#disabled student

[puffyrice]

Gearing up for September already 😫

I have a dosage calc exam before school starts, and I can’t go to clinical if I don’t pass it (we can only get 1 question wrong). I got this book from Level Up RN to practice. Also learning some basic pharmacology to give me a head start for that.

Side note: I’m more active on Instagram now! I’m making content about chronic illness and being a disabled student. @thelupusnurse

[chronically-chaotic-cryptid]

If you're wondering how disability staff in schools get trained about physical disability, they don't.

I'm the first wheelchair user ever in my school. The school is pulling rules out of their ass and consistently have no clue on what the guidelines are from the department. One of the disability coordinators at my school could not fathom why a red emergency cord should touch the ground (also didn't know what it was), the two of them keep acting like they're allowed to give me medical 'advice' encouraging me not to use my wheelchair (even after I've clearly shut them down and stated I'm more than aware about the effects of deconditioning) and the current SNA in my school seemingly thinks and acts like I cannot simply be anything else then a lovely little cripple with the autonomy of a five year old and the personality of a puppy in unfortunate circumstances.

All these people are specifically there to help disabled students. But seemingly their training and knowledge stops once a wheelchair user comes into the picture.

[feminist-furby-freak]

Academia is the pinnacle of performative activism. All my profs (who are in the gender studies department fyi) have us read all this disability theory and have sections in their syllabi about accessibility and ableism in academic spaces. But when I’m like hi I’m severely disabled can I get an extension/an additional excused absence/other reasonable accommodation they’re like no welcome to the real world sweaty where there aren’t handouts.

[thecultofcupid]

Elevators should be in working order and available for use. Period.

I am a Studio Art major meaning most of my work and supplies are in the campus art building. None of my classes are on the first floor, meaning that as a disabled student, I have to have full-time access to the elevator to both get to class and do work outside of class. So why is it that I find myself stuck on the first floor for the second day in a row with an elevator that won't respond with not even a notice saying it is/would be out of order and no clue when I'll be able to use it again?

Accessibility should be the standard. Not just an afterthought.

[lupusbaby]

So I was venting on Reddit about how difficult/maybe impossible it will be for me to do the weekly 9-hour clinical for nursing school I have this coming semester. They declined my request to split it into 2 half days. I’ll be able to use my cane at least.

A bunch of people basically said I will never be able to do it, I’ll be a burden to the other nurses on my team, and one even said I would endanger my patients because my brain would be distracted by my pain.

Like..I get it. I guess they’re right. But I feel like shit about it. I want to be a nurse so badly and I’m already top of my class in all the nursing courses I’ve taken. I love it so much so far even though it takes so much out of me with my health issues.

Kinda hoping the tumblr chronic illness community is a little nicer 🥴

[howtobeapersonwithfibro]

However bad you think accessibility on college campuses is, it's worse.

Looked around today and basically wanted to give up just trying to figure out where to enter this one building and how the hell I am supposed to even park close when there are only special lots.

It makes me want to give up just because of that. I shouldn't have to panic about just getting to and from my classes.

We deserve better.

[unforgivablyshy]

Nov. 17th

Sunday study session! Finals are in full swing in my research classes. I’m doing another project on Myalgic Encephalomyelitis this semester.

Tea of the day is a creamed earl gray and my study music is Glass Animals: Zaba (deluxe)

[shittycollagen]

every day I understand more and more why so many disabled students don’t finish university

[ash-the-fluffy-cat]

My band teacher is probably the teacher who has spent the most time making materials accessible for me out of all my teachers in my life. It took me until I was in high school to end up with a teacher who seems to care that much. I am so glad I ended up in a school that actually has a good level of support and funding for disabled kids, that’s what happens when there’s only like two high schools in the division, compared to in the city where there’s like four or five.

[chronicsymptomsyndrome]

Big celebratory shoutout to disabled/mentally/chronically ill school dropouts. You’re brilliant. You’re a hero. Don’t be ashamed. In fact, be proud. Be proud that you were…

…perceptive enough to see the situation for what it was…

…smart enough to know what you needed to do…

…strong enough to defy expectations…

…brave enough to forage your own path…

…and don’t let anyone convince you that their degree makes them smarter than you. or better than you. or more successful than you. or harder working than you. or more deserving than you. All it means is that they had better support systems. better resources. adequate accommodations. All it means is that you both had goals and plans and dreams, but the world let you down while it was seeing them though. All it means is that our society is deeply lacking both systemic and systematic equitability. And that is something to be angry or upset about, absolutely, but not ashamed of.

[puffyrice]

9/7/24 - Morning vs night in my new fav study spot 💕

I’m trying to get caught up on all my work this weekend. I finished a bunch of pharmacology templates, and now I have a few hours of ATI modules to complete. I also went to the gym and did my aqua therapy exercises this morning.

🎧 ~ Lotion - Deftones

[chronically-chaotic-cryptid]

Here's a good example of why it's always really important to ask a disabled person before you start helping them:

Someone nearly yanked my shoulder out if its socket because they grabbed the door and opened it further as I was going through it. I get you were trying to help, but I couldn't see you, and therefore didn't have the chance to take my hand off the door, so my entire arm went with it.

Could this have turned out worse? Yes. Which is exactly why I'm talking about it.

[worms-in-my-brain]

Hey if there are any disabled and/or mentally ill people out there who are in their first year of college or university and who are struggling. You got this. Shits really hard when you have extra stuff on your plate. And y’know what, it might not work out! But that’s okay. It’s not for everybody, and you don’t have to do it to have worth. You don’t have to do anything to have worth as a person. You can lie in your bed all day and you still deserve to be here and you still deserve to have people who love you.

I’m in my third year now and I’m coping a lot better than I was before. But sometimes I’m just sitting there and I remember how fucking hard it was. Truly if anybody needs to or wants to talk, feel free to send me a DM.

[lupusbaby]

Well folks, I think I may have to leave school. I’ve been fighting so hard, but my lupus has flared up badly now and is active on my bloodwork. My symptoms are much more severe, so I’ve been feeling like I have the flu part/all of the day for nearly 2 weeks now.

I’m sitting in the car waiting for PT feeling so ill and painful. It feels like when you have a fever and everything hurts and your skin burns.

I’ve been pushing myself for 2+ semesters now to accomplish this, and I just don’t think I can do it anymore. It’s not good for me. I have no idea what I’ll do if I end up leaving, because I’ll have to do something.

My parents are going to think I “let my illness win” or whatever, but I just don’t think I can tolerate feeling like this for so long. I need rest and I need to live a lot more slowly.

It’s a shame because I’m 26 with no college degree or real accomplishments but my life cannot just be suffering. Even if it’s only for another 2 years I just don’t think I can do it without wanting to stop living. I’m already beginning to feel like that.

I don’t know how to do this without feeling like a massive failure or like I gave up or lost. I don’t know if I’m going through with it yet but that’s what my gut is telling me needs to happen.

[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

[the-fictive-haven]

OCD and ADHD is such a funny (/sar) combination when it comes to college work.

Like. For the whole week the assignments pile up and linger in the back of my mind, I stress and stress about it and lose more and more motivation because of it until I fall into a depression, and then all of a sudden the day everything's due I snap into hyper-focus mode and knock all of it out at once on a lousy night's sleep and two coffees and realize it wasn't actually that bad at all as I turn everything in at like 11:55pm