Over the past few decades, disability rights and disability justice movements have helped support disabled and chronically ill individuals claim disability as an identity and set of lived experiences, not simply a diagnosis. In turn, more and more people are claiming this identity, connecting in communal spaces of all kinds, and working towards dismantling ableist concepts. However, there are still incredible challenges surrounding disabled identity for faculty members in the academy, despite the benefits of having disabled faculty on campus. For example, many of us have been told to downplay or even not disclose our identities and experiences when feasible in order to get a job or tenure, have experienced high rates of ableist microaggressions (as well as explicit ableism), and have dealt with extreme tokenization while simultaneously fighting for basic accommodations to be made for our bodyminds. These experiences of disability within higher education occur against a backdrop whereby colleges and universities increasingly ask those who work for them to be hyper-productive even as conditions of long-term support decline — the effects of which the contributors to this special issue of Spark all touch upon.