Anyway this Disability Wrath Month, a massive FUCK YOU to the Richmond, Indiana Community School System for forcing me to drop out before the completion of my junior year of high school because the truancy officer was threatening to "haul me off the toilet if I didn't get out of the bathroom in the next minute" and arrest me for having used up all my excused absences on having Crohn's disease. Never mind that the then-treatment for Crohn's disease completely collapsed my immune system less than a year before and I was six weeks out of school when I actively dying from shingles so severe there were pox all over my body, down my throat, up my genitals, and even coating my internal organs, that even when I was out of the PICU I still had to be hooked up to a constant PICC line dripping acyclovir directly to my heart at home with a nurse coming in twice daily, that when I was no longer contagious (and wouldn't it have been grand if the parents of the kid who gave me the first round of chickenpox six years prior had cared about being contagious so this didn't have to happen to me or anyone else) I had to go to school still completely scarred and weakened for months and could never catch up to the school missed even with summer school, that the stress of summer school year after year was already making me sicker to the point my hair was thinning on top of exacerbating my Crohn's, that after the disastrous results of the remicaid my pediatric gastroenterologist flat out said he wasn't comfortable treating me but refused to reassign me to another doctor so for the next two years until I aged out of pediatrics I was completely untreated and still very flaring, that this was the year I started developing celiac too so my free lunch was making me violently ill every day, and somehow ruining the sick kid's life by putting them in the carceral system or forcing them to ruin it for you by dropping out was a much better thing to happen then have your hopes for perfect school attendance record, a meaningless trophy, dashed for another year.
Anyway, fuck you RCS/RHS. I graduated G.E.D valedictorian at twenty-three without you, and it's only in my thirties that I'm finally getting over my trauma enough to go to college this year. You fumbled a great student who needed compassion, not punishment for things outside their control. 🖕
i forgot how much i fucking hate being graded. i'm literally doing a good job but because im running on disabled person time i get docked points
i visited the emergency room two times these past five weeks and have been forced to go cold turkey on one medication or another four times, had a colonoscopy and egd scope, and so fucking much more. and you want to take points off videos of me reading some sentences in hebrew (which you already know i can pronounce because i cold read them every class) ??? come ON
my university's complete and utter failure to implement the remote access accommodations i was already approved for is genuinely so appalling that I'm genuinely considering roping in a community advocate or lawyer. their inaction is forcing me to go to class in person to have adequate access to the course content to keep up, directly causing me additional pain and lengthening the recovery time. it is not that goddamn hard to have a person set up a laptop with a zoom call in a class for 2 - 4 weeks so a student can participate in class while recovering from surgery without injuring themselves, and for them to act like it's not possible to have this implemented this week when i first requested this accommodation, notified them i was having surgery, and provided proof thereof + information about the recovery directly from the doctor's office A FULL MONTH AGO. IN THE PREVIOUS QUARTER BEFORE THIS ONE. is an outrageous level of inaccessibility and ableism. These assholes are required by federal law to do provide equal access and they have straight fucking refused.
i'm fucking livid that we're halfway into the second week of the quarter and they failed to notify at least one of my instructors that I was requesting synchronous (i.e. real time, normal course schedule) remote participation accomodations until YESTERDAY. I had a meeting with them on DECEMBER 15TH, and my first email about this was sent December 3rd. They have no goddamn excuse when the medical documentation directly requesting accommodations, a redundant step they for some reason required, was directly delivered on Dec 31, and then waited until January 7th to notify me that they denied the accomodations because the doctors' office requested a longer period for the accommodations than I did (illegal reason to deny them). I gave them updated documentation the same day and they were approved the next day; at this point I had already missed three days worth of classes and independently contacted all of my instructors, and it was not until this point where they even started reaching out to my professors to CHECK IF IT WAS POSSIBLE to do remote participation. They didn't even START ASKING until two days after they should have been implemented. I am fucking livid.
We are now six business days into the quarter, and there is no prospect whatsoever of remote access being set up for any of my classes by the end of this week.
perhaps controversially (if unsurprisingly). i think certain online conversations have a tendency to replicate the kind of filtering and distancing which dolmage describes:
Disability has always been constructed as the inverse or opposite of higher education. Or, let me put it differently: higher education has needed to create a series of versions of “lower education” to justify its work and ground its exceptionalism[.]
Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education by Jay Timothy Dolmage
the language of that last sentence—“to justify its work and ground its exceptionalism”—struck me. particularly as someone for whom traditional education has been at times entirely out of reach, even with ample support and “accommodations”, I feel an increased need to “ground my exceptionalism”: to defend my ability to articulate myself, to discover and engage with oftentimes difficult-to-parse sources, to contribute to conversations in a meaningful way (what does that look like?), in an attempt to “prove” that my thoughts are worth considering despite my position as someone outside of the institution. for those of us for whom academia has been rendered partially—if not wholly—inaccessible, the drive to legitimize our thoughts serves as a technique to subtly or explicitly reinforce that same divide between “higher” and “lower” education.
there’s also a point to be made here about how even those on the outskirts of academia must insist that we rely on it as the sole knowledge-making authority, how that plays into this desire to legitimize oneself by implying that, “even though i am not speaking with the power vested in me by academia, i am still able to utilize its resources, and this allows me to demand that i be taken seriously”. I’m thinking again of a post I saw recently (which of course I can’t find now) which pointed out how it’s erroneous to assume that, say, a tumblr post containing information, is automatically less of an authority on a particular subject because it is not being conveyed in the form and context of an academic article (I believe the post in question was specifically talking about discussions of transmisogyny, and the pitfalls of relying on academia to produce useful material on the subject).
hey! I'm currently writing a paper discussing experiences of disabled and neurodivergent students at my uni (spoiler alert: it's not great lmao), and while I have a couple references so far (mostly Lund and Pearlstein) about the larger Disabled Student ExperienceTM I'm struggling to find academic papers talking about this, particularly since my field of study is psychology rather than disability theory/disability justice. are there any texts regarding this that you would reccommend? doing my best to lean on crip theory for this essay and you were the first person i thought of! no worries if you don't have the energy to answer this rn ofc, i hope you're having a good day ✨
omg what a fabulous & vital project! i’d love to hear more about your work both out of interest & to potentially refine my recommendations because this is such a complex, multifaceted area of experience + research + activism — i tried to draw from a variety of perspectives so you can dig deeper into what seems most relevant!
my number one recommendation is the book Academic Ableism by Jay Dolmage, i still need to read most of it rip but it’s absolutely considered foundational in this topic. the rest i’m gonna put under a cut because it got super long lol, i’ll also reblog to my disability sideblog @crippleprophet in case anyone else has suggestions!
best of luck with your work, i hope some of this is helpful! feel free to reach out for more recommendations, input, or encouragement❣️💖
on the built environment – eg, the physical campus & how it impacts students
if you’re in the US, this summary of colleges’ responsibilities under the ADA has been helpful for me (link).
Building Access by Aimi Hamraie
Accessibility for Historic Buildings: A Field Guide, 2nd Edition (link to pdf)
written by David Provost and revised by Joseph Hoefferle, Jr. as part of the University of Vermont Graduate Program in Historic Preservation
back in 2020 i used the first edition of this document in a project arguing my undergraduate university should make its historic buildings more accessible
lays out policies & options in tables with photo examples from their campus
Aimi Hamraie & Kelly Fritsch’s Crip Technoscience Manifesto (2019)
this piece is honestly just incredibly life-giving for me in general so i highly recommend giving it a full read when you have time. specific parts that i thought might resonate with the experiences of students at your uni:
Emerging out of historical fights for disability rights, the terms accessibility and access are usually taken to mean disabled inclusion and assimilation into normative able-bodied relations and built environments. […] However, the etymology of the word access reveals two frictional meanings: access as “an opportunity enabling contact,” as well as “a kind of attack” (2016, p. 23). Taking access as a kind of attack reveals access-making as a site of political friction and contestation. While historically central to the fights for disability access, crip technoscience is nevertheless committed to pushing beyond liberal and assimilation-based approaches to accessibility, which emphasize inclusion in mainstream society, to pursue access as friction, particularly paying attention to access-making as disabled peoples’ acts of non-compliance and protest.
noncompliant users and assistive technology as friction (p11):
Lifchez and Winslow offer the concept of “non-compliant users,” illustrating this with an image of a powerchair user wheeling against traffic on a street without curb cuts (1979, p. 153). This technology-enabled movement against the flow of traffic marks anti-assimilationist crip mobility: not an attempt to integrate (as in the liberal approach to disability rights), but rather to use technology as a friction against an inaccessible environment.
collaborative mapping of (in)accessibility, something i know happens more informally among disabled students on many campuses (p15):
Unlike mainstream disability technoscience “crowdsourcing” projects, which invoke a charity model of disability wherein non-disabled people collect data but do not engage in disability culture or politics, emerging projects such as Mapping Access are making participatory access-making the basis of a kind of technoscientific “access intimacy” (Mingus, 2017) through practices such as “critical crowdsourcing” of accessibility data (Hamraie, 2018). […] Collaborative mapping visualizes the evidence of inaccessibility while creating opportunities for collective response. Crip cartographic technoscience thus enables more critical design, and interrogation of the everyday built environment.
access to education
the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities includes the right to inclusive education (Article 24). scholarship in this area is about primary & secondary education, not postsecondary / university education, but a lot of the concepts can be applied
in addition to inclusive education, “universal design for learning” (UDL) might be a helpful keyword but it definitely trends toward the liberal as a whole
“Hidden contradictions and conditionality: conceptualisations of inclusive education in international human rights law” (2013) by Bronagh Byrne (link)
references the importance of identifying barriers as a step in the process of accessible education, which depending on your work may be a nice succinct justification of its necessity (p234):
Inclusion ‘necessitates the removal of the material, ideological, political and economic barriers that legitimate and reproduce in equality and discrimination in the lives of disabled people’ (Barton and Armstrong 2001, 214). According to this view, an identification of barriers within the school’s environment, teaching and learning strategies, and attitudes that prevent the full participation of children with disabilities, will also be required.
argues for a focus on inability of schools to meet students’ needs rather than students’ inability to conform to an ableist environment (for example, p242):
International human rights law has conditionalised the right to inclusive education for children with disabilities by making inclusion contingent upon the extent of individual rather than institutional or structural deficits.
psychological/emotional impact on disabled students
“psycho-emotional disablism” may be a useful search term for you, with the disclaimer that a substantial portion of scholars in feminist disability studies are TERFs / express “gender critical” beliefs / etc. so like i’m listing one paper i came across that looked relevant + two from my grad program’s recommended reading, but i haven’t read these & suggest vetting authors before citing them:
“The psycho-emotionally disabling impact of academic landscapes of exclusion: experiences of a disabled postgraduate in perpetual lockdown” (2023) by Joanne Hunt (link)
Reeve, D (2004). Psycho-emotional dimensions of disability and the social model. In C Barnes & G Mercer (eds), Implementing the social model of disability: theory and research. The Disability Press, Leeds, pp. 83-100. http://donnareeve.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/ReeveChapter2004b.pdf
Reeve, D. (2014) 'Psycho-emotional disablism and internalised oppression', in J. Swain, S. French, C. Barnes and C. Thomas (eds) Disabling Barriers - Enabling Environments, 3rd Edition, London: Sage, pp. 92-98. http://donnareeve.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/ReeveChapter2014a.pdf
Template for emailing professors with accommodations
Dr. [Professor last name],
I hope this email finds you well. My name is [your name], and I’m a student in your [CRN ####] course, [Section 000, optional]. I’ve been thoroughly enjoying your class so far, and am looking forward to the rest of the semester.
In order to make sure there are no barriers to my success in your course, I’ve attached a copy of my accommodations paperwork. Please review it, and let me know if you have any questions. If needed, I’m available to discuss this during your office hours or during a separate time that’s convenient for your schedule. You can also direct questions to [whatever they call your accommodations department staff], [name], at [email].
[what does your professor need to do to accept your accommodations? instructions here]. Thank you in advance for your support.
Wheelchair Access Does Not Mean Shit Without COVID Precautions
I just spent the last 2 hours trying to compose the most polite email possible explaining to my fellow graduate students that requesting everyone suggest wheelchair-accessible locations to hold our IN-PERSON graduate recruitment event next month is nice, but a futile effort if disability access is the goal.
I have spent the last 7 years begging for this email. Begging to not have to fucking ask for a change of venue because I cannot get in the door. I am STILL our department's ONLY wheelchair user. I am one of 2 people in our department who still takes COVID-19 somewhat seriously--the other person is a somewhat, I'm totally serious. So, I'm one of 2 people in our department who still wore a mask on campus last semester after the first month of class. I am the ONLY one to refuse to be in our building unmasked. Just like the wheelchair access, I have repeatedly stressed the need for COVID-19 mitigations. Nobody wants to wear masks, and nobody wants to offer a virtual option, and nobody wants to admit these things to me so they end up ignoring me every time I bring it up. Yet ALMOST EVERYONE wants to comment on my absence from departmental life for the last three years.
I shouldn't be this frustrated. If you saw my earlier blog post today, though, you already know that it was on this issue. The blog post was planned. Discovering the gem of an email from one of our first-year graduate students was not.
I couldn't leave it. I'm the only wheelchair user in our department, and I'm the only one with chronic illness who is openly concerned about COVID. I have no idea about the recruits.
I wanted to be abrasive. I wanted to bring up how infuriating it is that they have the audacity to bring up wheelchair access for the first fucking time this year when our weekly events are still in one of the least accessible rooms on campus. I wanted to tell them how I have been sitting with my fury, watching their group-me posts raving over one COVID superspreader event after another, being nice enough not to lash out and tell them how fucked up that behavior was.
Instead, I thanked them for acknowledging the need for wheelchair access and proceeded to "provide sociological insight" on why COVID-19 precautions are necessary for disability access. Then I contextualized things in terms of my class privilege compared to other disabled people and other graduate students. And I offered to help them make the events COVID-safe.
My response to the situation is a perfect example of the exhausting dynamic I was writing about earlier. We are still fighting for disability access that we started pre-COVID, and we can't even celebrate those wins because they are paired with the knowledge that events remain more inaccessible to disabled people than they were prior to the pandemic. It means sitting at the bottom of the stairs with our wheels while the non-disableds rave about "progress" and other bullshit like that.
Non-disabled progress means putting in a ramp, but missing the part where that ramp is attached to a building on top of a mountain, and the only way up the mountain is a large staircase. Your ramp does not mean much if we cannot get to the flat ground because it is elevated and only accessible by stairs.
Your ramp does not mean shit if you plan to give us COVID.
I am grinding my teeth over this class that was supposedly designed to be incredibly accessible, featuring:
no laptops, handwritten notes required
no lecture slides with text
100% oral instruction
no class recordings/transcripts
class homepage is not on the website all my other classes are on
Dropbox files that do not allow cutting and pasting!
office hours on the second floor of a ridiculously inaccessible building
not being available for the office hours listed on the syllabus
no writing assignments, 100% multiple choice exams
loud music and flashing videos at 9:30am
The most frustrating thing is that like 90% of these aren't outlined as access issues by our DSS department, and most of the students in the class seem to love how creative the class design is, so I feel like an asshole talking to my TA about any of this. Supposedly she's taught like this for years and hasn't had any major complaints.
It just gets better as we're approaching our midterms, good luck to everyone struggling with classes rn <3
