Where Visibility Becomes Justice: Heather Evans and the Work of Reimagining Disability

By Sigrid Wang

The moment Heather lifted her cane to answer a question in her Disability and Human Rights class, nobody said anything or even blinked an eye. But something in the room quietly shifted. Before that day, students with disabilities spoke cautiously, while non-disabled students hesitated for being afraid of saying the wrong thing. This small act of acknowledging her own body cut the invisible line that had long divided the class and made conversations flow. “You’re the first professor I’ve ever had with a disability.” The words Heather received by the end of the term stayed with her as a quiet call to responsibility. She realized visibility was not exposure but knowledge to make disability part of ordinary life.

Heather Evans，a sociologist and educator whose work bridges disability studies, medicine, and social justice. She identifies as a white, cisgender, multiply disabled woman, a chronic illness and a mental disorder shape the way she moves through the world and her teaching. At the University of Washington, she directs both the Disability Studies program and research at the Northwest ADA Center, where she examines how institutions marginalize or empower different populations. Her research grounded in mixed methods asks how systems including legal, medical or educational reproduce inequality and how they might be reimagined to foster access and dignity. Across her studies of homelessness, criminal justice and public health, she kept finding disability woven through every form of exclusion. That pattern became the core of her work: revealing how stigma around disability intersects with poverty, race, class, and faith to shape who is seen and who is left out.

Yet visibility is never simply a matter of being seen. It’s about how one chooses to be seen, or not. For many people with disabilities, the decision to disclose their identity carries both risk and meaning. Heather points out that institutions themselves often reinforce silence. From schools to workplaces, people are taught that disability is something to keep secret，which is only to be revealed when asking for accommodations. This culture of secrecy feeds the idea that being disabled is shameful or defective. For people with visible disabilities, disclosure isn’t a choice. They are read and categorized the moment they enter a room. But for those with invisible disabilities, their identity becomes a negotiation between safety and authenticity. The pressure to conceal part of oneself can lead to isolation and self-doubt. Silence may protect them from bias. However, choosing disclosure in professional settings can open doors to support, understanding and community. For example, revealing a disability may allow people to access accommodations or learn about resources that would otherwise remain invisible like disability affinity groups that connect employees who share similar experiences. 

For Heather, this act of openness is not only personal but political. She always chooses to disclose her disability, not out of obligation, but as a deliberate refusal of shame. Her visibility challenges the assumption that disability is rare or unfortunate. “We are everywhere,” she says, reminding others that nearly one in four adults in the United States identifies as disabled. 

“It's a real thing, and there are real things that you can do to try to manage it, but if you deny that it exists, that becomes part of that internalization.”  Heather notes that many people around her including her own family have at times interpreted her “down days” as a sign of weakness or a failure to take responsibility. This reaction, she emphasizes, reflects a broader cultural belief about mental illness, mood disorders, and personality disorders, which is rooted in misinformation. For this reason, she is deeply committed to educating others and modeling openness through her own life, using her visibility as a counterweight to stigma.

However, for Heather, the choice to disclose a disability is deeply personal and is shaped by context and individual resilience. She underscores that disclosure can carry real consequences: job opportunities may disappear and relationships can be altered. Because these risks differ from person to person, she refuses to prescribe a single “right” decision, insisting that only individuals themselves can determine when, how and to whom they disclose. As she pointed out, her own willingness to be open is shaped by the protections she has including her race, educational status and professional position, which allow her to absorb consequences others can not. Yet while she defends the autonomy of individual choice, she also acknowledges that the burden of negotiating these decisions falls disproportionately on marginalized people, especially in environments where disability remains stigmatized or invisible.

It is precisely for this reason that Heather sees institutional normalization as essential. Normalizing disability, she argues, requires shifting everyday habits to make variation in bodies and minds is expected. One of her most effective strategies is the practice of access check-ins, which is using brief, non-medical invitations for people to state what they need at the moment. Whether dimming the lights for someone with a migraine or allowing a mid-meeting snack break, these practices show that everybody’s fluctuating capacities are reasonable. They also create low-stakes opportunities for engagement, without pressuring anyone to disclose.

At the same time, Heather calls for institutions to confront the more entrenched stigmas that shape workplace responses to disability, particularly mental illness. Misconceptions that such conditions are impossible to accommodate reveal how deeply ableist assumptions are embedded into organizational norms. In reality, she notes, people live and work with a wide range of disabilities every day, and accommodations are often simple, flexible adjustments. Productivity does not need to look uniform, people can reach the same outcomes through different paths. 

The decision to disclose a disability is shaped by a complex web of structural stigma, capitalist assumptions, and institutional design, all of which place disproportionate burdens on disabled people. In the U.S., where productivity is tied to worth and employment is tied to health insurance, disabled workers must constantly weigh whether disclosure will improve their access to accommodations or simply expose them to damaging stereotypes—that they are less capable, less reliable, more expensive, or even “coddled.” These assumptions create a binary in which one is either imagined as fully capable or entirely incompetent, leaving no room for the ordinary variability of human bodies and minds. As a result, many disabled employees push themselves to self-accommodate at great physical cost, rather than risk being dismissed as unproductive. Moreover, because employer-based health insurance is essential for many disabled people, especially those who rely on expensive treatments, the risk of losing a job is inseparable from the risk of losing medical care. This structural precarity keeps many highly educated disabled workers in underpaid or undesirable positions.

For Heather, this reality underscores the urgency of systemic change. She argues that future research must examine how disability became tied to private medical history and why disclosure is so often treated as a personal burden rather than an institutional responsibility. She sees real possibility in scholarship and practice that help employers decouple disability from stigma, normalize conversations about access and capacity and design accommodations as standard features of workplaces rather than exceptional interventions. Such shifts, she believes, would offer disabled people genuine empowerment，not by asking them to disclose more, but by building systems that require less risk for them to thrive.

Heather’s motivation is rooted in a lifelong impulse to interrogate structures and a deep commitment to justice shaped by her own trajectory. Growing up in a working-class, largely Latino family in New Mexico, where neither parent finished high school, she entered higher education late and almost accidentally. Yet once she discovered research, she became driven not by abstract theory but by the possibility that scholarship could materially change lives. Throughout graduate school she gravitated toward work that confronted inequality directly, even when peers and advisors dismissed policy-oriented projects as academically marginal. Her insistence on research with real-world impact ultimately proved transformative. In a six-year study, her team exposed racial bias in capital sentencing and persuaded the Washington State Supreme Court to unanimously abolish the death penalty in 2018. She still marks this victory with a tattoo reading “9–0” because it was unanimous. That experience, she says, was “addictive,” revealing the power of evidence to reshape institutions. Over time, every path of inquiry from criminal justice to homelessness led her back to disability, prompting her to devote the last five years entirely to reforming systems whether in healthcare, the courts or her own university. 

Living with a degenerative disease intensifies this urgency of reforming. Heather says she does not know how long she will be able to work, but she is clear about her purpose. Her goal is not prestige or tenure, it is increasing the presence and authority of disabled people in decision-making spaces. For her, the most meaningful reform begins with representation. Thus she routinely challenges institutions to confront the absence of disabled leaders in their own ranks. If an organization claims to serve disabled communities yet has no disabled people in positions of power, she says, “that’s a problem.” Her career, sustained by both personal stakes and political conviction, is an ongoing effort to remake institutions so that disabled people can lead, shape policy, and redefine what justice looks like from the inside out. “Because if you're telling me all about folks with intellectual disability, but there is not one paid leader in your organization with intellectual disability, I'm gonna call bullshit on you. Because representation, I mean, that’s where the rubber meets the road.”