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This article explores visually impaired (vi) and blind students’ experiences of support as an undergraduate student in UK higher education (he) by focusing specifically on relationships and interactions between vi and blind students and support staff within Higher Education. Participants within this research show how their experiences highlight an uneven and often exclusionary Higher Education landscape. Constructions of disability and impairment show a complex relationship between support provision as it is offered and experienced. The findings overall suggest the experience of support is more than the placing together of student and support worker and concerns the management of this relationship, particularly around underlying assumptions about being vi. Support is not unnecessary or unwelcome, instead, the complexity of the relationship, the additional work associated with support experienced by these students, combine to shape academic experience.

Whilst there has been research that has examined the experiences of disabled students in higher education, to date none has examined the experience of being visually impaired -and- being a visually impaired student. By utilising a Critical Disability Studies (CDS) approach I consider how visually impaired students experience non-normative and ableist discourses within their life as a student as well as in their day to day lives beyond university. In doing so I show that for visually impaired students, higher education is a complex arena where there are allusions to participation and transformation, yet the sector often reinforces oppressive and disabling notions. The disabling attitudes and actions, regarding visual impairment, these students experience are culturally and historically rooted in concepts heavily loaded with tragedy, pity and fear.\ud \ud Using a critical Grounded Theory approach (Charmaz, 2014) I examine the experiences of a sample of participants drawn from an informal network and as told within loose semi structured interviews in which participants talked about their experiences as a student and their experiences as a visually impaired person, more generally, contextualising their university experience within it. Participants’ accounts highlight the complex systems within education that they are required to negotiate as a disabled student and, critically, they emphasise the many and complex interactions experienced in their daily lives. At the intersections of these two sets of experiences are often ableist assertions about visual impairment and visually impaired people, and the interviews show the importance of questioning normative discourses about visual impairment. I argue that despite many attempts to challenge disabling discourses these remain prevalent in contemporary HE and that taking an intersectional, CDS approach can reconceptualise being a visually impaired student as an autonomous and non-tragic identity, which in turn promotes a participatory and transformative higher education experience.