Reassessing Intersectionality: Affirming Difference in Higher Education

This essay offers a review of Jay Dolmage's "Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education" and Asao Inoue's "Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future" with the intent of reminding composition instructors of the importance of intersectionality and accessibility. Each text encourages us to challenge traditional perceptions of success and failure thereby also interrogating imbalanced power dynamics between instructors and students particularly in regards to writing assessment and other pedagogical priorities. Finding ways to acknowledge difference, and affirm it, is vital to our collective success especially in the writing classroom.