Member since December 2025
Karin Boxer is a philosopher and former professor who speaks nationally on disability, ableism, and institutional design. Her work examines how cultural norms and governance structures shape who is able to stay, participate, and succeed in higher education and the workplace.
Drawing on both analytic expertise and lived experience navigating higher education with Just Right obsessive-compulsive disorder, Karin connects structural ableism to institutional policy, standards of excellence, and accommodation systems. Her talks range from campus-wide keynotes on naming and understanding ableism to leadership sessions on redesigning institutional practices and strengthening the ADA interactive process.
She holds a B.Phil. and D.Phil. in Philosophy from the University of Oxford and is the author of a book on moral responsibility published by Oxford University Press.
This talk examines why the ADA interactive process routinely breaks down even in institutions acting in good faith.
It analyzes recurring structural failures, including expertise mismatch, information asymmetry, risk-management defaults, and the absence of reassessment after accommodations are implemented.
The focus is on institutional design: what employers must do for the interactive process to work in practice.
This talk examines how structural ableism becomes embedded in standards of excellence, productivity, and professionalism, and what institutions must change to enable disabled people to stay, participate, and succeed.
It reframes ableism as a governance issue, offering audience members a clearer lens for redesigning institutional policies, practices, and norms.
This keynote introduces ableism as the least named and least understood form of structural exclusion.
Drawing on lived experience navigating higher education with Just Right obsessive-compulsive disorder, the talk traces what happens when systemic barriers are misrecognized as individual weakness or failure.
Participants leave with shared language for naming ableism and understanding why challenging it belongs alongside work on racism and sexism.
This talk examines why the ADA interactive process routinely breaks down even in institutions acting in good faith.
It analyzes recurring structural failures, including expertise mismatch, information asymmetry, risk-management defaults, and the absence of reassessment after accommodations are implemented.
The focus is on institutional design: what employers must do for the interactive process to work in practice.
This talk examines how structural ableism becomes embedded in standards of excellence, productivity, and professionalism, and what institutions must change to enable disabled people to stay, participate, and succeed.
It reframes ableism as a governance issue, offering audience members a clearer lens for redesigning institutional policies, practices, and norms.
This keynote introduces ableism as the least named and least understood form of structural exclusion.
Drawing on lived experience navigating higher education with Just Right obsessive-compulsive disorder, the talk traces what happens when systemic barriers are misrecognized as individual weakness or failure.
Participants leave with shared language for naming ableism and understanding why challenging it belongs alongside work on racism and sexism.