No / Within the academic career literature, disabled academics are under-researched, despite calls for career theory development through the exploration of marginalized groups' career experiences and the boundaries which shape these experiences. Here, boundaries refer to the symbolic resources which become reified to construct social boundaries shaping what is and is not possible in career contexts. This article contributes to the advancement of academic career theory by enabling insights into impairment effects as an embodied career boundary for disabled academics and outlining how experiences of impairment effects and disabled academics' agency are entangled with their career context and organizational members' responses. Impairment effects shape career choices and opportunities, by being negated, and/or influencing expectations of employers to provide inclusive contexts which acknowledge impairment effects as a legitimate organizing principle. However this recognition of impairment as a legitimate organizing principle is not always reciprocated, with implications for disabled academics' careers.

Although people with disabilities have made significant strides toward educational equity, they continue to face struggles in college that perpetuate their dismal college outcomes. Current research focuses on struggles endured in the on-campus setting and provides little insight into online course experiences. Toward addressing the knowledge gap, the study opened a social portal to online higher education, leveraging disability as an experiential lens to understand online course challenges and the potential for universal design for learning practices to reduce obstacles to academic success. We considered online course experiences concerning impairment effects and disablism within a social relational disability studies perspective. The study's methodological approach embraced liberatory access, leveraging access intimacy to practice interdependence as a recruitment and data collection tool that valued and enabled a disabled, deafblind researcher. An inductive thematic analysis foregrounding seven students with disabilities' lived experiences identified three themes in the data: adapting to impairment effects, negotiating constrained autonomy, and assessing universal design for learning. Study results showed that students with disabilities negotiate how their impairments and chronic illnesses affect their embodied functioning while also contending with structural and pedagogical constraints that impede students' efforts to adapt in ways that allow for flexibility in pace, time, and duration of academic work. Online course spaces were most beneficial and supportive for students with disabilities when instructors practiced universal design for learning. The implications of experiencing disability in online courses include a need for disability justice approaches to faculty training and research investigating universal design for learning practices, students with disabilities invisible work, and access intimacy in the higher education context.