Invisible Expertise: Disabled Students’ Literacy Practices in the Postdigital University

Abstract Postdigital scholarship has theorized learning environments as more-than-human assemblages in which agency is distributed across human and nonhuman actors. Yet, that literature has largely failed to reckon with disability. This article shares the findings from a study using narrative inquiry to understand how five disabled students in higher education story their experiences of literacy within postdigital learning assemblages. Drawing on Clandinin and Connelly’s methodology of narrative inquiry, Barad’s posthumanist theorization of intra-action, and McRuer’s critique of normative constructions of competence and the bodymind, this article asks: How do disabled students in higher education story their experiences of literacy within postdigital learning assemblages? The findings are presented as narrative restorations based on semi-structured interviews conducted at a public research university in the southeastern United States. Participants’ narratives demonstrate that disabled students construct sophisticated and inventive literacy practices in response to assemblages not designed with them in mind, while concealing those practices from institutions unable to recognize them as legitimate. I argue that designing for literacy in the postdigital university requires a fundamental rethinking of whose literacy counts and who gets to decide, and that disabled students are among the most capable navigators of more-than-human learning environments, even as their navigation remains institutionally invisible.