More than Tolerance: A Call to ShiFt the Ableist Academy Towards Equity

A career in academia requires long days teaching, marking, and preparing content, and nights answering emails, researching, and connecting with online students. Amongst this intense schedule, there must, however, be time for attention to a partner, children, and friends, and ideally recreation and self-care. Sometimes this is manageable, but how do female academics cope when they add to this mix, the mothering of a child or children with disability? This chapter relates the stories of the authors straddling the worlds of academia and disability to negotiate an unexpected journey, balancing the unpredictable nature of disability and the sometimes unforgiving expectations of the university. These intersecting autoethnographies highlight that the Academy requires not just a shiFt, but a shove into the realities of ableism.