#disabled academic

[enbycrip]

Honestly, it’s been a pretty exhausting Pride Month.

I’ve had to deal with a lot of grief with how much disability, chronic illness and neurodivergence means that so much of Pride is just inaccessible to me and most of the community just isn’t bothered about that fact.

I’m not closeted to my parents but there’s this gulf where I don’t know how to even start discussing gender with them in a way that I can remotely convey how important it is to me to be nonbinary and what it really even *means*.

The fact that a UK general election is coming up and both of the “main” parties are vying with each other on how much they can oppress trans folk.

I’ve completed my Masters, which I’m really proud of myself for managing and proud of the research into disabled history I’ve produced, at a university which is actively empowering transphobes through the GCRN. And everything we’re doing to fight that is incredibly energy-sucking and mostly just gets actively ignored.

I’m so damn tired.

[chaotic-archaeologist]

Update on this future dirtling spoonie's first semester. SoI just did my first final. It was English Somehow took a 2-3 paragraph assignment and ended up writing 4 pages😅🤦🏻‍♀️1 final down 3 to go plus finish up the last page of a 6 page research paper (technically page 5, but I ran out of motivation for that page and skipped ahead and did page 6.) Due tonight

Hey, congratulations! The end of the semester is a busy and stressful time, but I hope you're taking the opportunity to be really proud of yourself. You did this. I know you were nervous, and I'm sure there were moments when it was hard—this is an incredible achievement, and you should give yourself credit for that.

Cheers, -Reid

[audhd-student]

War and Peace and the urge to murder the next person to tell me to meditate

[coolwyou]

041623 | long overdue updates!

it has been quite a while since i last updated. i had a horrible first semester of grad school, and spent this semester really trying to fix that! i wen through the medical withdrawal process and managed to do well so far. one class is a pass/fail class which helps a lot, and the other one is an introductory class so it's not as rigorous. other than that, school is pretty steady now! i'm taking the summer off to hopefully work or do an internship for a little bit (:

i am set to take a normal course load next semester, which i hope i can keep up with. i'm going to keep in touch as often as i can and hopefully save up enough to get all my appointments done and get adequate paperwork for some disability accommodations next semester. thankfully, one class is synchronous online, and another class is only meeting in-person every other week! it really helps me to not have to leave the house every week and just be comfortable at home.

anyway, i'm updating my theme (the struggle to find a cute and functioning one) and about section a bit! the biggest edits were adding links to show the planner i am using for 2023 and that i started bullet journaling! i'm not too great at it, and it's really just a book of "trackers" (i track things like video game daily logins, medical stuff, and my mood) but i hope maybe next year i can add a sort of scrapbook component to it! also, i made a cute things side blog! :D

as for my personal updates, i'll put those under the cut!

i have been doing okay! health-wise, i am doing quite badly, and upgraded from a cane to a walker (everyone thinks it's unfortunately comedic, because for years i called myself a little old lady, and now i really resemble one!). i also got a platinum pass to seaworld because it is a really happy place for me lately (love to go through it at my own pace, watch some shows, eat some park food, and just in general sit around it lol).

i'm seeing two of my partners soon! they're coming to visit and we're going to have a lot of fun i hope! i have an awful complex about living where i do, so i'm trying very very hard to make their stay nice. it's hopefully going to help me power through finals and inspire me to save up to visit them in the summer/early autumn too.

some random thoughts to end this post: i'm loving two songs a lot right now, nmixx's love me like this and ive's i am. they're both different overall vibes but they are both so fun to me! i also have been playing a lot of virtual jigsaw puzzles and just finished two 1000+ piece ones, and starting a new one. i am really loving sticker-by-number books too! i'm currently doing a dog one and it's so cute!!

[disast3rtransp0rt]

The things about academia you should wholeheartedly criticize:

Ableism

Ageism

Racism/Ethnocentrism

Homo- and transphobia

Elitism within administration

Cost and accessibility

Support of AI in certain circles

Pay-to-use databases where academic papers are stored/sold by institutions

General bastardry

What you should definitely NOT criticize about academia:

The tireless work of academics to provide whatever information possible and improve the world's general understanding of itself.

Their pressure on the system to make that info accessible to the public.

you can discuss the problems within academia literally forever and you probably should but “historians are trying to keep information from you” is always going to be an anti-intellectual, reactionary opinion, sorry, literally no way around that

[demigods-posts]

percy doing better than annabeth in college is one my favorite developments in the rrverse. if we reflect on percy and annabeth's academic upbringing. annabeth living at camp allowed her to receive accommodations for her adhd and dyslexia and surround herself with like-minded campers who had the same limitations. whereas percy was ridiculed, belittled, and routinely humiliated because of his adhd and dyslexia. even more so, percy's friends and family leave him out of the loop on so many important issue (no chb orientation film, no information about the great prophecy) which perpetuates his subpar confidence and self-esteem in his skills as a student and a demigod. but going to college at NRU changes his mindset because he receives the accommodations he should have gotten years ago and fucking thrives to the point of getting higher grades than annabeth — a person he deems way smarter and more prepared than him in every way. the most important thing percy is learning now is that a supportive environment makes all the difference, and he is more capable than he initially thought.

[acespeon]

I love both Stan twins but fandom really takes the Filbrick way of thinking wrt how smart Stanley is

[aro-culture-is]

aro culture is celebrating, uplifting the voices of, and practicing advocacy with the disabled people in our lives this disability pride month.

[yourdailyqueer]

Barbara Kannapell (deceased)

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Lesbian

DOB: 14 September 1937  

RIP: 11 August 2021

Ethnicity: White - American

Occupation: Activist, sociolinguist, academic

Note 1: First to promote bilingualism as an educational philosophy for the education of deaf students and helped legitimize American Sign Language. First deaf person at Georgetown University to earn a PhD. in sociolinguistics. So much more.

Note 2: Was deaf

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

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==

This might be funny if it wasn't pipelining pure toxic excrement into the waters of our knowledge-making institutions.

It's all fake. But now it's cited and treated as legitimate when it still isn't and never was. This is a form of corruption and fraud.

[enbycrip]

I’VE PASSED MY MASTER’S DEGREE! 🌈

[autistic-duck]

(Very long post, sorry.)

I had an experience with a college professor last semester that really got me thinking about academics and ableism, specifically in college writing.

A few months ago, my class was having an open discussion, and I brought up an opinion that had been on my mind for a while.

I basically said, "There's a gap between college-level writing and the average person's reading level that we need to fill. Nobody should need to look up words every three seconds to understand a study that could affect their life, so we either need more people to rewrite these studies for the general public to understand, or these studies, in general, should be published with language that isn't so complicated."

My professor responded by saying something like, "Sure, that's a good goal. However, wouldn't a better goal be to raise the average person's reading level so that everyone can understand college-level writing?"

I (in my frantic and confused way) tried to bring up the fact that there are people born at a disadvantage in life. In fact, getting everyone to a perfect college reading level isn't a realistic goal. It certainly isn't for me, and I don't want it to have to be for other people. In fact, the professor who told me this also struggled to understand the chapters we were assigned to read in that class.

Really, it all comes down to this: college-level language is inaccessible.

Even more importantly, many people will never be able to understand most of the huge words thrown around in college writing.

At school, I am constantly told my writing style is "simple" and "easy to understand." This is something my classmates have told me isn't "bad" but just "different." However, I'm still insecure whenever someone mentions it because it is always pointed out. I use a smaller vocabulary, they seem to say, but don't worry. It's just a preferred writing style, they reassure me. They think the simple language is a choice I could stop at any time.

Well, what if it isn't just a "style"? What if I struggle to expand my vocabulary? Learning one new word takes me ages because I need to see it in all kinds of contexts. Even then, oftentimes "context clues" are no help, and I completely misinterpret the meaning of a word for years because it seems like every other native English speaker knew what it meant without needing to say it. A lot of the time I'll read the definition of a new word and instantly forget it after finishing the sentence it was in.

So yeah, I'll say it with pride: Simple words are powerful. Simple words are beautiful. And most importantly, simple words are not inferior in any way to words like "quintessential" or "expedient." (I have no idea what either of those words mean even though I've looked them up plenty of times and used them accurately in essays before.)

Simplicity is why I like shows meant for all ages better than shows meant only for adults. Because in shows that are written with children in mind, there aren't confusing messages you have to spend energy untangling. There aren't unnecessary analogies or feelings that are "implied" but never said. The characters' facial expressions and emotions are easy to read and the moments where I am confused are rare.

Now, this is all coming from an autistic person with low support needs. My reading comprehension score is considered slightly above average, and so is my problem-solving abilities which means I am lucky and I can understand a lot of what I read in college. The main point of this little "essay" was to point out a common conversation I despise hearing in college, the one about simple language and its implied inferiority.

Because guess what? Language is not accessible to everybody. Many of us, even those with high reading comprehension, struggle.

Our goal should never be to make everyone capable of reading college-level books and studies. That is asking for those who need accommodations to accommodate themselves, something I'm sure other disabled people are tired of having to do. Instead, the goal should be making college language more accessible, making knowledge accessible. After all, the reader is only a fragment of the conversation. The writer is the majority of it.

TLDR; Everyone deserves access to language and knowledge that makes sense, and bigger words never mean they are better.

[campgender]

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)

Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 5(1), pp1-34.

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:

“user-initiated design” (Hendren & Lynch, cited p9)

“access as friction” (p10):

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

[mouchee23gamma]

USA students with disabilities and disorders: LISTEN UP!

In the USA, a huge issue has gone unnoticed by our government, despite the cries of my people. Since the creation and implementation of IEPs and 504s for students with disorders and disabilities in school systems, this problem has plagued school systems on a national scale.

‘What is this problem?’ Is what you may ask. Well, I shall tell you from my perspective (and other students) as a female who has autism, ADHD, and GAD.

The problem is that school systems are allowing staff to discriminate and ignore students with IEPs and 504s. When I was in 9th grade, I had an English teacher who wouldn’t follow my IEP, which is illegal to do. Even with my case manager and parents communicating to him that he had to follow my IEP, he wouldn’t listen and lied about his actions. My case manager reported him to the higher ups of the school and her supervisor, but they didn’t even reach out to him, nor did they ever get back to us.

I was warned by many students with IEPs about this English teacher, as they also experienced the same exact situation where he refused to follow their IEPs. He was (and likely still is) the only option for 9th grade English, besides the English class for those who may have things like dyslexia or those who struggle with English in general.

I could’ve taken him to court, unfortunately though, I only found that out after I moved schools.

The next year, in my new school, my new case manager ignored my concerns and refused to talk about making a few changes to my IEP. She brushed me off by saying that I would be fine.

I wasn’t fine.

I ended up switching to online school, where I would be at home, yet still receiving the proper education through online meetings and programs.

Those of us who are students with IEPs and disabilities or disorders, especially under the age of 18, are oppressed and our cries for help are ignored.

We are SUFFERING. IEPs are NOT a privilege, they are a NECESSITY for those of us who have it!

My best friend who also has an IEP keeps me updated on the happenings of the school I went to (the one with the English teacher mentioned in the first paragraph) about how those of us in special education or/and have IEPs are being treated.

I have researched and read of so many incidents and situations like mine.

There is a HORRIFYING amount of mistreatment of my community, my people, with disabilities, disorders, and IEPs among schools across the nation.

How could schools claim to treat everyone fairly and that consequences for discrimination will ensue, when the teachers are the ones who discriminate more than most of the students and get away with it?

We need to change, and we need to revolt against schools who let staff get away with discrimination of those of us with disabilities, disorders, and IEPs!

WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED! WE WILL FIGHT FOR OUR RIGHT TO EDUCATION!

To my dear readers, please share this post across social media platforms to spread the support we so desperately need. Please share this among family and friends, coworkers, and even teachers and school staff.

[chaotic-archaeologist]

First day went great, classroom straightened out. I'm taking cultural anthropology and political science this semester :) I took sociology last semester it's all so fascinating. The intricate process through time and how we've come about...yet humans are still humans everything has changed yet nothing has...sorry did not mean to ramble, tired because 2 of my books are e-books and I get headaches. But I had a question any suggestion on how to take good notes? I can't physically write for long cause hard to hold pen, but I remember better by writing it down

I'm like you in the sense that I remember things much better when I take handwritten notes, and my hand cramps up very quickly. I don't know if this will work for you, but switching to a fountain pen really helped me because you have to apply virtually no pressure to get the pen to write. There might also be some adaptive grips that might be helpful for you?

You can get a great basic pen, a Pilot Metropolitan for about $20 with ink refills for $5, or a package of 12 single use ones for $23 (they're over 40% off right now).

If you can afford some sort of tablet, taking notes on that might help you not strain your hand. I've seen a lot of left-handed students preferring to take notes on a tablet because the writing doesn't get smeared that way.

Check in with your school's disability service office and ask if they have any resources they can connect you with. They might have something you can use too!

Cheers, -Reid

[libraryposting]

Update since i went to therapy today , i Got a 97/100 on the academic anxiety test. 62/100 for generalized anxiety, 46 for depression, and 35 i believe for social anxiety. Its getting epic in here my disorder soup is getting really awesome. On another hand, the dining hall has FRIED CHICKEN AND MACNCHEESE TODAY !!!!!!!!! AND I visited chicagoan brad about missing three weeks of class and he was so nice i almost teared up. He said it made his day that i stopped by. Yes it has been a great day!

I’m still very behind on everything and may get straight Bs this semester. But honestly, I think that is survivable. Considering this is senior grad level afuckingccounting. I’ll be lucky to graduate at the same time as everyone else, much less get As!