‘I’m just the nuisance crip' : postqualitative flows of un/belonging for disabled staff and PGR students across UK universities

Whitburn, Ben and Vincent, Jonathan (2026) ‘I’m just the nuisance crip' : postqualitative flows of un/belonging for disabled staff and PGR students across UK universities. Higher Education. ISSN 0018-1560 (In Press)

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Abstract

Belonging is recurrently advanced as a significant measure of achievement, retention, and satisfaction among staff and students of higher education. In this article, we examine the politics of un/belonging from the standpoint of disabled academic and professional staff, and PGR students at UK-based institutions of higher education. Drawing on a postqualitative critical disability orientation, the study problematises dominant discourses of belonging that presuppose compliance with an assimilist institutional culture. We present four postqualitative flows (Mazzei, 2013) that conceptualise un/belonging as affective; as divergent from inclusion; as relational; and as agentic and transgressive. Rather than treating the university as a fixed or neutral site to which one might belong, we mobilise subscendence (Morton, 2017) to challenge transcendence and the totalising logic of institutional coherence. Subscendence repositions the university as a porous, contingent assemblage shaped by the masked and embodied experiences of those navigating its norms. The value of this article is its conceptual interrogation of belonging grounded in the empirical accounts of disabled participants, highlighting how current conditions mediated by legislated ‘reasonable adjustments’ can inadvertently promote ableist practices rather than support meaningful belonging. By reframing un/belonging as a relational and political claim—not as a solely individual affective state—this study calls for a more comprehensive engagement with disability knowledge and experience. The study demonstrates that disabled people do not simply seek to be included within the university but are already co-constituting it.