The personal is political! Considering and exploring the attitudes and intentions that form and frame our ‘partnering up’ with and for disability rights in higher education.

Abstract

This alternative piece in a poetic conversational style presents a series of individual and linked reflections on our ‘attitudes and intentions’ as students and tutors in higher education ‘partnering up’- for social justice and disability rights. The authors are believers in and practitioners of critical pedagogy and wish to challenge the traditional binary of ‘student’ and ‘tutor’ in our work. We hold at our core that education is a collective endeavour, without which learning, self and community growth does not happen- thus a partnership which works to challenge power, systemic oppression and established frames of reference and representation in education is an essential component of our, the authors’, collective attitude and intent. So too is our belief about the need for change, in particular a radical systemic and cultural change for social justice in relation to the intersection of ‘disability’. For the authors, our personal identities alongside our externally positioned identities overlap, contradict, conjoin and spin out. We find ourselves in the words of Ahmed (2012) regularly pushing against the dominant flow, and so we combine energies by coming together and coming out as partners for change holding this attitude and belief - “Our personal is political”. We also believe it is through collective endeavour, partnership and combined energy that the status quo will be changed and a previously isolated oppressed self, can be transformed. ‘Collective action for a collective solution’ as Hanisch (1969) said.

We invite you to read our words - be challenged, feel discomfort, find connection, pain and humour, be a partner, be an ally and always see the political.