About Karin Boxer
Philosopher and disability inclusion strategist focused on institutional design.
Karin Boxer is a philosopher and disability inclusion strategist whose work examines how institutions structure responsibility, expertise, and authority, shaping disabled people’s ability to participate and remain.
Her work addresses two closely related domains. The first is the conceptual and cultural analysis of disability and ableism: how institutions define excellence, merit, productivity, and professionalism, and how those definitions quietly exclude disabled people. The second is the institutional design of accommodation systems, including the ADA interactive process, and the recurring structural patterns that cause those systems to fail in practice.
For twenty-four years, Karin taught philosophy, with a focus on moral responsibility, institutional decision-making, and standards of evaluation. She lives with Just-Right obsessive-compulsive disorder, an experience that informs her analysis of how institutions treat deviation from normative ways of working and how accommodation processes often misrecognize structural barriers as individual shortcomings.
Her work examines why ADA interactive processes so often break down despite formal compliance, and how misplaced expertise, front-loaded solution burdens, risk-management defaults, and procedural drift undermine their intended purpose. Across contexts, she traces how accommodation failures are produced not by bad intent, but by design choices that offload responsibility and obscure institutional accountability.
Her work spans writing, speaking, and consulting on disability, ableism, and the institutional design of accommodation systems.
