Policy and the ethics of doing disability: Working within and beyond an inclusive norm in the English higher education

Ball (2013), following Foucault and his later work on ethics, reminds us that we are what we do, and that if we think it in that way, we are freer than we think. Framed within studies of governmentality, this chapter explores ‘the continuing tension between domination and agency’ in processes of enactment of inclusive policies in the English university, and their relations to the experience of being a disabled student. By problematizing the necessity of the neoliberal present of higher education, it challenges discourses around economy and ableism in university contexts, and suggests a different reading of inclusive higher education policy and teaching and learning practices. By looking into the potential of the higher education experience as a space for reinventing and caring for ourselves and others, this chapter rewrites the use of policies as ethical fields of government, and advances some practical alternatives for university to become an ethical experience of subjective freedom.