment that rewards independence, competition, and indeed, ability (Naidoo and Williams 2015; Brown and Leigh 2018). In this institutional climate, students with invisible disabilities find that the validity of their disabilities is questioned, and their experiences are misunderstood or ignored. Disability policies rely on the medical model of disability (Hutcheon & Wolbring 2012), and students are expected to individually manage processes of disclosure for accommodations. Students employ discursive identity work of concealing and revealing their disabilities to manage the advantages and disadvantages of disclosure.

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