Making the Circle Bigger South African Higher Education, Social Justice and Students with DisabilitieS: Disability inclusion in South African in higher education.

The book takes as starting point the proposition that students with disabilities (SWDs) can be seen as canaries in the coal mine of South African higher education inclusion debates. Their experiences point to the multiple ways in which existing norms and practices are formulated around a set of assumed normalities that need to be questioned and reconfigured. The idea of ‘inclusion’ is critiqued since it implies inclusion into ways of being and doing that exclude and marginalise. In this book we offer a diverse range of perspectives in order to suggest what it might mean for universities to create cultures that are friendly to disability. The chapters provide new insights into the multiple ways in which dominant norms and practices do violence to those whose lives and experiences they exclude, ignore, denigrate and fail to recognise as fully human, deserving of equal respect and consideration. The book offers a South perspective which explores the intersection of multiple aspects of students’ identities but places the experiences of SWDs centre stage for the first time in the South African higher education transformation, equity and inclusion debate. While previous literature has focused mainly on obstacles and challenges faced by SWDs in this book contributors talk also about solutions and share experiences of best practices. Rather than focusing on disability as a characteristic of individuals the book takes the perspective that social environments and relationships are disabling and that it is the latter that need to change rather than locating the challenges in the disabled person who is then constructed as needing to find ways of ‘fitting in’ to society. The various contributions cover a wide spectrum of concerns, from flexible and accessible curricula; to questions of funding, assistive technology, conscientisation and sensitisation of educators, availability of monitoring mechanisms to ensure effective implementation of inclusive education policies, participation of SWDs in sport and recreational activities,  accessibility of built environments, both academic and social, health promotion and sharing responsibility for inclusion.