Inclusive education and tertiary instruction. New questions in the tradition of disability studies

The proposal aims to investigate the university inclusion of students with disabilities through a review of theoretical studies on the subject. The definition of inclusion it‘s an aspect not free of criticality, suggesting reference to the concepts of marginality and exclusion. In this context, universities, understood as places of confrontation with diversity (Bolt & Penketh, 2016), are called to fulfil their institutional mandate. With specific reference to Law No. 17/1999, full formal recognition of the access of persons with disabilities to tertiary education is sanctioned. However, this requires a dual commitment from the institutions in the pursuit of inclusion policies (Chiang, 2019): on the one hand, at the level of implementing services; on the other, in building an inclusive community that allows the active participation of all students (Moriña et al., 2015). In particular, there is a need for the university to promote a culture of disability, providing safe spaces and opening up to a confrontation based on the recognition and appreciation of individual diversity, without falling into mere welfarism (Chiang, 2019). The subject of critical discussion in the article are, therefore, the main theoretical nodes that have emerged in the scientific literature on disability: the first concerns the relationship between disability and classical sociological thought, with particular reference to Parsonsian structural-functionalism and the sick-role theorisation (Parsons, 1951); the second refers to the Goffman interactionist approach (Goffman, 1963). From these conceptualisations, it is easy to recall the multiple forms of prejudice, which can be classified at an inter-individual and contextual-level.