Book review

The Question of Access is a book which aims to convey the constructions of access in the context of higher education in Canada and which engages with deeply held (but disavowed) notions of who belongs in this and other bureaucracies. Titchkosky skilfully engages with policy, pedagogy, law and other formal structures whilst arguing that these alone do not make an enabling environment. Written in a poststructuralist framework which questions how we do and perform disability, she problematizes social space to articulate a politics of space, belonging and personhood that questions our fundamental encounters with one another the beauty, potential and catastrophe of disabled and non-disabled people’s often separated lives. Lives lived together and yet apart. In reading this book, I am reminded of Isaac Rosenberg’s war poem where he states ‘these meetings in dreams, how sad they are, when waking and walking about, there is no contact to the hand’. This sense of the achievable unachieved, the possible not made possible, runs through Titchkosky’s narrative. She relates the question of access via her own testimony as a professor with dyslexia who despite statute, guidance and training, finds herself in a work that is officially hers, but ontologically unstable and conditional. The book could have been simply about the gap between rhetoric and reality in higher education and access policy, it could have discussed case law, human resource practice and staff/student committees more fully. Whilst it does of course marble its discussion with these points, the overall feel of the book is purposefully semiotic, it is at its strongest where it unpacks signs and symbols of access. Titchkosky notes: