Belonging needs more than reasonable adjustments
Updated Jun 16, 2026
student voiceA university can meet the letter of its disability duties and still leave disabled people feeling like problems to be managed. That is why Ben Whitburn and Jonathan Vincent's recent Higher Education paper, "I'm just the nuisance crip": Postqualitative flows of un/belonging for disabled staff and PGR students across UK universities, matters for UK universities using student voice to understand belonging, access, and postgraduate research experience. We see the same risk whenever disability-related feedback is treated as isolated casework rather than evidence about how the institution itself is designed.
Context and research question
Belonging is now a familiar theme in higher education strategy. It appears in retention work, EDI plans, wellbeing surveys, and transition programmes. The practical problem is that belonging is often treated as a positive feeling students either have or lack, rather than as something institutions actively shape through rules, routines, and assumptions about who fits easily.
Whitburn and Vincent tackle that problem from the standpoint of disabled academic and professional staff, and postgraduate research students in UK universities. Drawing on a postqualitative critical disability orientation and empirical participant accounts, they ask what un/belonging looks like when university life is organised around norms that presume disabled people should adapt themselves to the institution. The paper is especially useful for UK teams because it shifts the question from "Are our adjustments in place?" to "What do our processes make disabled people feel, expect, and carry?"
Key findings
The paper's sharpest finding is that formal adjustment processes can coexist with ableist conditions. The abstract argues that legislated "reasonable adjustments" may still promote ableist practice when the wider culture treats disability as an exception to be managed. For universities, that matters because a timely adjustment on paper does not guarantee that a student or researcher feels recognised, safe, or fully legitimate in the institution.
Un/belonging is framed here as relational and political, not just emotional. The authors argue that it is produced through encounters with institutional norms, expectations, and responses. That is a useful correction for UK higher education teams, because disability-related comments often get flattened into satisfaction or dissatisfaction when they may actually be describing who is believed, who has to explain themselves repeatedly, and who is expected to absorb the friction.
Inclusion and belonging are not the same thing. The paper's four "flows" describe un/belonging as affective, divergent from inclusion, relational, and agentic or transgressive. In practice, that means a university can include someone procedurally while still making them feel burdensome or out of place. For Student Experience teams, that distinction matters because the same feedback theme can contain both access problems and deeper signals about dignity, trust, and institutional fit.
The paper's conclusion captures the point clearly:
"disabled people do not simply seek to be included within the university but are already co-constituting it"
That final shift is the most important one for institutional practice. Disabled PGR students and staff are not asking merely to be accommodated inside a fixed system. Their accounts show how the system already works, where it fails, and which assumptions make belonging fragile. That gives universities better evidence than a compliance checklist alone.
Practical implications
First, UK universities should treat adjustment feedback as belonging evidence, not just service feedback. If disabled PGR students repeatedly describe disclosure, paperwork, supervisor response, or teaching access as exhausting or humiliating, that is not a narrow operational complaint. It is evidence about whether the institution recognises disabled people as full members of its academic community. That is closely aligned with recent work on making student voice more inclusive by redesigning participation itself, because access and voice often fail in the same places. The benefit is a clearer route from individual comments to structural action.
Second, doctoral schools and student experience teams should ask more precise questions about disability, belonging, and support. A generic item on satisfaction with support is too blunt. Teams need open-text prompts that ask what makes it easier or harder to ask for adjustments, whether supervisory or departmental responses feel respectful, and where students feel they must self-advocate repeatedly. That matters even more in light of UKRI's refreshed expectations for postgraduate research support, which make disabled doctoral experience a more explicit evidence question. The benefit is feedback that points to actionable patterns instead of another vague score.
Third, institutions should separate access, process, and culture when analysing comments. A single disability-related theme is rarely enough. Teams need to distinguish issues such as adjustment timeliness, physical or digital access, supervisory consistency, peer climate, and whether students feel their presence is treated as disruptive. This is where Student Voice Analytics fits naturally: it helps universities compare those recurring patterns across comments at scale without collapsing them into one undifferentiated category. The benefit is sharper diagnosis and more proportionate intervention.
Finally, universities should govern sensitive feedback more carefully once they start collecting it in more detail. Disability-related comments can be highly contextual and personally revealing, especially in smaller PGR cohorts. A robust student comment analysis governance checklist is useful here because better listening only helps when storage, segmentation, interpretation, and follow-through are handled responsibly. The benefit is evidence that is both more useful and more defensible.
FAQ
Q: How should a university change its PGR or belonging surveys after reading this paper?
A: Add one or two open-text prompts that separate process from culture. For example: "What has made it easier or harder to secure the adjustments you need?" and "What affects whether you feel recognised as a full member of your department?" Those questions usually produce more usable evidence than a single rating on support satisfaction.
Q: What are the methodological limits of this study?
A: This is an interpretive, postqualitative study grounded in participant accounts from disabled staff and PGR students in UK universities. It is designed to surface how un/belonging works, not to estimate how common each experience is across the sector. UK teams should use it as a strong interpretive lens, then test the same issues in local surveys, PRES-style feedback, and qualitative follow-up.
Q: What does this change about student voice work more broadly?
A: It widens the purpose of student voice. Disability-related feedback should not only check whether a service responded. It should show whether institutional routines make disabled students feel recognised, credible, and able to participate without constant self-justification. That makes student voice more useful for culture change, not only case resolution.
References
[Paper Source]: Ben Whitburn, Jonathan Vincent "'I'm just the nuisance crip': Postqualitative flows of un/belonging for disabled staff and PGR students across UK universities" DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01692-4
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