Through a careful analysis of the cultural expectations around normativity, ability, and productivity that are implicitly and explicitly delineated in graduate programs, my dissertation explores how these expectations influence disabled graduate students' professionalization in the discipline and what kinds of resistance disabled graduate students have employed to meet their access need. My analysis of how disability influences graduate students' professional identity construction offers insight into how graduate programs can critically think through program-level policy in graduate education in ways that center disability justice and care. 

An understudied and often neglected and precarious population, disabled graduate students’ experiences are critical to graduate education scholarship because their lived experiences can offer insight into critiques of normative and disabling academic structures. My dissertation will explore common and shared cultural expectations across doctoral programs in rhetoric and composition. This is important because disabled graduate students' identity construction presents important implications for broader academic contexts by exploring how ableism circulates through micro and macro cultural expectations and material-discursive notions about productivity, efficiency, and ability. This is especially true given the ways that “disability is always shifting, contingent on circumstances, contexts, and particular experiences, relationships, and bodily arrangements'' (Kerschbaum Signs of Disability 11). 

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Through this study, I will explore how the conclusions I draw from disabled graduate students’ experiences might inform and generate structural recommendations that take access, care, and disability justice seriously in graduate education. While I intend to propose structural suggestions around creating a culture of access that integrates the perspectives of disabled graduate students, my focus in the dissertation is not specifically on policy. This is important because my decision to focus on story and lived experience is a political one; many universities argue that their diversity and inclusion initiatives are inclusive of disabled students and that they actively support disabled students by following ADA policy and allowing for reasonable accommodations, and yet ableism continues to remain a defining feature of so many disabled academics experiences. Stories enable disabled graduate students to tell a different narrative about disability in higher education.