ABSTRACT
Disability too often remains disconnected from nonnormative gender and sexual identities, despite the increasing prevalence of intersectional research in higher education. In this chapter, the authors provide the story of their experiences interviewing college students with (dis)abilities who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer. They employ scholarly personal narratives from three researchers who took up the question of how college students experienced the intersections and disconnects of disability, gender, and sexuality. The authors critically consider their varied disciplinary, personal, and professional backgrounds, as well as their positionalities along dimensions of race, gender, disability, and sexual orientation—and how these dimensions shaped the study they conducted and potentially uncovered and addressed (dis)connections between disability and diversity in higher education. Education researchers have increasingly used scholarly personal narratives (SPN) to reflect on their positionalities and subjectivities. Team approach to collaborative, interdisciplinary research would enhance projects aimed at understanding students' intersectional experiences with multiple social identities.
