BRIANNA BLASER: For folks to hop on.
We're excited to be having a conversation
today about disability inclusion in the ongoing pandemic.
I know I have been surprised over the past few months
as more and more things are just returning to in-person norms.
And that excludes so many folks with disabilities who are still
trying to be cautious.
How we had all of these hybrid and online events
during the pandemic, and folks are now just
returning to our pre-pandemic models
without thinking through that.
And of course, we can't ignore that there
are folks who have joined the disability community
after having long COVID.
So I am excited to have everybody here today,
and I'll do a brief introduction.
And Eric, can you make sure you've
restarted the recording, too?
ERIC: Yep, I have.
BRIANNA BLASER: Perfect.
Excellent.
So again, we're excited to have you here today.
For those of you whom I don't know,
my name is Brianna Blaser.
I'm Associate Director for the AccessADVANCE Project
at the University of Washington, funded by the National Science
Foundation.
And our goals are really to help STEM departments and broadening
participation activities become more welcoming to women
with disabilities and academic positions
and to develop resources related to these goals.
And that's part of why we are here today.
This is part of a series of webinars we've had this spring,
talking about disability inclusion in faculty,
and in academia, more broadly.
If you're interested in learning more about what we do,
you can always go to our website, uw.edu/doit/programs.
And if you want to get weekly emails from us
on related resources and information,
you can email doit@uw.edu to join our Community of Practice.
I think that is it for my announcements.
Today we're going to have, for the first hour,
we'll have a panel discussion.
And I'm so happy for our panelists joining us today.
And then for the last half hour, we
will have informal discussion and networking.
So again, thank me--
trying to exit out--
thank you for joining us.
We have on our panel today Victoria Chavez
from Northwestern University, Emmanuelle Marquis
from University of Michigan, Stephani Page from the Women
in Engineering Proactive Network, or WEPAN,
and Matthew Dowell from Towson University.
So I am going to stop talking now
and turn it over to Victoria, who's
going to tell us a little bit about herself
and her experiences.
VICTORIA CHAVEZ: Hi, everyone.
So excited to be here.
Thank you for having me.
I hope everyone's doing well.
My name is Victoria.
I use they and she pronouns.
I am a racially ambiguous not just look wise but also
to myself Latina with short curly hair.
I am currently a second-year PhD student
at Northwestern's Computer Science and Learning Sciences
program.
My research seeks to disrupt instances and systems
of oppression that disproportionately
harm Black, disabled, Indigenous, and Latinx students
and scholars.
Most recently, I've also been trying
to understand survival and joy.
Folks who know me know I can be a little depressing.
And I want to understand how people experience joy
and how that is also so important towards our survival.
Before, at the onset of the pandemic,
so before I was a grad student--
I'm only a second year--
so before that, I was actually a computer science lecturer
at the University of Rhode Island.
So I also had that experience of that hard switch
to teaching online very early on.
I want to give a general content warning around at least some
of the stuff that I'll be sharing and talking about.
Because this is inevitably a very deeply personal topic,
and I won't shy away from how I feel
and from naming things and calling this
by the massive eugenics project that it
is in terms of my experiences and perspectives.
So I am dynamically disabled.
It's a term I really like around understanding
that my disability changes every day.
What I can and what I'm able to do changes every day.
I'm immunocompromised, and I live with chronic pain.
And so as a grad student in particular,
it's really been an uphill battle trying
to acquire accommodations, to the point that I
just gave up and said, you know what,
I'm just not going to ask.
I'm going to do, and I'll do everything
unofficially and in secret and hope that people support me
because this is not a battle that I have the spoons for.
I am super, super fortunate to have an incredibly supportive
advisor and to have found community with other folks who,
for a variety of reasons, were all forced to carve
these spaces for ourselves.
And just generally, it's been really exhausting
having to unofficially request for accommodations
from our professors and ask, hey,
can you support me being remote but don't tell anyone?
And also, you could get in trouble if you say yes
and anyone finds out.
So just feeling like I have to fight just
to be allowed to exist, while being
not just told, but generally made to feel
that my existence is a burden, that
wanting to live a full life and be
able to leave my apartment safely
is too much to ask for, and especially,
most recently, that my death and the death of other people
like me are an inconsequential price to pay for abled people's
sense of normalcy.
As a grad student, my future has felt super uncertain because--
and we'll get to this in a little bit--
but it's been really difficult to publish.
You can't publish if you can't attend conferences.
And I can't attend conferences that aren't accessible to me.
And so the pandemic has really shown
how unsustainable academia is broadly,
but especially for people like me.
And so as a second year, I just, I really question and wonder
what my future is going to end up looking like.
So yeah, that's just a little bit
about where I'm coming from.
BRIANNA BLASER: Excellent.
Thank you for sharing.
Emmanuelle?
EMMANUELLE MARQUIS: Sure.
Thanks, Brianna.
And hi, everybody.
So I'm Emmanuelle Marquis.
I'm a professor in materials science and engineering
in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan.
My pronouns are she and they.
So for me, I had COVID in March 2020,
and since then, I have had Long COVID.
So it manifests obviously as an invisible disability.
It makes standing difficult, so teaching is quite a challenge.
And it has a number of other symptoms
that are disabling and changing all the time as well.
So I guess what I want to talk about a little bit is, first,
the personal level.
I've had to learn to embrace my condition.
There are days where I can forget it,
but there are days where it's really hard.
And so just there's a mental health aspect to it, for sure.
I've had to educate myself about disability.
I'm completely open to the fact that before being sick,
I was pretty ignorant about the topic.
I'm currently and still on a long journey
to recognize and address my internalized ableism
towards myself but also towards others,
recognizing that I've had and need
to continue changing my expectations for myself,
as well as others.
I'm dealing with continued trauma,
obviously at the beginning at the onset
with the illness, which for me manifested itself
as a brain injury.
So I've lost the complete ability to function.
I could not read.
I'm an engineer.
I couldn't do simple math.
Like 5 plus 9, I just couldn't do it.
For a year I was unable to work.
And then there was the gaslighting
from the medical establishment on top of it,
and then from my institution, which
denied me all form of accommodation
and required me to come back to work 100%.
So that was really hard.
I've had to try to figure out how
to not lose my job while functioning somehow
and do what I was required to do.
Which I'm lucky in the fact that I've somehow
managed it by finding allies where I sometimes least
expected it.
And then now, identifying as a person with disabilities
and trying to raise awareness, finding myself into facing
microaggressions and sometimes not so micro aggressions.
So on the professional level, within my institutions
I'm learning to navigate the void and finding allies.
So there is absolutely no process
by which at my institution faculty or staff
with disabilities are supported or can find accommodation.
So we're isolated by design.
Everybody follows whatever process they can figure out.
It's by no means transparent and often results
in very cruel decisions.
It takes time and energy, obviously,
to advocate for this, but it's important.
And then outside the institution,
like Victoria was saying, it's finding
that professional societies and funding
agencies are very reluctant to adapt,
far more than I expected it because that also includes NSF.
So they still require in-person attendance
for some grant applications.
And then conferences refuse to be remote,
with the argument that they would lose funding.
So now I'm very active with advocacy
on campus, with three aspects that I'm trying to tackle.
So raising awareness, I got some funding
from the College of Engineering to organize seminars and panel
discussions, just to educate my colleagues about disability.
I'm also quite active in community building
because we're all very isolated.
So with two colleagues across campus,
we created a disability justice network.
So it's a collective of staff and faculty
that brings disabled people, people with disabilities,
and allies together to try to foster
discussions about disability justice at the university.
And then it provides a safe support network
for asking questions, figuring out
what can we ask in terms of disabilities,
who we can talk to, et cetera.
And then the main aspect of this group really
for me is how can we make change.
And with this, I've started discussions
with the upper administration.
It's unclear where it's going to go,
but at least it's started, about how
we can address the ableist rules and the language that
is used, for instance, in the faculty handbook.
This is all pretty heavy, so I want
to finish with positive takeaways.
With the pandemic, I really found a increased sense
of awareness for disability justice among my colleagues.
There is an eagerness to connect and to bring change
to the academy.
It may not be true within the upper administration,
but I found an extraordinary amount of support
from students.
Unlike the upper administration, they've
generally shown empathy, generosity, and support.
We are here forbidden to request masking in the classroom.
When I asked them on the first day of classes,
"will you please mask because I'm immunocompromised?"
they all did without any complaint.
And I've never had to remind them all year long.
And so that's all I want to say for now.
So thank you, thank you all for being here.
BRIANNA BLASER: Excellent.
Thank you.
And I was just about to drop in the chat
a link to an article in The Chronicle of Higher
Education that Emmanuelle is a co-author on Long COVID,
too, that I think many of you might
be interested in checking out.
So I will drop that in in a second.
And Stephani?
STEPHANI PAGE: Hello, everyone.
Thank you so much for having me and for supporting
this discussion happening.
I do like to start with a little bit about my position
and my positionality with respect to this conversation.
I am Director of Strategic Initiatives
for the Women of Engineering Practice Network.
I am a engineer scientist by degrees and training,
a biochemist and biophysicist.
And right at the start of the pandemic,
I was leaving my last postdoc and recall
a lot of the sigh of relief that I was not navigating academia
as the pandemic started.
For me, it's really important to share
that I am someone who grapples with my identity
and relationship in the context of disability.
And I see it a lot in the activists and the scholars
who I write--
or who I read and who have had a lot of influence on how
I think about justice inequity.
I've dealt with chronic pain.
I've been in pain every day for at least the last 13 years.
I've experienced massive depressive disorders,
where I can be--
it's debilitating.
I have a neuropathy that impacts my ability
to function sometimes, to the point that I am right-handed
and to the point that I can't even use my right hand.
And I have debilitating migraines
that can get so bad that I have difficulty seeing.
But I still grapple, and I'm very open about the fact
that I still grapple with calling myself disabled.
And I know that a lot of that comes from not just
internalized ableism, but how systems of oppression
actually function to cause us to distance ourselves
from our reality, and how that also impacts our ability
to recognize marginalization and oppression for other people.
And the wonderful thing in my mind
about the necessity for intersectionality
as a framework is the fact that it really, as a framework,
is an amazing tool.
And I said that kind of "the wonderful thing"
sarcastically because this is really
incredible work that feeds into these frameworks that we use.
But what makes them, what makes these frameworks
a necessity is exhausting.
Even today, I could be dealing with a new diagnosis
just this morning.
And so as I was coming into this,
preparing for mentally for this discussion,
I was starting to think a lot about what I would want to say.
We use intersectionality as a framework
not just in the context of my broader organization,
but in the context of one of the larger initiatives
that I'll reference, which is our NSF Advance Funded
Initiative, the ARC network.
And as I'm driving home from this doctor's appointment
where I've got a lot to process and a lot
to think about in terms of what do I prepare for, of course,
I'm thinking about this conversation and how
intersectionality, with it we go beyond just
asking how many overlapping identities or social identities
does a person have, and we move into thinking
about systems of oppression and the organization of power
in our broader society and even in our social microcosms.
We think about how social identities are constructed
and then operationalized, and then who constructs them
and who operationalizes them.
And then, what are the tensions when people take over
their identities, or the social constructs that
have been developed?
What happens when we kind of own them and reverse them and make
them clear and make them, take some control over them,
that hostility or that violence that's then experienced?
And then there's this broader idea about how all of this
intertwines and influences each other
and then gives rise to marginalization
and the disparate experiences with access and opportunity
and safety and security.
The reality is that we live in societies that disable people.
That's just a fact.
And it's made it deadly to be disabled,
and it's continued to cycle.
And that disabling structures are just so incredibly deeply
entrenched in our society that racism disables,
misogyny disables.
And these cycles are continued and they're deepened.
We sit and we look at our different movements
that have been incredible.
But then we still have to contend
with that in a lot of these movements and spaces,
we've denied the reality that disabled people exist along
all axes of marginalization, right?
But then in some spaces where there are movements
around disabled folks, they deny that people
experience other marginalities just beyond being disabled.
And it's all feeding within to each other,
and so there's just a denial that
trans disabled people exist, and denial
that Black disabled people exist,
and that disability still can, at times, some movements
and spaces still adhere to whiteness
and affluence and uphold white supremacy and uphold stiffness.
And where are we sitting in that balance?
And it is, in my mind, it's a constant confrontation,
both at the individual level, the organizational level,
and the societal level of how are we continuing to exclude
and marginalize and further disable people,
even to the extent that it undermines the efforts that we
say are quote unquote "a main area of focus."
And I know that's a lot to think about
in a 20-minute or so drive, especially
as I am grappling with a lot of decisions
that I'll need to make.
But it does cause me to sit in a space coming
into this conversation, so I wanted to share that.
I also want to be open about the fact
that we are hosting an in-person meeting in June.
And there's been a lot that we've dealt with internally
about how do we really integrate who
we say we are in our practices and our approaches.
We've had to deal with the disappointment
when certain models for virtual and hybrid
just didn't work out.
We had to deal with when someone has said,
this is what you have to do, and there's inflexibility
with that.
And the fact that this meeting is we
are charged to put on and host the national convening
for ADVANCE grantees.
And so it wasn't just our choice,
but for us and for this team, we do feel
responsible for what we uphold.
And so there's a lot that we've been confronting internally
and that I think we need to continue
to confront and continue to talk about and continue
to push against and challenge in terms
of thinking about the most vulnerable people.
And what does inclusion look like?
And not just inclusion as the opposite of exclusion,
but inclusion in the context of the organization of power
and how we do what we do?
So that's all I could really think to say as we start.
But again, it's just really happy
that this conversation is happening
and to be a part of it.
BRIANNA BLASER: Excellent.
Thank you, Stephani.
And Matt?
MATTHEW DOWELL: Hello.
I'm going to drop a link into the chat for some slides
and my opening comments.
Hopefully I set up those sharing settings correctly.
And I do have a very, very basic PowerPoint that, again, I'll
try to share and start there.
Did that work?
BRIANNA BLASER: It looks beautiful.
MATTHEW DOWELL: OK.
So, hi.
So I have written out comments.
It's something I'm trying to do more of for access reasons.
They're probably more formal than I'd like them to be,
but so they are.
My name is Matt Dowell.
I'm an Assistant Professor of English
and Director of First-Year Writing at Towson University,
just north of Baltimore, Maryland.
Thank you all for being here.
Thank you, organizers, for organizing
and, at the risk of getting her pronunciation of her last name
wrong, Melissa Collins for recommending AccessADVANCE
to invite me to participate.
I always find these conversations
beneficial or educational.
So I'm happy to be here, and I look forward
to learning from all of you.
So I'm a Type I diabetic, insulin dependent diabetic.
I was actually diagnosed at 28 in the middle
of my dissertation.
When you're trying to dissertate and you
find yourself falling asleep on the floor
and then wondering why you're on the floor,
it's kind of a worrisome thing.
So I also have an inflammatory condition of unknown pathology,
though it's in the vein of RA, Crohn's, or Behcet's.
I'm also asthmatic, so the onset of the pandemic
was a rather unsettling period of time
and remains so, as other panelists have spoken to.
My academic background that makes
me a little bit of an outsider here
is that I almost exclusively teach first-year writing, which
is probably a required class at your college or university,
and I run that first-year writing program.
I've been a writing program administrator
for over a decade now.
My research, as best as I can currently make sense of it,
focuses on the uncomfortable frictions
among managerialism, disability, accessibility, and labor
in all of its many definitions, and existences
in higher education, including my experiences
of being a disabled academic program manager.
And I like to quote Raymond Williams here,
who has this great line about an administrator just
being a more class-aware, polite way of saying manager.
My work as a writing program administrator
of a required first-year class situates me
in a space that historically and continues
to operate as a gatekeeper for higher education, situated
in linguistic, racial, and class discrimination,
as well as discrimination based in the expectation for
and even demand for sound norm in bodies and minds.
Additionally, first-year writing is, nationally speaking,
overwhelmingly taught by contingent faculty,
which raises questions about, among other things,
the teaching labor of accessibility
and the recognition of and support for disabled faculty,
including--
it is not new to say this, but disabled faculty
are more likely to end up in contingent positions.
I am the co-chair of the Accessibility and Disability
committee, along with my good friend, Bre Garrett,
for the Council of Writing Program Administrators.
And I facilitated accessibility and accommodations
for the 2019 in-person conference
in Baltimore, the last in-person conference
before the upcoming one this summer.
And I can speak more to that, if there's anything to be said.
I could be--
I don't-- the slide's not moving the way-- there we go.
So not doing great with the PowerPoint, but here's
some of my research.
Academic program director.
And then recent scholarship in public writing
has addressed conference accessibility and exclusion,
including a piece that gained a little bit of traction
about maskless DEI initiatives.
I can put a link in the chat for this once I'm done here,
but I include the very beginning part of it
here on the screen, where it says, "Recently I
remotely attended a mask-optional in-person meeting
where campus leaders proudly proclaimed that DEI was
a my college's top priority."
And when I say college, I mean College of Liberal Arts
within the university.
We're a very college-based operational model.
As a disabled faculty member who writes about disability access
in higher education, I find myself considering
how to make sense of such a statement, how seriously
to take such statements, how much to care
that such statements are being made.
And it goes on from there, and I can share that link.
Like I said, I feel a little bit out of place
being here in that my academic home is not in the sciences.
But at the same time, I think it's very important
to say if we're discussing access and accommodation
in higher education, including all
the way up until professional organizations and faculty
and science organizations and whatever it might be,
then that super very much involves the access
and accommodation that matters in required, often gatekeeping,
undergraduate courses.
I just always give some thought to who
are we, just who are we not in a selfish way,
but whose work and whose expertise
and whose commitments are we losing by banishing them
the first year?
My broad opening comments on accessibility
in academic institutions and organizations
is that accessibility has to center
disabled people and their needs, that designing accessibility
has to be the starting point for all design
choices of organizations, meetings, and the like,
and that the work of accessibility
can't be left as the labor domain of disabled people
alone.
Currently in my day-to-day academic life,
I'm thinking through the rhetoric and materiality
of what I call "the more," by which I mean that accessibility
very often requires more, while at the same time,
the ableist commitment to its more
is very much an enemy of accessibility.
We have to have conversations about how to fully include
more people and do more for more people,
while recognizing that might require doing less in ways,
eliminating a catered meal at a conference
so to fund captioning services, or having even fewer campus
speakers but creating robust participation options for those
that are held.
Such questions of more and the challenges of more
are always occurring within manufactured scarcity.
And that scarcity and the manufacturing of it
are also an enemy of inclusion and accessibility,
while also very much being a defense of the ableist norm.
How often do we hear, "Oh, if only if we could?"
And I'm also thinking about more with my teaching
and administrative work.
That's something, I guess, that's
kind of a space that's not--
I find it special, and my teaching, my admin,
and my scholarship all do go together.
And that's where I spend a lot of my mental and work space
and labor on a daily basis, how student and faculty
accommodations require more paperwork, more disclosure,
more labor, how intercessions to help struggling quote unquote
"struggling students" demand that doing
of more that's placed on top of an already too much,
that refuses to acknowledge and give attention to the material
conditions of teaching and learning,
and how the demands of the normal
are demands of more, that are in favor of the privilege
and against accessibility and inclusion for so many.
BRIANNA BLASER: Thank you, Matt.
That's awesome.
And I think I found a link to your article
and dropped that in the chat, too.
MATTHEW DOWELL: Thank you.
BRIANNA BLASER: So I have some questions that are things
that I've thought about ahead of time.
I know many of you probably have questions as well.
I invite folks to drop questions in the chat
or raise their hand, too, as we continue our discussion.
I guess one of the questions I'm thinking about
is, how do we continue to push back
on organizations that are prioritizing
in-person interaction?
And I think often what I'm hearing
is that it's too expensive, and it's too time-consuming.
And how do we find--
I don't know-- how can we advocate there
while recognizing those issues that keep getting raised?
I'll share.
I was surprised recently when someone shared with me
that for a conference they were involved organizing,
the hotel was going to charge hundreds of thousands
of dollars if anything was made available online.
Because the hotel was losing business if part of the meeting
was online and folks weren't coming and spending
their money to stay at the hotel, to buy food, et cetera.
And I think that was really eye-opening to me.
So it's not just the extra AV costs
of making a meeting accessible in terms
of having enough microphones and enough bandwidth that folks
could do an online meeting.
Stephani, I know you guys have thought
a lot about hybrid meetings.
And I know the one I attended where everybody
did COVID tests every day, I felt safer
than I have in other contexts.
I don't know if you have any thoughts
from an organizational perspective.
STEPHANI PAGE: Yes.
I think, from an organizational perspective,
a lot of the things that I think about.
And I will just give folks a preview of some of the things
that I've done, or that we've done within my organization,
or that I've done.
I was recently on a steering committee
just in terms of maintaining accessibility.
And I'll try to find it.
There's a really good--
Some groups have just kind of worked together,
just to pull together just really as specific
and as-long-as-they-need-to-be lists that really bring
together, well, if you're going to be in person,
these are the things that you need to do,
down to "do you have refrigerators for folks who
need insulin?"
And that actually ended up being a life-saving piece for someone
who attended a conference just last week, earlier this month.
We require masking.
We require proof of vaccination.
For the smaller meetings that we have,
we bring tests for participants to test daily.
And then we encourage testing.
We have a larger meeting, and we encourage testing.
But down to our keynotes when people
are speaking at the microphone, they are masked,
and that's what we ask.
We do allow for individuals who need to have the masks that
are built for mouth reading--
or lip reading, excuse me.
But still, where we sit, we are so far from optimal.
And so what do we continue to say?
Because people are now in this space of before you
can make that argument or advocate, just like you said,
it's that a lot of hotels are limiting,
a lot of conference sites are even limiting.
They won't even go to the bandwidth
for the hybrid options to be functional beyond.
Something that we are doing is we are
streaming our plenary sessions.
But that means that for the interactions that come along
with all of the many different amazing folks who
are going to be sharing their work
through the concurrent sessions, they miss that.
And then, how do we have the discussions--
and I know I feel like I'm asking more questions than I'm
giving answers.
How do we deal with the fact that the overall tone is
we have to be in person, we have to be in person,
we have to be in person for this to work.
It's the being together in person.
It's the community engagement.
And then, when we are really sitting down and looking
at the combination of what are all the things that we would
need in order to ensure that everyone experiences
the same security and safety in the space,
and then when we talk about the opposite side of that
is how do we really, how do we really
then facilitate the same?
Folks in just the online space and setting,
even in a totally remote setting,
how do we ensure that that connectivity is there?
And for me, I just I feel extremely
overwhelmed by the topic and challenged a lot.
Because normal is a scary word for me.
I don't know if anyone else feels that way.
And so back to normal is actually really unsettling.
People continue to say it.
My son is one of those kids that still
masks when he goes to school.
We still mask when we go to the grocery store.
When we are out in public, we still mask.
We still mask when we travel.
And this idea of back to normal in all the many layers, I
think there's a facade that we're
supposed to be helping hold up.
And I do feel like organizations like mine
are sitting in that push and pull
about what's the facade that people desire right now?
So I'll hush because I don't know
that I answered as much as I just
shared some of the pieces that are on my mind
and that we think a lot about.
MATTHEW DOWELL: I can jump in a little bit about my work
with the professional organization in my field.
And the way I got into that was I
just said, hey, I'd like to help with this conference.
It's going to be in Baltimore.
I live in Baltimore.
I'd like to be helpful.
And somebody said, well, how do you want to help?
And I was like, well, if I'm going to do it,
I want to learn more about accessibility and things.
Because for the longest time I'd been pretty ableist to myself
about these things, then picked up
a second illness in 2017 that changed
my life pretty drastically.
And I was like, OK, I'm done with that.
And one of the things I think-- because there's
a question of how do we make, how do we
create better accessibility?
And sometimes those are technocratic solutions.
Sometimes it is very budgetarily based.
Who is underwriting this?
If you're a national organization
and you have funding from a major--
I mean, even in CTE in our field,
it allows things to be done that a small organization like CWPA
probably can't do.
And that's a real challenge, but it's also--
I think part of it, you have to go back and examine
the histories of the organization,
and how we got to the decisions that we got to,
and why are we doing what we're doing?
I'm going to quote Raymond Williams for a second time
here, but tradition is an active social process.
Tradition is influencing the decisions
we're making and biasing the decisions we're making.
And that's why normal is a scary word.
And for my organization-- and this is glossing a little bit,
but it's a long conference.
It has an Institute that precedes it.
I did the new writing program administrator
part of the conference in 2017 in Knoxville,
and I was in Knoxville for, I think, eight or nine days
and got funding from my dean to do that.
That was more than my travel budget, and it was great.
I loved it.
But the thing is, our conference-- and people
disagree with me on this-- but this conference,
this organization, has historically
been a summer vacation.
That's what it's been.
And people make it that, often historically bringing
their families.
You can think historically 20, 30 years ago
who these people that were coming to this conference.
And at some level, the academic conference model
is so outdated, we should just be done with it.
That's part of the conversation we should be having,
that traveling nationally and internationally--
and I've gone to conferences for 15 years,
and at some point not doing it--
I haven't done it because 2019 was in Baltimore,
I haven't been to a national conference since 2018
and might never go back.
And people-- I always want to stop.
These people have called me a lot.
I have the institutional privilege
to never need to go back.
I feel for grad students who need their work to be published
and early career people that need to make connections.
There is a bias to face to face interaction.
So that is a real thing.
I have the privilege to say I'm never going back
to a national conference.
And the one thing I realized being away
is, I don't want to take all the diabetic supplies.
I don't want to take the emergency things.
I don't want to get sick in a city
where my doctors aren't and end up in a hospital.
I don't want to do any of that for an academic conference.
But the bias of face to face as the value of it,
and, well, we've always done it this way.
If I can quickly move back to 2019.
That was the first conference where we had CART services.
And we had CART services because my dean
was willing to fund the CART services.
So you get these sponsors--
often in my world, the sponsors are textbook publishers,
and they'll sponsor breakfasts.
They'll sponsor a reception.
The Norton reception at 4 Cs, the big writing conference,
is elaborate.
There's just, historically, food everywhere.
But no one offers to fund accessibility
or accommodations.
We had to get outside CART funding.
But then people are up on the podium at breakfast,
at catered breakfasts, telling you about their annotation
software.
And they paid to have that right.
But no one's paying to fund accommodations
and accessibility.
And because of the traditions of the organizations,
I don't think a lot of organizations
are sitting there saying, we're having people
sponsor the wrong things.
BRIANNA BLASER: Emmanuelle, I see your hand.
You're muted.
EMMANUELLE MARQUIS: Sorry.
Just building on what Matt just said, just thinking.
So the example I'm going to take is
a large scientific conference that happens every year.
And what I'm finding is that their purpose is to make money
as a society, which I was not aware of,
but I guess I found very scary.
And in terms of disability inclusion,
there's a lot of inertia to reinvent what a conference is.
And I think all these societies are very risk averse.
So I've tried, and others have tried as well,
to try to have the conversation of finding new ways
and find allies.
Because we all know that accommodations benefit far more
than just the people that the accommodations were
designed for.
So having online participation to a conference
would benefit, say, if the conference is in the US,
all the Asian participants that can't come
will travel to the US due to Visa issues, for instance.
Or all the caregivers.
Or the environmentally conscious citizens that don't want
to fly or anything.
So it goes, I think it goes far beyond just
the disability discussion.
But what I find is that these societies just
don't want to consider this.
And so the question is, how do we
address the lack of imagination to be
able to reinvent what the model of a conference is
and what the purpose and how it can function?
And I think this is where I'm stuck at the moment.
And I think we have the same conversations
with funding agencies like NSF.
I was recently involved in a large proposal,
and the last step that we had to do was to travel to DC.
And there was no discussion possible about the fact
that some of us could not travel.
If we didn't travel, then we were out of the competition.
And that was a very eye-opening moment
for how NSF deals with this.
BRIANNA BLASER: That's definitely
what I say about those kinds of things.
Victoria?
VICTORIA CHAVEZ: Yeah.
So I'll share.
It's really difficult when you're not
in a position of power to be able to convince
these organizations and associations and conferences.
I have sent many emails and made many, many tweets,
calling in and calling out, offering solutions, offering
ideas.
But really, what I think it boils down to is
if you don't include us in the planning,
you're not going to be inclusive.
And so Brianna, with what you shared about a conference that
realized, presumably after they had booked the hotel,
that there would be these extra costs, if this had been
something that was thought of way, way early
in the planning when you're even considering what places are
going to be considered, what hotels are going
to be considered, those are things
that we can ask as organizers.
We can say, hey, by the way, we are planning already
ahead of time.
These are the things that we're going
to do to be an inclusive conference,
an inclusive meeting, whatever it may be.
What are going to be all of the costs associated?
And associations, once-- hotels and conference
venues and everything, they're going
to make money off of this.
And so if that's something that we ask ahead of time,
they can't back out afterwards.
And you can decide whether this is a place that you
want to host your event at.
And if conference venues start noticing,
oh, us trying to profit off of these things
mean that we're actually losing events,
then they're going to change their tone,
and they're not going to make these prices incredibly
egregious.
One of the things is after all of these cancellations
happened in 2020, all of these venues lost a lot of money.
And they are trying to make up for all of that loss
and realizing we can actually--
It's the same thing that happened with eggs, right?
Yes, there was an egg shortage, but there was no reason
eggs should be $12 a dozen.
And companies profited a ton, and they said, well,
I mean, why should we lower the price?
People are going to pay.
If people are going to pay, they're
going to keep doing these terrible, terrible practices.
And so I think having folks from the beginning who are thinking
about this and who can make sure that all of this
is included in the planning is really important.
And I think that there's also this idea of all or nothing.
And I think that making hybrid the norm
will have a huge impact.
And it will make things accessible to so many of us.
And also, I recognize that sometimes hybrid is not
going to work.
Sometimes there are things that if you
want to have a hybrid event, the people online are
going to feel like less than.
It's going to be a subpar experience.
And so there are some organizations that I've noticed
have been doing separate online and in-person events.
And I think that there is a lot of value in that
when it's done correctly.
Because it's the same thing where it's not
separate but equal like schools are, or schools
were, where it wasn't actually equal.
And so making sure that the way that these events are planned,
that the events are planned carefully and thoughtfully,
and that folks are making sure that there is--
especially in academia, where there can be a--
I mean, there is a tremendous sense of elitism.
And so, oh, well, you attended the virtual conference,
so your publication is less worthy
or has less credit because you didn't
go to the in-person event.
And so making sure that the way that we are organizing
these things and marketing them and the value
that we are assigning to them is actually equal.
I know I attended the NCORE conference online,
and they actually hosted the online conference
before the in-person conference, which I really
appreciated because we didn't feel like an afterthought.
Like, oh, shoot, we forgot, and now we
have to do the virtual one.
But it was very intentional, and it was a really, really great
experience.
And then they had the in-person one,
and there was some overlap in presenters,
but it wasn't necessarily a one to one.
And the online experience was phenomenal.
And I know ARA is also doing place-based.
I think is what they're calling the in-person, which I really
appreciate because just because I'm not in the room with you
doesn't mean I'm not in-person.
My person is physically here.
And so they're doing a place-based currently
in Chicago.
They did it last week in Chicago,
and in a couple of weeks, they're doing a virtual one.
And so it hasn't happened, so I don't
know what that'll be like.
But having avenues of you can participate.
Hybrid is a norm, and we'll try our best.
And we recognize that sometimes we
do want to have these separate spaces, and that's also OK.
And they're both just as valuable
and planned just as carefully.
And I think that that's really where the caveat is,
making sure that they really are planned carefully
and meaningfully and that they aren't-- and I'm all about
calling people out.
SIGCSE, for example, has been doing stuff hybrid,
and all of a sudden, they're like, oh, actually
hybrid is too expensive, so we're
going to do a virtual only thing.
But it's only going to be every other year.
So we're only going to be included every other year.
What does that mean?
What are you telling us when you're
saying that you'll only consider us once every other year?
And so just being really, really intentional
about what these policies are and how this marketing happens
is so, so important.
BRIANNA BLASER: I want to read a couple of things
from that chat, and then, Matt, I'll go to you.
Julie says, "it's frustrating that people, disabled people,
asked for virtual options for so long
and were told it can't be done, and then COVID
changed everything.
Now I feel sometimes people are pushing going back to normal
when there was no normal to begin with,
or the norm was inaccessible."
I agree with that 100%.
I think we definitely need to learn from some of what
we experienced in the pandemic.
Melissa asks, "How have you all been navigating
the return to normal?
I'm growing so weary of having to ask for access
and usually dealing with microaggressions as a result.
I'm moving toward just not asking, and thus,
not participating because I'm so tired.
Not good, but really a form of self preservation."
Sarah says, "I went to a conference in October,
and I regret it.
It's so much extra labor to plan around
my access needs without the mass disabling virus added on.
But this time, I had the added fun
of being asked why I was masking, despite signs
saying masks were required."
And Liana says, "When we did the year of online conferences,
I had such an amazing time going to the Zoom talks
and then having conversations with the authors in the Zoom
rooms.
I do know it's hard for people who
have children living at home or roommates, pets, et cetera."
Excellent.
And I'm going to go to Matt and then Stephani.
And then maybe we can talk more about
how we react to our institutions, rather than just
conferences.
MATTHEW DOWELL: I had a few comments on institutions,
so I'll hold those.
But I mean, I'm good at thinking about these things
and sometimes bad at arriving at plans and solutions.
So I respect all of those of you who do.
I think one thing really important
that has come up in a few ways is
the disability, the accessibility,
the inclusion has to be out of the executive committee.
And this is something we've been fighting in our organization.
The other major-- there's really three big organizations
in the writ comp world.
I'm sure I'll leave some out.
Conference on College Composition and Communication,
Rhetoric Society of America, and CWPA.
And Cs has made this change, and I respect them
for it, which is making disability represented
on the executive committee.
Jay Dolmage talks about retrofits and supplements
and how often is the accessibility and disability
committee at the service of the normal?
I've had to navigate the space where
how much I want to be involved in trying
to make the face-to-face conference accessible
when I don't want any involvement
in a face-to-face conference, especially an unmasked
face-to-face conference.
I'm 100% entirely opposed and have made that clear.
But the way that organization is set up,
we're at the service of both the local committee
and the executive committee.
I don't want to say at their beck and call.
That's a little bit rough.
But we don't have the authority to stand on our own.
Nobody even came and consulted us and said,
what are your thoughts as the accessibility and disability
committee on having a face-to-face conference.
And two quick comments.
I liked the comment about in-person.
I've seen some people argue that saying on site
would be better language, and I do
think language often matters in how we refer to these things.
Hybrid is difficult for all kinds of reasons.
But I think one of the things that gets left out--
and I don't have an assistant director.
I run the program on my own.
And I don't want to run hybrid events, actually run them.
Because if I'm being quite frank,
the people most willing to unmask
are going to be in person, and I don't
want to be in person with them.
And somebody has to run the hybrid part of the event
to make it hybrid, and that's not really a risk
I'm willing to take on from people who don't
want to accommodate my needs.
And it's difficult in a labor standpoint
because I run the program, and there's
three of us who have some access to tenure
out of 30 people in the program, so it's a complicated thing.
And then finally, the part that is entirely being, I think,
ignored--
and this isn't robust, full accessibility,
and I recognize that-- but masked face-to-face--
Stephani, I appreciated what you said about your all's
is going to be masked in-person.
That's kind of like the scarlet letter of things, that,
oh, how dare we have masked anything.
I don't know.
I know some organizations are having masks,
but that it has to be face-to-face
and it has to be unmasked is what we mean by the normal,
and that's part of the problem.
BRIANNA BLASER: Thanks.
Stephani?
STEPHANI Page: There was so much that both--
well, I'm saying both--
that Victoria said that I really want to pull forward.
Because I think a lot of times, too, organizations
don't, and institutions don't, want
to sit with the discomfort of when
a need for a change or a shift is recognized and communicated.
And sometimes I think why I appreciate
being with the organization that I am with
is because we take that time.
Never mind that I explained my back story,
but the rest of-- we're a really small team,
but the rest of the leadership team actually are disabled,
one being a Black woman.
Our executive director, Dr. Ershela Sims, is a Black woman.
And thinking in a really layered sense
about the totality of the experience
that you want to create for folks
is really at the forefront.
But I think there's also a sense that if you don't feel
like you are empowered all the time,
or you don't feel like you have the resources all the time,
or you don't feel like you have the knowledge all the time,
you should be open all the time.
For example, to give ourselves the runway to do more
and to make our meetings more accessible,
or she'll put her foot down and was
like, no, we're starting now for next year,
where the last two years we had really, really short runways.
Because it might make things feel a little more
uncomfortable for us in terms of operationalizing our ideas.
It might make things a little more comfortable for us
in terms of pursuing the financial resources to make
things happen, investing more time in the homework, more
time in the negotiations, which are always fun.
Negotiating with sites for conferences and meetings
are fun.
But you've got to, you have to sit with where you see
and have heard that your practices have resulted
or upheld someone else's exclusion or marginalization.
You just have to.
And I think in a lot of ways, organizations and institutions,
it's just not the way society works.
But again, that speaks to thinking
about systems of oppression and organization of power.
It's positioning themselves so that they don't have to.
And systems are also resistant to change.
But I think on an organizational level,
that constant confrontation is important.
And I don't mean confrontation like fights and arguments,
but that constant confrontation with the reality of what
it is to be oriented towards equity and justice, so then
what does that mean for your practices.
BRIANNA BLASER: Thank you.
I think we are just about time for our formal discussion here.
And I want to thank you all for your thoughts.
Seeing some of the comments in the chat and in the Q and A,
I think there's a lot to be said of how
we have to keep raising issues around disability inclusion
and pandemic practices.
Because it's not solved.
We're still at a really hard point.
So join me in thanking our panelists
and sharing their experiences and their perspectives.
And again, we have time now for some informal discussion.
I invite you to join us, but we also
understand some folks will need to hop off.