Introduction

Participative equity in higher education has largely been framed as equality regimes to address some of the consequences of massification (Trow, 1973), high participation (Marginson, 2016) and the neoliberalisation (Rizvi and Lingard, 2011) of higher education (HE). It has become even more critical in pluralistic and postcolonial states like Nigeria, where the need to forge an inclusive community through higher education remains a cardinal function of the universities (Lebeau, 2008). This changing nature of the ‘missions’ of the university has challenged how higher education institutions respond to diversity initiatives and their investment in maintaining or altering institutional cultures (Aguirre, 2020, Ahmed, 2012). With little focus on students' agency, institutional perspectives on why institutions change (Powell and DiMaggio, 1991, Thornton et al., 2012) and become what academics or leaders make of them (Chaffee and Tierney, 1988, Tierney and Lanford, 2018) abound in the literature on the sociology of HEIs. However, students’ demand for the dissociation of the university from its colonial (Bhambra et al., 2018) and capitalist relics (Santos, 2018) to an inclusive and liberating pedagogical space has called for the need to understand students’ agency or roles in institutional transformation. This explains why the post-Salamanca education debates on the meanings of inclusion, who is to be included, into what and how inclusion should be done (e.g. Ainscow et al., 2006, Ainscow et al., 2019) have shown why policies on inclusion and equity in HE must be approached as a holistic policy process; that addresses asymmetrical power relations of access, participation and outcome of underrepresented and underserved communities such as students with disabilities (SWDs), women, forced migrants, persons of colour and young people from low-income families. Inclusive education policy and corpus of work on how education systems can become inclusive, have been critiqued as a ‘neo-colonial project’ (Walton, 2018 p.34 ) developed in the rich countries of the Global North. This has thus given rise to a “second generation of inclusive education countries in the global South” (Artiles et al., 2011) uncritically adopting the theoretical and empirical understanding of disability and inclusive practices developed from the centre.

To interrogate knowledge on the experience of students with disabilities in higher education and practices of inclusive education more broadly, this study explored how the practices of inclusion and participation of students with disabilities in universities are organised. This study’s novel approach situates the analysis of textual and structural relations or the “untidy policy moments” (Svarícek and Pol, 2011)  of disability inclusion practice in the HE system of Nigeria within the “colonial matrix of power” (Quijano, 2007) shaping global education agenda. It seeks to explain the everyday experience of students with disabilities by taking a critical perspective on how complex intersections of poverty, gender, religious and cultural beliefs at the local continue to shape the meanings of disability and the practices of inclusive education.

Methodology This study employed institutional ethnography (IE) as a materialist method concerned with the explication of institutional processes that organise a problematic everyday world (Smith, 2005). Thus, the ethnography in IE does not connote traditional ethnographies of institutions but rather a commitment to people and actuality: a “commitment to discovering ‘how things are actually put together’ and how they work (Smith, 2006 p. 1). While researchers can know how things work through their everyday observations, experiences, discussions with people, and reading, using IE helps in focusing on “textually organised ruling relations” central to understanding how things work (Murray, 2020). Therefore, this study sets out to describe the interface between individual experience and their textual relations with an institution. An ‘institution’ is conceptualised in IE as a ‘metaphorical bundle of social relations that cluster around and coordinate specific societal functions’ such as higher education, locally and extra-locally (Ng et al., 2013). This study was conducted with two levels of informants (Smith, 2005) by starting from the position of ‘entry-level informants’ (SWDs in the case of this study) and relating their experience to the ‘level two informants’. These level two informants typically consist of the Lispkian street-level bureaucrats like disability unit (DU) staff, lecturers, counselling support services, volunteers, principal officers and other actors engaging in a ‘work process’ with the entry-level participants. The problematic(s) ─ which may be regarded as the point of ‘disjuncture’ between actualities and the “authorial intentions of policies” (Codd, 1988) ─ is the complexities in ‘including’ and accommodating SWDs in a higher institution.

The analysis of data from 6-month fieldwork in three Nigerian universities took cognisance of the work relations taken for granted in texts and protocols. One of these is how the ‘policy work’ that students with disabilities do to negotiate their inclusion and participation remains almost unacknowledged in research and institutional practices. I have done this using the Listening Guide developed by Carol Gilligan and colleagues (Gilligan, 2015). Findings from this study show how the organisation of equity, diversity and inclusion practices in the Nigerian HE is coordinated by texts and discourses embedded within ongoing local and extra-local relations. Institutional mapping of the work that goes into inclusion practices shows that most units and individuals are unaware of the intentions of the institutional policies and texts. Though, university actors identify that the diversity of students and staff on campus is necessary for the university's transformation and the development of an inclusive society, policies and strategies put in place to support disability inclusion are still being negotiated by students with disabilities themselves. Thus, institutional strategies are oriented towards the economic role of producing ‘able-bodied’ graduates for the labour market. This orientation draws on the colonial and capitalist economic development rationales that predicated the expansion of higher education systems in most African countries (Lebeau and Oanda, 2020). As universities founded and funded by the states, these colonial and market logics continue to shape the inclusion policies and the day-to-day experience of students with disabilities in higher education.

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