About Karin Boxer
I work with employers and higher education institutions to redesign the systems that shape whether disabled people can remain, belong, and succeed. My work focuses on disability, ableism, and institutional design.
I work in two institutional settings.
In the workplace, I focus on the ADA interactive process and the workplace policies and practices that make individualized accommodations necessary in the first place. I examine why accommodation processes stall, narrow prematurely, or end without identifying an effective accommodation, and how organizations can build systems that search more effectively for solutions.
In higher education, I examine how institutional systems shape the experiences of disabled students, faculty, and staff. My work looks beyond accommodations alone to questions of belonging, culture, governance, and the policies and practices that determine whether disability is treated as a valued form of human diversity or simply as an individual problem to manage.
Across both settings, I’m interested in the same questions: how institutions assign responsibility, make decisions, and embed assumptions about disability into ordinary policies and practices. I believe many of the barriers disabled people encounter are created by institutional design—and can be changed through institutional design.
Organizations engage me for consulting, leadership and advisory work, policy and process reviews, and invited talks and workshops. My work is diagnostic and structural. I do not manage individual accommodation cases or provide legal advice.
Background
After a 24-year academic career in philosophy, I left academia in 2024 to focus full-time on disability inclusion through consulting, speaking, and writing. My teaching and scholarship had long examined ethics, moral responsibility, disability, and the institutional conditions under which people are judged and held accountable. I launched Karin Boxer LLC in 2026.
I am the author of Rethinking Responsibility (Oxford University Press, 2013). I earned a D.Phil. and B.Phil. in Philosophy from the University of Oxford and an A.B. in Public and International Affairs from Princeton University. I was a Marshall Scholar and Truman Scholar.
My current work is also informed by lived experience. I have Just-Right Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. After an accommodation process failed to identify workable ways for me to continue contributing, I left my academic career.
That experience changed the questions I ask. Rather than viewing disability as a problem located primarily in individuals, I became interested in how institutions define competence, assign responsibility, organize work, and decide which forms of participation are treated as legitimate. Those questions now shape my work on accommodation systems, disability belonging, faculty retention, and institutional design.
I work with institutions that are ready to ask whether their systems are designed for the people they're meant to serve.
