Thesis
Disabled-queer student experiences in higher education
- Creator
- Rights statement
- Awarding institution
- University of Strathclyde
- Date of award
- 2026
- Thesis identifier
- T18137
- Person Identifier (Local)
- 202275315
- Qualification Level
- Qualification Name
- Department, School or Faculty
- Abstract
- This study explores how disabled-queer students experience higher education in Scotland. While disability and queerness have each been examined within higher education research (e.g., Marzetti, 2018; Wertans and Burch, 2022), their intersection remains an emerging field (Miller, 2015a). Drawing on twenty-one in-depth, semi-structured interviews with self-identifying disabled-LGBTQ+ undergraduate and postgraduate students across universities in Scotland, the research explores how participants negotiate fit, exclusion, agency, and recognition within institutional, social, and academic environments. In doing so, it extends understandings of ‘the student experience’ beyond the classroom to encompass everyday relational and structural contexts. Using a queer-crip framework (McRuer, 2006), the analysis illuminates how universities are experienced as spaces structured around normative expectations of the ‘ideal’ student, alongside intersecting inequalities. Participants describe uncertainty about whether they are ‘allowed’ to be present across settings. Their accounts highlight structural barriers, including uneven disability support, institutional rules, and normative cultures, as well as interpersonal dynamics such as disclosure dilemmas, community-seeking, and experiences of misfitting. Additionally, participants identify moments of affirmation, community, and self-sufficient practices that support inclusion, thereby offering a more nuanced account. Foregrounding the temporality and situatedness of student experience, the study conceptualises university life as fluid and shifting, shaped by intersecting identities rather than reducible to fixed demographic categories. Through a distinctly intersectional and queer-crip lens, it contributes to ongoing debates about how ‘the student experience’ is theorised across multiple sites and degree levels. The study contributes to emerging scholarship that brings queer-crip theory into empirical research on higher education (Abrams et al., 2024), theorising disabled-queer student experience as a dynamic negotiation of fit. By centring disabled-queer students’ lived experiences, it offers conceptual resources for re-examining the assumptions and norms that shape who higher education is for, and how universities might better recognise and sustain diverse ways of being at university.
- Advisor / supervisor
- Wilson, Claire
- Taylor, Yvette, 1978-
- Resource Type
- DOI
- Funder
Relations
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PDF of thesis T18137 | 2026-09-11 | Public | Download |