PsychologicalDisabilityinAcademiaby-Db579qCUWUm3wl9y4QOnBw

/* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 5 4; mso-fontcharset:1; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:0 0 0 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-styleqformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;} h1 {mso-style-priority:9; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-styleqformat:yes; mso-style-parent:"Normal \(Web\)"; mso-style-link:"Heading Char"; mso-stylenext:Normal; mso-margin-top-alt:auto; margin-right:0in; mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto; margin-left:0in; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; mso-outline-level:1; font-size:20.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; msofont-kerning:0pt; font-weight:bold;} p {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-margin-topalt:auto; margin-right:0in; mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto; margin-left:0in; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;} p.msonormal0, li.msonormal0, div.msonormal0 {mso-stylename:msonormal; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-margin-top-alt:auto; margin-right:0in; mso-margin-bottomalt:auto; margin-left:0in; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;} span.Heading1Char {mso-style-name:"Heading Char"; mso-style-priority:9; mso-style-unhide:no; msostyle-locked:yes; mso-style-link:"Heading 1"; mso-ansi-font-size:20.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:20.0pt; fontfamily:"Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-themefont:minor-fareast; font-weight:bold;} MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-defaultprops:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; msopaper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} > Psychological Disability in Academia by Margaret Price [silence] JERRY KNIGHTON: Good afternoon Can everyone hear me OK? My name is Jerry Knighton I'm the director of the Office of Access Equity, and it's my pleasure to open this event for this evening [no audio] Can you hear me now? OK, all right, good This is our second annual NDEAM event, which is designed to recognize the many contributions of individuals with disabilities and the contributions that they make on our campus and in the world For those of you who don't know, NDEAM stands for the National Disability Employment Awareness Month And so we're proud to offer this as an opportunity to recognize the contributions of those that are represented here on our campus and throughout the world On your way in, we hope that you had an opportunity to view our photo exhibit of the 2016-2017 Clemson Life students out in the atrium We want to thank Susan Manning and Project Exposure for bringing this display If you missed it on your way in, we want you to certainly take an opportunity to see it before you leave Please take note that this presentation will be streamed live at tv.clemson.edu, and the recording of the presentation will be made available at Clemson Online's blog under the heading NDEAM N-D-E-A-M-Event and Maximizing Video Accessibility I want to take this time to recognize our sponsors, who include the Office of Inclusion and Equity, the office of Access and Equity, the departments of Communication, English, Parking and Transportation Services, Women's Leadership, and Student Accessibility Services We want to thank them because without their support, this event would not be possible And I would also be remiss if I didn't take the time to recognize the person whose leadership is responsible for this event, so please join me in recognizing Priscilla Harrison and everyone who assisted her in planning this event Priscilla is the university's ADA coordinator in the Office of Access and Equity and chair of the President's Accessibility Commission So let's give her a round of applause [APPLAUSE] Now for the reason that we are here Our presentation today will be given by Dr Margaret Price Her topic is "Psychological Disabilities in Academia," which addresses the experience of being psychologically disabled on a university campus Dr Price is an Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University, where she specializes in Disability Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition She is a highly esteemed writer And one of her most noted books is Mad at School Rhetorics of Mental Disability in Academic Life This work won the Outstanding Book Award from the Conference on College, Composition, and Communication And Dr Price holds a PhD in Rhetoric and Communication from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, a Master's of Fine Arts in Fiction Writing from the University of Michigan, and a BA from Amherst College So please join me in welcoming to our campus Dr Margaret Price, Dr Price [APPLAUSE] MARGARET PRICE: Good afternoon Thank you so much for having me here today And I want to particularly thank Priscilla, the Office of Access and Equity, the generous sponsors, and everyone who's worked to make this event possible and who's also worked to publicize National Disability Employment Awareness Month, which is a very important cause and something that I've had the pleasure to participate in for several years now at different schools and government offices I also want to note that I am coming from The Ohio State University But I'm also very proud to say that my spouse is a graduate of Clemson Engineering [APPLAUSE] I'll let her know that you applauded And also I'm told has her name on a brick somewhere around here So if anyone sees the brick for Johnna Keller, please tell me because I want to take a picture of it Today I'm going to be talking about my own experiences as a disabled faculty member, and I'm also going to be sharing some of the research that I've conducted over the last several years on disabled faculty, staff, and students My goal today is to explore what we really mean when we talk about inclusively for disability in higher education and how we might enact that inclusively Before I get to those stories and the research, though, I want to take care of a few introductory details First I'll describe the image on the cover side It shows a green sign that's poking up in front of a bank of evergreen shrubbery On the sign is a stick figure in a wheelchair This is the redesigned accessibility icon that was developed by Brian Glenney and Sara Hendren In it, the figure leans forward slightly and has one arm poised over the wheelchair's wheel Below the icon is the white-stenciled word "entrance," and that's accompanied by an arrow pointing to the right and slightly up As is often the case with such signs, this sign is meant to indicate that the accessible entrance is somewhere else, not here Next I want to check and about how we are accessing this space together We're in a medium-size auditorium, definitely needs more orange [LAUGHTER] The floor is raked, with steps leading down to the flat part where I'm standing at the bottom There's a very large screen where I'll be projecting words and images I will describe all the images It looks like the lights may be fluorescent or maybe LEDs It's hard to tell And it looks as though we don't really have exterior windows, but there's some nice, natural light coming in through the partially shaded doors In the interest of making this space as accessible as we can, I want to invite everyone who's here for the duration of this event to please use this space in whatever way is most comfortable for you One of my particular areas of interest is the ways that we gather in academe And like most academic spaces, this one is built probably more for efficiency than for comfort So I want to offer you a visual example of the way that one might access an academic space On the screen now is an image of me at a conference a couple of years ago at George Washington University This was a Disability Studies conference, and therefore I felt completely free at this conference to access the space in a way that I needed to At that moment, when the photo was taken, I was lying on my back on the carpeted floor with my arms outstretched and my feet propped up on a suitcase The suitcase is lavender It's not actually my suitcase I think it's [INAUDIBLE] Parked next to me is a yellow Segway scooter, as well as a blue chair with a jacket on it You might imagine, looking at this picture, that I'm sleeping But, in fact, I'm paying close attention to the person who's presenting Due to my own physical fatigue and joint pain, that position was, at that particular moment, the best way for me to stay mentally engaged and to pay attention to the speakers Now, unfortunately, we're not usually invited explicitly to assume comfortable positions while doing academic work, either literally or figuratively So I want to invite all of us to use this space, or maybe, if that doesn't feel comfortable or possible right now, to just imagine using this space in a way that's most comfortable and accessible for you You might wish to sit on the floor or even lie on the floor rather than remaining in a chair You might want to stand up, move around, stretch, or go out and come back in You may wish to engage in activities, such as stimming, typing, knitting, or drawing You might wish to move around in order to take care of a person near you, such as a loved one All of these forms of engagement are welcome And here's the last bit of housekeeping business before I get into the main part of the talk I want to offer a quick note on vocabulary In the book "Mad at School," I use the term "mental disability" as an umbrella term to mark a coalition space between various conditions, including mental illnesses, cognitive disabilities, and intellectual disabilities, as well as any mental condition that might accompany what we ordinarily think of as a physical disability or an illness, for example, brain fog Now, to be clear, I don't mean that all those conditions are the same thing I'm not saying, oh, let's conflate these because they're identical Rather I'm saying that we need an umbrella term because I think there is a unified experience that all these disabilities involve That unified experience is that these disabilities tend to be imagined as located in the mind The mind, in Western culture, is imagined to be the seat of rationality, intelligence, and agency Indeed, it's assumed to be the location where the value of the person themselves resides This bias has persisted even within disability culture A famous example actually comes from the earliest days of disability activism There was a group in Berkeley called the Rolling Quads, led by Ed Roberts And one of their more well-known slogans The Rolling Quads were a group of quadriplegic people One of their more famous slogans was that they were paralyzed from the neck down not the neck up So this slogan, which you still hear sometimes, even today, is emblematic of the ways that imagining a disability as being intimately connected to or located in the mind seems to have particular effects on the ways that we regard that disability And this is why I ended up with the umbrella term mental disability Again, not because I think that all disabilities that relate to the mind or the brain are the same thing, but rather they seem to have some of the same effects in terms of the way we think about them, the way we talk about them, and sometimes the ways in which discrimination plays out in response to them And that brings me to the first thing that I want to talk about today, which is the issue of inclusion So as we probably all know at this point, it would be hard to find a word of more interest on college campuses today than inclusion possibly diversity, maybe budget cuts On the screen right now is a headline from The New York Times Education Life supplement The image shows the top half of a newspaper page with the headline reading, "Diversity is One Thing, Inclusion Another." The photo accompanying the article appears to be taken from the point of view of someone lecturing from a podium Open in front of the viewer is a laptop And beyond, somewhat blurred, is an auditorium filled with students The article refers to protests that were taking place at the University of Missouri Those protests were against an escalating series at the school of racist attacks This series of events led eventually to the resignation of the University of Missouri's president Now what I'm emphasizing in this case is that the students were not actually protesting the racist attacks themselves They were protesting the weak response by the university's administration in its attempts to address the problem That response had included, sort of notoriously now, plans for mandatory, quote unquote, "diversity training." The protesting students argued, in that case, that the diversity training by itself meant very little, since those trainings, however well meant, often don't much to actually change the culture of an institution Even before the current politically-fraught moment that we're living in right now, there's been a great deal of work on what it means to include people And some of that work talks about what it means to include people, specifically in academic life Much of that work has focused on students, but some of it looks at the experiences of staff and faculty as well For example, Sara Ahmed's book, On Being Included a Study of Racism and Diversity in Higher Education, says this about inclusion, "to be welcomed is to be positioned as the one who is not at home." When I first read this I read Ahmed's book a couple of years ago I was really struck by it, because, at the time, I was working on something that was intended to help university administrators be more welcoming to faculty and staff with mental disability And the word "welcome" was all over the document I was writing And reading Ahmed's book really made me rethink what does it mean to welcome? Who's already home doing the welcoming, and who is outside the door presumably needing to be welcomed in? I also want to pause for a moment and say to the tech person it sounds from where I am that the mic just got super echoey Is that happening for anyone else? Yeah The mic has gotten really echoey and tinny Did you change the recording level? Is it better now? All right, I'm going to rely on the people in the back row I'm still hearing like a tinny zing I'll keep talking How are things going now? Sounding a little better? OK So to return to Ahmed's point, being welcomed to a university space is supposed to be a generous gesture, but it also positions the welcomee in a particular place A philosopher of disability from the University of Toronto, Tanya Titchkosky, makes a similar point Her study, which is called "A Question of Access," includes observations of her own university, including several instances in which people are discussing things like ramps, doorways, and accessible bathrooms Titchkosky, who was a part of many of these conversations, listened in and thought about what she was hearing and drew some conclusions from what she heard during the conversations In particular, she was interested in the justifications that people offered for why spaces might not be accessible I'm now going to read a quote from Titchkosky "Wheelchair users are depicted as never showing up, as an expense Disability, in this instance, can be characterized as the abject underside of legitimated existence, included as an excludable type by signifying it as an always absent presence," end quote So Ahmed and Titchkosky are making similar points about what happens when we try to cause inclusion to happen Regardless of how well-meant our efforts might be, the very fact that those gestures of inclusion are being made means that the distinction between those in and those out is strengthened Moreover, as the efforts to include and the justifications for why we don't include at specific times play out, certain bodies end up being consistently marked, as what Titchkosky calls, "the excludable type." So to illustrate what I mean here, I'm going to return to the image that was on the cover side But this time I'll give it a little bit more context First, here's the green and white sign itself, with the wheelchair logo, the word "entrance," and the arrow pointing to the right and upward This slightly more pulled-back perspective than the one that you saw on the cover side shows that the sign is not just posted in front of, but is actually sort of nestled among, layers of shrubbery This sign delivers a familiar message to wheelchair users and others who cannot use stairs The accessible entrance is somewhere else, probably around back, and quite likely at the other end of a winding maze of pathways and passageways Interestingly, often accessible entrances can be reached only by inaccessible pathways, for example, woodchips, cobblestones, or areas without signage Sometimes they require the use of multiple elevators In fact, just last week I was visiting a different school I was trying to get to the speaking venue with my friend who uses a wheelchair And we discovered that we had to enter the building, take one elevator down, get off that elevator, go to a different elevator, and take elevator number two up in order to get to the second floor of the building Now, in this case, the sign is pointing toward the accessible entrance is situated in a somewhat extraordinary context The next slide shows the front entrance of the building, where the sign is posted This image is of the full building entrance The building, a college library, is enormous and very grand It has stained-glass windows, elaborate towers and turrets, large wooden doors, and a flight of stone steps leading up to the front doors It's sort of Harry Potter looking For scale, I deliberately took the picture when a student was walking up the stairs The student appears tiny in comparison to the imposing building From this point of view, the accessible entrance sign is nearly impossible to make out I circled it in white It's at the lower right-hand corner of the frame Now, from this perspective, it becomes clear that the sign is really quite a long distance from the front entrance And its small size and position, kind of snuggled within the shrubs, indicate that it would be pretty hard to notice except by accident, which is actually how I happened to notice it This sign and it's position raises the question of who it is for This is a question that both Ahmed and Titchkosky have raised with respect to inclusively And, of course, since I'm a rhetorician, it's a question that I am always very interested in, who's the audience? Who is this for? If something circulates, how is it circulating, and who is it supposed to be reaching? So we might imagine, is the audience for this sign a person using a wheelchair or a cane, a person who might approach this library, eager to get inside and start doing their work? Or perhaps is the real audience the person who insisted that the sign be built in the first place, maybe a campus activist, maybe a member of the school's legal team? Is this a sign, perhaps, for those of us who could walk up the stairs so that we don't have to think uncomfortably about those whom the stairs are excluding? What work is this sign doing in the world? Now, in showing you this example, I want to add my intention is not to make fun of the school where the sign appears It's actually a school that has made significant efforts toward accessibility That, in fact, is exactly my point Even when best efforts are made, none of us is exempt from the failure of inclusivity None of us is fully able to make the imaginative leap beyond what Titchkosky calls "the unimagined type." I'm now going to tell you a little story about when I arrived at my current job, where I started quite recently in January 2016 I'm a disabled faculty member And despite the fact that access in higher education is my area of study, I struggled terribly when I started a new job at Ohio State about two years ago Although I talked about being disabled during the hiring process and immediately upon arriving on campus, I never received information about how I might find accommodations or otherwise address any access problems that I might encounter Now the atmosphere wasn't at all unwelcoming or hostile In fact, it was very warm, very friendly I felt great My colleagues were very collegial And I was told over and over again, just let us know if you need anything I felt genuinely deeply welcomed, but also specifically deeply unclear on whether accommodations were available, how I could find out about them, or, most significantly, whether I even qualified Within a couple of months in my new job, I found myself unable to keep up with the onslaught of physical and mental tasks that were required to move successfully into my new position And this is the part that still amazes me I could not figure out what to about it I literally held in my hand research, conducted by me, showing that disabled faculty often don't know where to go to seek accommodations, often fear asking for accommodations because of the risk of reprisal And, at least according to the over 300 faculty who I have personally surveyed or interviewed, they usually try to handle their accommodations themselves rather than seeking institutional support This amazes me It amazes me that I felt myself so unable to act because I had pretty much every advantage of knowledge and support at my disposal Not only did I have my own research clearly demonstrating the barriers I faced and how I might circumvent them, but I also was at a school with an extremely supportive and knowledgeable ADA Coordinator, Scott Lissner And yet when I finally found my way to Scott's office, it was not to talk about my own accommodations, rather we were having a meeting about a professional project that we were undertaking together And he happened to start the meeting, as you do, by saying, how are things going? I started to tell him how things were going And to my surprise, I broke down crying I told him that I had been hospitalized just a few weeks before No one could figure out what was wrong with me, but my blood pressure had been found to be over 300 It was out of control I was just about at the end of my rope, and I did not know how I was going to continue doing my job Scott is a very kind and skillful ADA coordinator And by sheer luck at that moment, I was in the right place to discuss the barriers I was facing, because the ADA coordinator at Ohio State is, in fact, the person who handles faculty accommodations That actually varies from school to school I'll also pause in my story to mention that some universities handle employee accommodations by asking the employees to go to their own supervisors, which obviously is a very problematic construct And, in some cases, disabled employees must also plead for funding for their accommodations out of their own departmental budgets So neither of these situations is the case at OSU, thankfully And during that meeting, during which, needless to say, we did not talk about the project we were going to work on, Scott instead spent about an hour figuring out what was going on with me, helping me figure out what accommodations I needed, and began putting those accommodations in place right then and there So what's most striking to me about this story is that a person could hardly have been better resourced or more knowledgeable about disabled faculty in higher education than I was I was, at that point, probably literally one of a handful of national experts on the topic Moreover, I'm tenured, and I had just been recruited into the job of director of disabilities studies at a school where that program is longstanding and well-respected And yet, there I was, trying to soldier through, not really believing that my specific configuration of illnesses and mental illnesses was anything that could be reasonably accommodated In other words, I was making myself an unimagined type Now, I'm not trying to say this was a case of internalized ableism and I just needed to fix my attitude and that's the answer Rather I'm trying to illustrate how incredibly powerful is the systemic oppression that makes some people unimagined types And I'm offering myself as kind of a brief case study to say, could someone possibly have been better positioned to assume that they deserved accommodations and then to-OPERATOR RECORDING: You have been muted by the moderator Press star-4 to unmute yourself You are now unmuted MARGARET PRICE: I feel so unimagined [LAUGHTER] Are we all good? Don't worry [LAUGHS] Don't worry My talk's totally make room for stuff like that Systemic oppression [LAUGHTER] So the thing that's so striking to me about thinking about myself as a case study is, again, my point is not that thank goodness I finally managed to pull myself up by my bootstraps It's that systemic oppressions and the system that creates certain people as unimagined types is just that powerful that a person could be in as ridiculously privileged position I was at that moment and still feel as though maybe I had no options except to just drop out A statistic that has probably been updated, but one that does get tossed around pretty often, is that students in college with serious mental illnesses drop out at a rate of something around 86% And again, that number may be going down, thanks to improved support services over the last 10 years or so But the number is still staggeringly high, and it prompts me to stop and wonder when attrition rates are that high, how is it possible that there is not an immediate response of panic and outrage? And this is not only true for any disabled students There are many minoritized and vulnerable populations who are experiencing attrition or distress at similar rates And our failure to respond with immediate alarm is still very puzzling to me And yet again, as my case study shows, I am probably more capable than the next person at being like, oh, it's probably supposed to be this way It really sucks, but we should probably just assume this is what's normal So that's what I'm going to talk about when I shift gears to talk about my research now, which is, how we unbuild that sense that unbearable distress is normal? The term "inclusivity" operates in higher education like the terms engagement, critical thinking, productivity sorry, productivity is not in this slide productivity or excellence We want these, but we can't agree on what they are And as common topics, they tend to cause debates because they invoke values that we seem to hold in common but which may turn out to mean very different things when actually applied and circulated in specific situations So again, as a rhetorician, this is one of the things I study, is these common topics And in Mad at School, I explore a number of common topics, including not only engagement and critical thinking and excellence, but also resistance, productivity, freedom, independence, presence These are all common topics that we tend to invoke often and which we kind of act as if we agree on But, in fact, when we start to really enact, then we realize there may not be as much agreement as we thought So my argument now with my newer research is that inclusivity is another one of these common topics, or in Greek, topos T-O-P-O-S So when we observe the workings of these topics in the everyday life of higher education, when we try to take a look at how they're actually being applied and enacted, their exclusive function quickly becomes apparent And a good example of how this works is with the topos, or the common topic, of engagement Think about a college classroom, a classroom that's relatively small, maybe 20 students And in this class, the students are asked to read material and then come to class and discuss it We're accustomed to thinking of classroom accommodations in terms of measurable steps aimed at equalizing, for example, providing note takers, sign interpreters, or providing materials in alternative formats All these efforts are aimed at, as we like to say, leveling the playing field However, what accommodations might we offer for the student who is engaged but in ways that are not legible to their instructor, not legible to the rest of the class? For example, what about the student who is not quite able to break into that discussion or who unintentionally speaks out of turn or who has difficulty even following the free-flowing oral discussion? What about the student who needs to engage in activities that might be considered distracting, stimming, rocking, having to leave frequently? I knit a lot in class Oh, side story So one of the ways that I maintain my focus and attention while teaching, if we are having long discussions, is I will get out my knitting and knit And I usually don't say anything when I this I just get it out and start knitting And almost inevitably at the next class period, some student will arrive with their knitting, like "I'm ready." And if I were a more awesome teacher, I would probably just invite everyone to knit from the first day, but I usually fail to that So back to the common topic of engagement The term discussion implies that the space is open to all perspectives But this setting, the classroom setting, is, in fact, controlled by rigid, unspoken expectations Students taking part in a discussion are expected to demonstrate their knowledge of the topic at hand, raise relevant questions, and establish themselves as a presence in the room but not an overly dominant presence Further complicating the transaction is the fact that different instructors have different expectations for the, we might say, script of a classroom discussion One teacher might want straightforward paraphrasing of the reading Another teacher might want provocative questions right off the bat Another teacher might want students to draw connections between today's material and last week's These expectations are often not communicated directly So classroom discussions fall into a category of discursive setting that I call kairotic space K-A-I-R-O-T-I-C This term draws upon the classical Greek term "kairos," which is usually translated as "the good or opportune time." Kairotic spaces are the lessformal, often unnoticed areas of academe where knowledge is produced and power is exchanged A classroom discussion is a kairotic space, as I've just described So is an individual conference with one's professor Academic conferences are rife with kairotic spaces, including the Q&A sessions after panels, those impromptu elevator meetings, and gatherings at restaurants and bars on the periphery of formal conference events Other examples from students' experiences might include, for example, those sudden small groups that we're always asking you to get into, study groups, interviews for on campus jobs, or social events that you're invited to at which your professors are present So when I came up with this concept while I was writing Mad at School, my primary definition for kairotic space was "one of those spaces I'm always being thrust into during graduate school that I really dislike and that I poorly in." However, when I tried to write about it more systematically while writing Mad at School, I had to come up with a more widely understandable definition So I came up with five criteria that helped define what I understand is a kairotic space First events are synchronous They unfold in what we usually call real time Second, impromptu communication in these spaces is required or encouraged Third, participants are telepresent That is they may be present in person, through a digital interface, such as a video chat, or they may be present in a hybrid form Fourth, the situation evolves a strong social element And if you think about it, it's surprisingly frequent that, in academic space, we kind of pretend that we're at a party instead of actually doing something like taking a class The humanities might be particularly prone to this I'm an English professor But it was really interesting to me, once I started actually analyzing academic space, to realize that there was almost nothing I could as an academic that didn't require some form of impromptu social exchange And finally, the fifth and maybe most important criterion for kairotic spaces, stakes are high So for me, the defining element of kairotic space is the pairing of spontaneity with high levels of academic impact Attention to relations of power is of great importance in understanding kairotic space And it's also really important to recognize that different participants will perceive those relations of power differently I cannot tell you how many times I have been told, just relax, or cocktail parties are fun, or just enjoy meeting new people, or you don't have to it that way I would suspect that the people offering me this well-meant advice are people who find it easy to navigate kairotic spaces and therefore don't perceive them to be as high stakes as I Or if you want to examine how high stakes a kairotic space is, just see what happens when someone messes up in one Now despite their importance, kairotic spaces in academia tend to be understudied One reason for this is that, because they're unscripted, it's notoriously difficult to collect data in them One of the most thorough studies of academic conferences comments this is by Ventola et all V-E-N-T-O-L-A comments over and over again that they have a very hard time gathering research on conferences for the simple reason that nobody wants to research there It's too hard Another, I think, more compelling reason why these spaces might be understudied or at least underexamined is that their impact tends to be underestimated by those who move through them with ease The importance of kairotic space will be more evident to a person who, for example, can hear only scraps of a conversation when they're sitting in a group around a table, or a person who needs more than a few seconds to process a question that's asked to them in class Now, in academia, we're accustomed to thinking of disability as something that we can accommodate by identifying a specific problem and then fixing that problem through a series of predictable moves But instead, I've come to realize through my research, disability often must be accommodated as it's unfolding, as it emerges in those interactive spaces, like classrooms, offices, and gathering places So that's why I turn to my current research, which combines a large-scale anonymous survey with detailed semi-structured interviews Basically, I wanted to learn more about exactly how disability actually unfolds in specific situations of employment in academic life So I undertook this study When I first started the disabled faculty study, which was around 2011 PS, I took a big chunk of time off while my book was in press I really recommend it I did almost nothing But finally, when the book was on the verge of coming out or had just been out for a few months, I decided, you know, what I want to next is really get a better look at how disability actually emerges for mentally disabled people in academia Initially, I set out to study only mental disability That goal changed as the study unfolded because, to make a very long story short, I realized that you really can't meaningfully draw a bright line between mental disability and other kinds of disability if you're trying to study how it emerges situationally And then the other thing that changed was I started wanting to study students, faculty, and staff sorry, students, faculty, undergrads, graduate students, and faculty and staff That turned out to be unworkable Again, sort of long story short, it just was not possible with my tiny resources So I finally decided to just faculty and staff With that said, the survey and interview protocols that we use are publicly available, and we would really love it if people would be interested in taking up a similar study with other sample groups, just FYI Anyway, so what we were able to and the research team was me, Stephanie Kerschbaum K-E-R-SC-H-B-A-U-M She's at the University of Delaware And then two researchers from Temple University, Mark Salzer S-A-L-Z-E-R and Amber O'Shea O-apostrophe-S-H-E-A What we ended up doing was first a large-scale anonymous survey of faculty who self-identified as having mental health histories That is not all faculty in the survey identified as disabled, but all selfidentified as having accessed mental health care while an employee of the university And our sample size for that study, the eventual number of actual analyzable surveys was 267 Then after the surveys had been analyzed, Stephanie and I continued with semi-structured extensive interviews Most of our interviews are between one and two hours And so far we've interviewed 34 faculty with a wide range of disabilities The last thing I'll mention is that there's a dedicated page about this study on my website The URL for the website is margaretprice all one word wordpress.com So if you go to that page, there's a tab marked Disabled Faculty Study And you can see some of the findings that we've published and some of the stuff that's been written about the study So one of our most important findings so far, looking just at the data on faculty who self-identified as having accessed mental health care, is the faculty in this group still experience a sense of stigma so powerful that most of them don't disclose their disabilities at work and never seek accommodations When we found that, we were a little bit surprised because the Americans with Disabilities Act has been in existence for more than 25 years It's now commonplace for people to seek mental health care, and many campus organizations focus on raising awareness around mental disability at events like the one today So why this stigma persists so strongly is a crucial area to study, because our findings showed us that the most difficult inclusion problem in higher education with respect to mental disability is no longer principally what the laws or policies say You still come across the occasional asinine policy, like if you have severe depression, be sure to discuss it with your department chair They'll help you work it out It's not a good policy But for the most part, the structures that are needed, the policy and legal structures that are needed are pretty much in place So then the question is, why is the inclusion that one would hope would follow still so incomplete? Now, the interviews that Stephanie and I are working on conducting give some idea of what might be going on kind of between the lines of the law Essentially the faculty that we've interviewed feel a tremendous sense of vulnerability And that sense persists, just as it did for me, even when they are at well-resourced institutions with available support and with no obvious experiences of risk or retribution Now, I say no obvious experiences because often the reasons that faculty articulated to explain why they felt so vulnerable had to with spatial or atmospheric issues that we might not originally have noticed as being something that caused a sense of stigma or vulnerability So I'll offer a few examples from our interviews to illustrate First, the faculty in our study reported a sense that any accommodations they might have are very tenuous and can be taken away at any time For example, one of the interviewees, Nate, who teaches at a research university and sees an individual counselor as one of his accommodations, noted that this arrangement required constant discussion and constant readjustment with his human resources office This is both because his school's faculty association, which is sort of similar to a union in Canada, the faculty association often renegotiates the terms of employment But also because the policies at his school keeps shifting And every time they do, he has to go back to human resources to talk about his accommodation again And in his case, his accommodation is just, "I need therapy." So he stated, "I would have a lot less anxiety if I knew that even the process of how I got what I need would always be in place What I have could just vanish," end quote Another faculty member, Sarah, who's at a community college in the Pacific Northwest, had the experience of being asked to meet with an administrator and list the accommodations that she thought she would need These ideas were then, in her words, "sort of picked through," as the administrator went through the list and determined which of them she would be allowed to have Of this exchange she said, quote, "everything I asked for, I felt like I was sort of I'm not sure I could ask for it or whatever Was I going too far?" end quote She also said that she felt afraid to ask for too much Sarah reported feeling very vulnerable not only about what accommodations she could ask for, but also on what basis So it's very interesting to observe sort of the rhetorical implications of being asked to list the accommodations you need and then have someone pick through the list and say, OK, you can have this one, but not that one It's kind of like you're making the world's worst Christmas list, and the person who's going through your accommodation list, instead of sort of seeing the list as a whole-person kind of list, like, "Yes, I see you need all these things," instead is like, "OK, you can have the Baby Alive, but you can't have the Transformer," which turns one's actual human needs into this sort of weird object in a transaction Now, because Sarah interpreted this experience as being sort of combative, she experienced the person going through her list as not being on her side, she decided, during that meeting, to talk about only one of her diagnoses, which was ADHD She also has a mood disorder, but decided to keep that secret or, as she put it, "keep it close to the chest." This choice, in which a disabled person with multiple diagnoses discloses only the one that seems to cure at the lowest risk, has been observed by numerous other researchers And the researcher Tara Wood has called the phenomenon "selective disclosure." Notably, Sarah's choice in these sessions was inspired in part by the set up of the conversation Rather than creating a situation in which Sarah felt like a full participant in the conversation, she felt that the conversation was based instead on a scarcity model We can see the same model at work when people start talking about the cost of accommodations Two costs, ironically, that are very often spoken about is the cost of interpreters and the cost of captioning And so you might find yourself in these weird conversations literally faculty in our study reported being told, well, we can have coffee and cookies at faculty meetings, or we can have your interpreter I'm not even kidding That's a direct quote from one of our faculty's experiences And she was a junior faculty member at the time So a second issue that often came up, in addition to this sense that accommodations are based not on the need of the person who needs them, but instead on some sort of imaginary scarcity model, was that faculty observed derogatory remarks being made about disability not to them directly, but kind of around them And this, in turn, created a sense of an unsafe space So, for example, I asked Irene, who teaches at a small college in the Midwest, our standard first interview question, which is, you talk about your disabilities at work? Irene responded immediately, "No way." At other times during her interview addressing the same question, she said, "There's not a chance in hell," and "Absolutely not." Through the course of the conversation, it became clear that the school where Irene teaches is very unwelcoming to disabled students It does not have a clear system for handling student accommodation requests, and Irene has also heard colleagues making fun of disabled students Based on this atmosphere of hostility, Irene has decided never to talk about her own disability with colleagues or with any administrators at her school In fact and this was the part that struck me most deeply she also elected not to submit a paper for a conference that she was interested in simply because the theme of the conference itself would have called attention to her mental disability We're getting pretty close to, I think, the amount of time anyone should be asked to sit quietly and listen to one person talk So I'm going to go a little bit faster through the examples from the final interviewee, who I want to talk about today And this was a person whose pseudonym is Zoey Zoey, in her interview, reported making similar inferences based on the lack of accommodations for students at her school She commented, "This school isn't great about accommodations." And so when she arrived as a new faculty member, she kind of saw what was happening around her with disabled students and decided not to negotiate for some of the accommodations she herself needed, such as speech recognition software A large number of the 34 faculty that we've interviewed reported paying for needed accommodations themselves rather than have to go through channels at their school Now, in Zoey's case, her efforts to navigate having a mental disability at work are further complicated by the fact that she is Latina, while Nate, Sarah, and Irene are white Zoey also noted during her interview that she knows she could easily be labeled what she calls, quote, "the stereotypical crazy Latina," end quote And thus she has to perform extra emotional labor to remain on guard around this intersectional identity in ways that it could be singled out for additional discrimination She noted during her interview that during her job interview at the school, one of the search committee members actually used the R word And after she arrived at the school, a colleague used the expressions "crazy" and "just plain nuts" around her Finally, getting tired of this casual use of the ableist terms, Zoey asked one of her colleagues about it, and this is how she reported that conversation going Quote, "One person said, when I checked in about my concerns, he hadn't heard anything negative And the other person " she actually checked in with two people "said I might just be 'taking things the wrong way,' end quote, 'reading into it,' end quote." She also reported, "one even asked if 'maybe I wasn't just being a little paranoid,' end quote." So in the longer articles that this talk has drawn from, there's a longer section about gaslighting and a sense of sort of atmospheric insecurity that can cause people not to seek accommodation But this was one of the quotes that struck me most strongly, since Zoey had gone to a colleague in good faith to say, hey, this feels really uncomfortable to me And the colleague actually flat out said, maybe you're being a little paranoid So these examples are not even among the most lurid or shocking or disheartening examples from the faculty disability study And I also want to say It's not the study itself and the hundreds of pages of interview transcripts that we've generated are not just sort of an unmitigated disaster There are a lot of stories of faculty being resilient, coming together in coalitions, doing their work in spite of barriers So there's also a lot that's positive about it But it's absolutely clear when you look at these interviews as a whole, that we, at universities, are doing a very poor job at enacting inclusion Now, as a result of that research, Stephanie and I were asked to create a kind of training manual for faculty administrators And this was a little bit terrifying for us because oh, by the way, if you're on script I am in the middle of page We were asked to create a training manual for faculty and administrators And this was a little terrifying for us because we're kind of theory heads, and we like to write about things in very complex ways And in order to write a useful training manual, you have to be really pretty directive, and you have to be like, it this way not this way So the genre was unfamiliar to us But we also really believed in the project, and we wanted to present our research in kind of an actionable way So this manual is now available online You can download it for free from the Temple University Collaborative's website You reach that website at the URL tucollaborative all one word org And it's in the section Research The manual is titled Promoting Supportive Academic Environments for Faculty with Mental Illnesses And speaking of language, we had to say mental illnesses because Mark said nobody would find the guide otherwise Much as I like the term mental disability, it's not still one that people tend to search for So the manual exists I think it contains a lot of valuable ideas about how to be more inclusive in a systemic way at one's university But at the same time that I feel it was important to create this and I really want everyone to read it and make use of it, I also want to encourage asking questions that are not very easy to answer, doing work that doesn't result in the kinds of cut-and-dried or bullet-point advice that you might find in a training manual So I want to conclude by offering some open-ended questions about what it means to include mental disability in university space And I hope that during the discussion period you'll add your own questions to mine as well So here's some questions that I think are interesting to ask And perhaps these questions that might be mobilized when you all are thinking about considering access, enacting access in the various academic spaces that you move through First in this space, whether it's a classroom, a meeting room, the university as a whole, how we talk about mental disability? Do we at all? Does it appear only metaphorically, for example, calling a paper "schizophrenic," or making a joking reference to, oh, "I'm so OCD today?" Second, what questions about disability are expected from students, not allowed, but expected? What kinds of questions are expected from faculty members? What opportunities have been open for discussion? Are those opportunities easy to find, even for newcomers who might feel vulnerable about speaking up? Third question, where are the kairotic spaces in our program, department, or school? Do they occur during discussions, meetings, during social events? How might we adjust these spaces so that expectations are clearer and alternative ways of communicating are expected, again, not accepted or tolerated, but actually expected, explicitly invited into that space? And finally, how we find a balance between the need to set clear policies and the need to respond individually to access needs, in other words, to practice access simultaneously at the structural and individual levels? Now, I don't have an answer for any of those questions Those are just some of the more interesting questions that I tend to grapple with on a daily basis And I don't have a set design for disability access in academia What I have is assurance that our goal, the goal of inclusivity itself, must be worked toward not only by predicting access needs ahead of time, but also by observing spaces and situations that emerge through the interactions of humans, environments, structures, and policies In other words, this has to be an ongoing project And it is all our work Thank you [APPLAUSE] PRISCILLA HARRISON: Thank you very much, Margaret, for that excellent thought-provoking presentation We have a few more moments, if anyone has any questions for Dr Price If you raise your hand, I'll come to you Any questions at all? Anybody? MARGARET CAMP: Thank you I'm Margaret Camp I'm the Director of Student Accessibility Services on campus And something that we struggle with in our office is that balance It's kind of the fourth question that you presented to us between creating a welcoming, safe environment for students, where we interact with them on a non-hierarchical level and say, "Talk to me Tell me about what's going on How can we support? How can we help?" And the hundreds of students who come in and say, "I have anxiety; I have depression and I don't have documentation to back it up." "Tell me about your anxiety." "I feel butterflies in my stomach I get nervous when I take a test." There's some degree that you should be nervous when you take a test, that there's some degree of expectation So finding that balance between creating those safe spaces and, like you said, the policy or the clear expectations that we have to have at the institutional level I would love to hear if you or if anybody has suggestions or advice about that, because students it's kind of like we're in this catch-22 We say, "Gosh, wouldn't it be better if there weren't so much stigma around depression or around anxiety and around what are considered mental disabilities?" And then we say, "Gosh, everybody's claiming that they have anxiety." Well, guess what? The stigma is being released, and then we're not happy either So that's just something that we struggle with that I'm always looking for insight on how we can that better MARGARET PRICE: I would actually be really interested to hear from others on that as well And one of the answers that I think we're often offered and it's an important possibility is to think about ways that space can be designed more accessibly So, for example, in the classroom, yes, I have to take students accommodation letters and sort of the one-on-one process But I can also, as the instructor, at the beginning of the semester, say, in a general way, I'm trying to create an accessible space for all of us I would like everyone to be open about their learning needs P.S, here are some of mine So, for example, my students learn early on that I have an extremely poor short-term memory They cannot come up to me after class and ask me for something and then expect me to remember it So I can answer a question after class, but I can't remember to send them an email, or I'm not going to remember a meeting that we set And that's just a routine accommodation I ask them for If it's something like, you need a meeting with me, or it's something that I'm going to have to remember, please either send me an email or hand me a note Whereas, if it's like a clarification question, that I can answer after class And that's one of the examples I give them of my own access needs However, as probably every single person in this room knows, trying to create a space like that only goes so far And then we get into situations, like what if every single person has an access need? That actually happened to me last semester I was teaching a graduate seminar, and I was doing my usual spiel about "I really want to know everybody's access needs." Well, all 13 students in my seminar, all were like, "Challenge accepted." And so, like, students needed different formats And one student needed to sit close to the door And another student couldn't be in a room as small as the room we had And another student had two captionists with her, so we had to be in a specific room It was so unbelievably hard to manage Now, the thing is the reason it was hard to manage is not actually because it's a problem if everybody has access needs It's because we assume that in a classroom about 10% of the people present will have identifiable access needs We're already operating on kind of a deficit model Just realizing that does not magically make universities open their pocketbooks and create lovely, large, flexible classrooms for every single class and unlimited test-taking time We're operating within these kind of budget constraints all the time And I don't just mean literal economic budgets, I mean budgets like grade budgets I can't give everybody an A I'm basically not allowed to Not everybody in a college can go on to exactly the same kind of job or exactly the same kind of success That is the win-loss system that we are set up in So it doesn't answer the question of how to deal with the question of, what if everybody has access needs? That's one, to be totally honest, that I just kind of deal with as best I can semester by semester But I think it's really important to recognize, if we're thinking about accommodation or access as kind of a benefit that will break the system if all of us are getting it, first of all, why is the system assuming that? But second of all, what is the actual metric that we're operating on? So one of my students recently raised the question of people faking disability to get accommodations And I asked my students to think through what it actually cost them if someone else faked disability And the answer was, "Well, then they get advantages that I don't have in the classroom, like extra time on tests." And I said, "OK, that's true." "So what is the person with that extra time, then, get?" "Well, they get a chance to better on the test." "OK And what they get from that?" "They might get a better grade." "And then what does that get them?" "They will get a higher GPA." "OK, let's keep going Where does a higher GPA get you? What does that get you?" "Well, it gets you maybe better internships or better scholarships and ultimately a better job?" "OK, and what is a better job?" So my students started sort of imagining what is the better job And it was a job with good pay and reasonably flexible hours and satisfying work And then the question that you arrive at, at the end point of that kind of thought experiment is, why doesn't everybody get a job like that? So if a system is built structurally on inequality, you will always have problems with the accommodation model because, by definition, the accommodation model gives stuff to some people and less stuff to other people Now, I'm not a 100% hardcore anti-capitalist My dress is from Banana Republic However even as I try to kind of improvise my way from semester to semester, I find it very useful to remember there is not a shortage of natural light in professors' offices because God decreed it should be so It's because we are operating within certain kind of budgets all the time, and sometimes the most useful question to ask is, why can't everybody have an accommodation, even if you can't actually enact that? I'm super interested to know what other people would suggest TAIMI OLSEN: Thank you for the resources you provided I'm TAIMI Olsen I'm new to Clemson I'm the new Director for Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation At my former school, I noticed that there were a lot more faculty coming in in consultation And I just talked at a conference about this recently Is that better? MARGARET PRICE: Yes TAIMI OLSEN: Oh, OK So I was just talking thank you I was just talking at a conference about faculty who come in for a consultation on teaching And we had noticed an uptick in disclosures about disabilities, not necessarily accommodated disabilities And one of the interesting questions was, "Should I talk to my students?" And you mentioned that But for a lot of the faculty that I talk with, this is a really tricky thing "So I tell my students what my disability is?" "Can I expect them to accommodate me?" And I'm wondering if you had heard that before, those kind of questions? MARGARET PRICE: Yes, definitely Questions about if a faculty or, for that matter, a staff member has disabilities, particularly if you're working with students, what kind of accommodations can you yourself expect? This gets to one of the most difficult phrases in the Americans With the Disabilities Act, which is "essential functions." In a nutshell, the ADA says that you can have all the accommodations you want, as long as it doesn't interfere with the essential functions of your job So according to the Americans with Disabilities Act, I am not protected by the ADA if I say I would like to be an NFL player I cannot perform the essential functions of a National Football League player's job, that I know of I actually haven't tried So that's not something the ADA affords me It doesn't say you can have any job you want in the world It does say if accommodations will enable you to perform the essential functions of that job So, if I could be a credible NFL player, so long as I had the accommodation: extended time to take I don't know what it would be then that's protected under the law The thing is trying that pinning down what the essential functions of a professor's job are is awfully difficult And notoriously, an incredibly high percentage of suits brought by higher education instructors under the ADA are actually lost at the summary judgment level In other words, typically, when people who are in professor or instructor jobs in higher education try to say, I should have this job because I could it with accommodations, the courts typically disagree And so the essential functions of our jobs include things that we kind of can't get extended time for The semester clock is what it is I can't be like, well, I need five months to return these papers As much as I might like to, that's not performing the essential functions of my job And I also I personally happen to think that there are certain situations where, regardless of what the ADA says, if you're detrimental to the other people inhabiting the space with you, you at least should give it a hard think, if not decide to remove yourself summarily In terms of asking for accommodations from students, the ones that I ask for Like my first watchword as an instructor is always: their learning in the classroom comes first And honestly, their learning comes first over considerations of access they might have So for example, if I had a student whose accommodation involved something that interfered with everybody else's learning, I would object My job as an instructor is to create a learning environment And I'm bound by that, and I expect them to be bound by that as well So this governs not only the ways that we handle access, but the ways that we handle things like respectful dialogue, the ways that we take up assignments, the ways that we modify assignments, the ways that I grade, the ways that I ask them to respond to each other They're all bound by this kind of shared contract, like "This is what we're trying to guys, learn." If we're not learning, we need to take another look at how we're doing this So if it's something that will help them learn better, like my short-term memory thing, I absolutely will ask for that accommodation If it's something that's not necessarily involved with their learning, for example, I have severe social anxiety I mean, I might discuss it if it seems relevant in a particular moment But that's something that just seems to me to make sense to work out between me and my employer, if that helps Now again, I'm in this very privileged position where I can sort of disclose willy-nilly to my students, and it most likely will not affect my job But I think carefully, last point, about my own gut-level personal comfort There are some things that I choose not to disclose, even though they might be valuable for my students to know, just because it interferes with my own personal comfort And that's a line that I feel pretty comfortable about drawing JILLIAN WEISE: Thank you so much for speaking with us today I so enjoyed your talk A couple of times you mentioned thinking it was a bad idea for an employee or a faculty member to report to their supervisor Could you speak more about that, in other words, to ask the accommodation of their supervisor? MARGARET PRICE: Yes, absolutely And I actually want to turn and ask the interpreter something Are you all on the clock until 5:30 or 6:00? OK, this is good to know Let's make this the last question INTERPRETER: 6:30 MARGARET PRICE: Oh, 6:30 Oh, well, everybody get comfortable I'm kidding Maybe we should make this the last one anyway You all have been super patient I appreciate it So we did actually encounter quite a number of times, both in the survey and in the interviews study, situations where employees were put through these really weird situations when asking for accommodations And schools it all different ways Some schools say you have to go to the same place students go, the disability services office Some schools say you have to go to human resources Some schools say you have to go to your own faculty union, which strikes me as bizarre And some schools say you have to go to your direct supervisor Now, the reason why it's a terrible idea to ask employees to negotiate accommodations with their direct supervisor is because their supervisor is the person who supervises their work, and the accommodations are what they need in order to their work So if the supervisor doesn't like some of the accommodations that the employee might need And this can be true, unfortunately, if your accommodations have to with things like what time you typically arrive at work, what kind of transportation you need, whether you need a coveted resource, such as a window in your office, what kind of breaks you need, this can create a really unpleasant conflict of interest for the supervisor between their job of determining whether the employee is doing good work and whether they agree with the employee's accommodations or not So it's critical to have another person or entity involved to kind of triangulate that situation, just as students are not required to work out their accommodations directly with their professor Now, in a best case scenario, you are kind of collaborating with your students around accommodations And in a best case scenario, I, as a professor, can say casually to my department chair, oh, I'm not able to xyz because here's what's going on with my disability But if you don't have a best case scenario, and a lot of students don't and a lot of employees don't, you absolutely don't want to be saying to the person who does your annual evaluation, I also need this benefit at my job, this benefit that other people are not legally entitled to Oh, and for the same reason, it's a very bad idea to ask employees to negotiate where the money for their accommodations comes from I had no idea, before we did these interviews, how common that was that employee accommodations often come out of the budget for their own department or program So this is the kind of situation that leads to people being told, well, I guess if your interpreter's going to be at our department meetings, then we can't have coffee or cookies Like, first of all, that's incredibly belittling But second of all, in what universe of best employment practice will you pit an employee against something like a ream of paper or coffee and cookies or a new hire? Again, it sets up a really unbearable conflict of interest with the disabled employee as to the kind of linchpin getting squeezed in the middle there PRISCILLA HARRISON: OK, well, thank you so much for coming Let's show Dr Price our appreciation once again for her presentation MARGARET PRICE: Thank you all so much, too PRISCILLA HARRISON: Thank you again for coming MARGARET PRICE: Thank you very much