Infrastructuring as Collective Resistance: How Disabled Students Negotiate Access Through Technology in Universities

Ly, Cross, Tasman, Mattka, Doggett, Marathe, and Chandra examine how disabled students at a large Canadian university collectively negotiate access when the institution's individualised accommodations system fails them. Through semi-structured interviews (60-90 min) with 13 student activists and leaders of disability-related campus groups, plus a targeted digital ethnography of 12 group-operated social media accounts (Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok), the authors map a web of formal and informal student-led accessibility infrastructure. Theoretically, they draw on Pipek & Wulf's infrastructuring, Bowker & Star's infrastructural inversion, Bryan Semaan's routine infrastructuring, Margaret Price's crip spacetime, Aimi Hamraie's access frictions, and Dean Spade's mutual aid, and adopt Alison Kafer's political/relational model of disability — refusing the medical model that underwrites university accommodation systems. The paper's central argument is that student-led disability groups constitute an "(in)formal care infrastructure" that works with, within, and around the university; their access labour is not ad-hoc troubleshooting but a sustained political praxis. The authors introduce the concept of "counteractive frictions" — strategically produced disruptions (protests, petitions, Human Rights Tribunal filings, guerrilla postering) that force institutional negotiation, extending Korn & Voida's "designing with friction" from designer-led to community-generated friction.

Findings organise around three themes. (1) Frictions of access: students face a burden of proof — medical documentation, "disabled enough" thresholds, and faculty gatekeeping around academic rigour; law, medicine, and other "prestigious" programs erect additional bureaucratic layers (P2, at law school, describes accommodations framed as either "lowering of standards" or "unfair advantage"). (2) Three infrastructural positions for student groups: campus services (most formal, university-employed volunteers with resources but direct oversight), student unions (faculty-affiliated, self-governing, able to covertly support Human Rights Tribunal cases via Facebook Messenger to evade faculty surveillance), and student clubs (least formal, least funded, most autonomous — free to run guerrilla campaigns like P7's neurodiversity club's petition for sensory-free study spaces). (3) Collective mobilisation via human and digital networks: students use Discord, Slack, Google Drive, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Reddit for internal coordination, historical record-keeping (surviving leadership turnover), peer writing groups, professional mentorship for disabled students, and public demystification of institutional policy. Counteractive frictions produced collectively have six properties: they materialise and contest politics, accumulate through mobilisation, are relational and temporal, strategically disrupt, lead to reconfiguration, and emerge as a natural consequence of democracy. Boundary conditions for these frictions include a polycentric authority structure, a university rhetorically supportive of accessibility, and the partial surveillance affordances of digital tools.

For practitioners in higher-education accessibility, disability services, and EdTech, the paper is a corrective to the "frictionless accommodation" framing that dominates institutional rhetoric. It documents, in concrete detail, the labour students perform to sustain access (student-run writing groups, mentorship programs, Tribunal support, records-keeping in shared Google Drives) and names the political value of that labour rather than treating it as a system to be automated away. Designers of university LMSs, accommodation portals, and institutional communications should read the "counteractive frictions" framework as a warning against smoothing interactions in ways that depoliticise disability. Limitations: single-site Canadian study; recruitment was biased toward student groups with existing social-media presence; intersectionality, which the authors flag as important, did not surface in the data as only one participant disclosed demographic detail beyond disability.