Compassion as governance
Neuro-ableism, benevolent pathology, and the moral economy of care in higher education
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21556378 |
|---|---|
| Authors | E Ademolu (0000-0002-5122-6232, King's College London, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 45 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 1208-1218 |
| Publication date | 2026-05-19 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Higher Education Research & Development (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0729-4360 • E-ISSN: 1469-8366 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/07294360.2026.2643244 |
| OpenAlex | W7138847220 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 16 |
Compassionate pedagogy is increasingly promoted as a humanising response to contemporary pressures in higher education, yet the cognitive assumptions that make compassion institutionally operative remain underexamined. This paper theorises compassion as a governing affective order that shapes what counts as credible difficulty and who can appear as a legitimate subject of support. Drawing on critical disability scholarship and a neurodivergent standpoint, it argues that compassionate governance relies on neuro-ableist norms of emotional readability and narrative coherence, converting cognitive difference into procedurally legible vulnerability and, in turn, vulnerability into recognisable deficit. The paper introduces benevolent pathology to describe a regime in which credibility is routed through medicalised grammars of impairment and sustained through routine administrative acts. Synthesised in a schematic model, this process operates as a sorting mechanism that distributes care and misrecognition over time. While grounded in systems where access to support is organised through individual disclosure, therapeutic classification, and administrable evidence, the analysis identifies a wider risk: when legitimacy depends on narrated injury, compassion functions less as an ethic of care than as a technology of governance. The paper concludes by proposing a design-justice pivot that embeds cognitive plurality into ordinary pedagogical arrangements rather than exceptional accommodation
Compassion · Empathy · Higher education · Moral economy · Moral education · Prosocial behavior · Digital Education and Society · Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations · Neuroscience, Education and Cognitive Function
| Highly cited | No |
|---|