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Stories of Academic Ableism: Teaching While DisabledStephanie L. Kerschbaum University of [email protected] / https://sites.udel.edu/kersch

Stories of Academic Ableism: Teaching While Disabled

As a graduate teaching assistant learning how to teach by running my own classrooms,

my fellow TAs and I frequently talk together—during office hours in our shared offices, over

drinks in the Union, during regular professional development sessions—about what we are

doing and how we are doing it. Aside from peer review, class discussion is probably the most

commonly-raised and discussed pedagogical strategy. Sometimes I am a little bit quiet during

these conversations, especially when they occur in front of the whole teaching staff. We talk

about managing classroom silences, motivating students to contribute, asking good questions.

But almost everyone seems to have as an ideal the classroom where conversation proceeds

“naturally,” where they don’t have to tell students to raise their hands when they want to say

something. In these moments, I lean back and slink down in my seat and try to push away the

creeping feeling of shame I feel because I can’t—I just cannot—do a classroom where people

just talk whenever they want. Because I’m deaf, I have to have an order for students’

contributions, and I have to be able to visually recognize who wants to talk. For a long time—a

long, long time—I think this means I’m not as good as my peers at teaching. I think that “good

teachers” are all excellent at leading lively classroom discussions where everyone in the room

just jumps in and talks and everything proceeds very smoothly without explicit intervention from

the teacher. i

This is a story of academic ableism.

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Kerschbaum / “Stories of Academic Ableism” / 2

According to disability theorist Fiona Kumari Campbell, “a chief feature of an ableist

viewpoint is a belief that impairment or disability (irrespective of ‘type’) is inherently negative

and should the opportunity present itself, be ameliorated, cured or indeed eliminated” (2009, 5).

In the story above there are some very obvious signs of academic ableism—ableism that I as a

graduate student had internalized and absorbed, in large part (I now think) because of my lack of

exposure and interaction with other disabled academics and teachers, and lack of encounters with

disability studies.

As a consequence, the image I had of my peers’ classrooms based on our conversations

about teaching reflected what I assumed was an “ideal” classroom. An undeniably ableist ideal,

described as it is with terms like “jump in” and “lively” and with “talking” as a dominant mode

of participation, not to mention as classroom underlaid by an unclear—and frankly, mythical—

notion of “natural” communication (see Yergeau, 2013). I internalized this image of “good

teaching” and focused most of my negative judgment and criticism on myself for not being able

to do things the way they should be done.

This is academic ableism, a set of negative beliefs and stereotypes about disability that I

used to compare myself against a normative “ideal” teacher who, I imagined, could, in fact, hear

everything her students were saying and thus create this ideal classroom environment. Indeed,

the very idea that the “right way” to do things is one that involves having a “full range of

normative capabilities” (Kerschbaum & Price, 2017) is a particularly insidious form of academic

ableism, and it pervades nearly everything that disabled faculty do when faculty jobs are

imagined through a hypernormative, hyperproductive, hyperflexible (Dolmage, 2017) neoliberal

framework (Dolmage & Kerschbaum, 2016).


Now, this story of mine is not unique. I didn’t put it at the start of this talk because I think

my experience is singular. If you are disabled in any way whatsoever and you are involved with

or connected to an institution of higher education, then you have a story, if not many stories, of

academic ableism. I am interested in how we tell these stories, what we can learn from their

content but also how they are shaped and what kind of interactions motivate them to be told.

I have been thinking about these questions and listening to and collecting stories that

disabled faculty tell about academic life for more than five years now. I’ve been reading and

writing about memoirs written by disabled faculty (Kerschbaum, 2014). I’ve sought out blog

posts and social media conversations about academic life and faculty work, such as those

emerging on Twitter through the hashtag #AcademicAbleism. I worked with Margaret Price for

three years to generate interview data from a diverse and broad-ranging pool of 33 disabled

faculty, inviting stories about when and how faculty disclose (or don’t disclose) their disability at

work. And I’ve collected examples of anecdotes and narratives shared in the midst of scholarly

articles (largely within disability studies) of faculty life and work (Kerschbaum, 2014, 2015).

In many ways, almost all of these stories are stories of academic ableism, but they are

also stories of powerful ingenuity, reminders that we disabled faculty are always creating new

ways of being and doing together with others in the face of ableist institutions and social

structures and cultural forces. Indeed, for that very reason, it feels really significant as I develop

and think through some of these ideas for the first time, to be delivering this talk here at

Berkeley, the place where Ed Roberts and the Rolling Quads fought for academic inclusion for

disabled students. It also feels significant because despite this powerful history and despite the

resources available at Berkeley as an institution, academic ableism is still pervasive on this

campus and unfortunately, everywhere in U.S. higher education (see, e.g., Vogler et al., 2017)


What I want to do in the remainder of this talk is to share one of the stories from the

interview study I co-conducted with Margaret Price. I want to use this story to show how some

forms of academic ableism emerge in the stories we disabled faculty tell about our experiences. I

also want to show how these stories reveal us inventing new ways of telling stories. Toward that

end, these stories can help change the existing cultures of academic ableism at our institutions,

and I invite all of you to join me in thinking about what else we can do, how else we can create

such change. Such work is important because of the way stories stick in our minds, because of

the way stories give us explanatory frameworks for how we interpret and understand the world

around us. Finally, I’ll conclude with some implications that my close analysis of just one story

of academic ableism might have for future scholarship and efforts to challenge cultures of

academic ableism at our institutions and in our departments and in our classrooms.

Let me start by giving you some context about the research study that generated the

interview data because that context is actually really important to understanding why this

narrative looks the way it does. In 2013, Margaret Price and I embarked on a qualitative

interview study of disabled faculty. We were interested in faculty members’ experiences with

disability disclosure, so we asked faculty members if they addressed their disability at work and,

depending on the answer to that opening question, asked a follow up: “Tell us a story about a

time when you did that” or, “Tell us a story about a time when you chose not to mention your

disability.” Together, we interviewed 33 faculty members with a wide range of different

disabilities, in different academic departments, at all ranks of faculty life, in different geographic

regions, with different gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, age and religious identifications. We

wanted to hear about as many different experiences as possible, and to learn about the different

ways that faculty members negotiated disability at work.


I also want to quickly share how I approach narrative, as I do have a very specific

definition of narrative that I am working with for this project. Put briefly, I understand narratives

as emergent interactional accomplishments that move away from the present moment to relate

one or more past, future, or hypothetical events with the goal of bringing that event (or those

events) to bear on the present moment (see, especially, Ochs and Capps, 2001; Labov and

Waletzsky, 1997). I’d be glad during Q&A to say more about how I’ve developed this

conception of narrative and how I’m using it to extract narratives across my broad-ranging data

set, but for now, let’s turn to Megan’s story.

The story is titled “This is what happens when your university doesn’t have accessible

technology,”ii a quote taken directly from the narrative (line 99). In this story, Megan, a blind

adjunct faculty member in the humanities who identifies as a white woman, recalls a day when

she wanted to show a film in her class, but her laptop wouldn’t connect with the classroom video

projector. The story is powerful for the way it showcases various forms of academic ableism, but

it is also powerful for the rich interactional dynamics that tell us something about how stories

about academic ableism are told. I’m going to move through some ways that academic ableism

emerges in this story, sharing excerpts from the narrative with you.

Institutional Ableism

First, as the title itself indicates—this is a story about inaccessible college and university

environments. As Megan’s words—reflected in the title—emphasize, this isn’t a story about

Megan having an individual problem. It’s a story of ableist infrastructure, a story of what

happens when your university doesn’t anticipate what happens when blind faculty lead

classrooms (Titchkosky, 2011, “disability as not-yet”). The result is that because of institutional

design, the spaces and materials available within classrooms expects a single or primary way of


moving with the available classroom environment and simply doesn’t accommodate those larger

needs (for more on this particular topic, see Hamraie, 2017). Here’s how Megan described it:

Example 1

25 MEGAN my laptop for some reason

26 wouldn't cooperate with the schoo:l

27 um

28 projector

29 to: you know get the video to come up on the large screen ((MAR touches knuckle of pointer finger to chin)) (0.6)

30 and so I had to have a colleague

31 um a good friend of mine

32 she teaches like the same level I do

33 and she was in grad school with me

34 um her office is right next to mine

35 so she set it up initially

36 but then I had to ask a student

37 to come help me

38 set up the video and play it

Megan not only has one of her colleagues (and it’s significant to note that Megan

explains that this colleague is a peer, “a good friend” (line 31), who “teaches like the same level”

Megan does (line 32), and who has known Megan for some time) help set up the video initially,

but then she also needs a student to help “set up the video and play it” (line 38) because her

laptop “wouldn’t cooperate” with the projector (lines 25-29). Later in the narrative, Megan

explains: “this isn’t my fault / that the technology isn’t accessible / that this is not my burden /

it’s the fact that I didn’t have the right cable / to connect my laptop / which is accessible / to /

university computer / and the fact that there is no provision on the computer / for me” (lines 114-

24).

This initial layer of academic ableism could be called “institutional ableism”, and it

points to the problems that arise when institutional environments exclude consideration of what

happens when a disabled faculty member or student or staff member enters the room. Already,


Megan has accommodated herself by purchasing and using a laptop that is accessible for her. But

that laptop in and of itself isn’t enough. She, like every other faculty member at a college or

university, also depends on institutional infrastructures to perform her job. In this case, this

involves the available computers and video projection technology in classrooms as well as

resources for connecting laptops with classroom computers. This story about a technology

mishap is ultimately a story about ableist institutional infrastructures that assume the bodies

using classrooms will all be able to move in particular ways.

Stereotype threat

A second form of academic ableism that emerges in this story appears when Megan

describes how she felt when she had to ask a student to help play the video. Here’s what she says

—and this transcript excerpt immediately follows Example 1:

Example 2

39 MEGAN and I felt so uncomfortable

40 because I thought

41 oh my gosh

42 here I am the instructor

43 not able to work the basic technology ((MAR grabs canned drink from off screen))

44 *they're going to think I'm totally incompetent you know *((MAR brings can to mouth and takes a long sip)) (0.6)

In this excerpt, Megan describes the discomfort she feels at having to ask for help—as

she puts it, “here I am the instructor / not able to work the basic technology” (lines 42-43). She

calls up stereotypes of disability as incompetence or lack (line 44). Psychologist Claude Steele

has written extensively about stereotype threat—most accessibly in his book Whistling Vivaldi

(2010)—as he explains how people in underrepresented groups who are aware of stereotypes

about their group often find themselves acting based on that consciousness, changing their


behavior in subtle (and sometimes dramatic) ways. Megan later explains how her awareness of

this stereotype led her to act differently towards her students.

Example 3

94 MEGAN I sort of said something

95 I I sort of fake grumbled you know

96 like I was

97 u:m

98 I was grumbling but I wasn't really grumbling

99 °I said well this is what happens when° your university doesn't have accessible technology:

100 MARGARET oh really

101 MEGAN and

102 so (1.3)

103 um ((MAR looks to the left and scratches nose))(0.7)

104 *they kind of *((brings hand to back of neck and tilts head back))

105 my students *didn't get it though *((drops hand away from neck))

106 they didn't really get what I was doing

107 I was sort of making a comment on the situation

108 MARGARET mhhhh ((nods))

109 MEGAN and pretending to be really annoyed

110 when I wasn't really annoyed

111 MARGARET mh-hmmm ((nodding))

112 MEGAN but

113 also trying to throw out the factor

114 that this isn't my fault

115 that the technology isn't accessible ((MAR nods emphatically))

116 that this is not my burden ((MAR nods))

117 it’s the fact that I didn't have the right cable

118 to connect my laptop

119 which is accessible

120 to

121 university computer

122 MARGARET mhmmm

123 MEGAN and the fact that there is no provision on the computer

124 for me

Megan’s consciousness of stereotypes linking disability with incompetence lead her to

perform a feeling that she acknowledges she wasn’t really feeling—because she wanted her

students to make the connection that the problem was the inaccessible technology, not her


disability. Note in particular lines 114-116, as she names what it is she was calling attention to:

“this isn’t my fault / that the technology isn’t accessible / that this is not my burden.”

Doing Disability 101

Finally, I want to share a third form of academic ableism that emerges in this narrative:

the responsibility that disabled faculty may feel around constantly doing “Disability 101” in

educating those around them with regard to everyday interactions with disability.

Example 4

128 MEGAN and I didn't really feel like (0.5)

129 using it as a teaching moment because

130 I think I like the idea of the teaching

131 that they they

132 observing being really implicit

133 I don't want to make it really super-explicit

134 I I feel like they learn better from watching me do things

135 than me explaining

136 this is how your disabled professor does

137 this thing

This segment comes at the conclusion of this narrative, as Megan reflects on this layer of

ableism that overlays all of the work she does in the classroom: the need to continually teach

students not only the course content, but also “how to interact with a person with a disability” or,

as she puts it, “explaining / this is how your disabled professor does / this thing” (lines 135-37). I

have sometimes seen this called “doing Disability 101”—because so many students come to

classrooms with relatively scant experience with disabled people, disabled faculty members often

find themselves in the position of having to do significant interactional and pedagogical work

around what it means to have a disability and how students should behave, understand, interpret,

or make sense of the difference that disability makes. Without such interactional work, disabled

faculty may find themselves experiencing negative judgements of their teaching, judgments that


appear in numerous locations including course evaluations (see, e.g., Brueggemann &

Kerschbaum, 2015), complaints to administrators (see e.g., Lewiecki-Wilson & Wilson, 2001),

or even through the adoption of sentiments of pity or sorrow (i.e., “it must be so hard for her”).

***

So at this point, I’ve unpacked three layers of ableism that emerge in Megan’s story. She

describes institutional infrastructures that don’t accommodate her ways of moving in the

classroom. She accounts for how stereotypes about disabled people affect the decisions she

makes about how to present herself in class. Finally, she explains the additional responsibility

she feels around educating her students about disabled people more generally, while also

acknowledging that she is just one blind professor, refusing to be a representative for all blind

professors.

It’s also really important to acknowledge that Megan’s disability identity isn’t the only

one at work in these examples. She identifies as white and female and works in a humanities

field that skews female. Certainly, her focus on disability in this narrative may be largely, if not

wholly, influenced by the fact that this story was shared during a research interview for a study

focused specifically on disabled faculty members and disability disclosure. But her framing here

is also certainly connected to the fact that being white and being female are both majority

identities in her field and her department. So while whiteness and femaleness may not be

identities that Megan is explicitly naming in this narrative, they are nevertheless salient to

consider as she describes her fear that students might perceive her as incompetent. She doesn’t

indicate here that her gender or her racial identity are contributing to students’ potential

perceptions of her incompetence. I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting that this means

Megan is not thinking about her raced and gendered identities. What I would say instead is that


she’s not pulling them to the forefront in this narrative, but that as we listen to these stories we

can and must ask: what identities are explicitly named, and which ones are un-named? When and

where are some identifications pulled out as more or less salient, and when and where are those

identifications deemed less-important, less-prominent? How are our interpretations of these

narratives informed by the intersections among these identifications?

In this final section of my talk, I want to address not just the forms of ableism (and

intersectional identities) that emerge in these narratives. I want to notice some things about how

stories of ableism emerge. In the case of Megan’s story, this is where the interview context

becomes incredibly important. This is not just any old research interview where Megan has been

invited to tell a story. This interview narrative emerged through data generation with disabled

faculty by disabled faculty in a project that centered disability from the outset (Lester and

Nusbaum, 2017; Kerschbaum and Price, 2017; Price and Kerschbaum, 2016). Megan’s choices

about how to tell this story in this place at this time is influenced by her conception of her

audience and her identification with Margaret as interviewer. Put directly: in telling this story,

Megan knows she is talking with another disabled faculty member as part of a study interested in

how disability matters to faculty life. To show how important this awareness is, and how

Megan’s orientation to Margaret as a fellow disabled faculty member is, I want to point to a

couple of interactional elements of this research interview that reveal the significance of this kind

of alignment and understanding to the stories that emerge during the interview study.

First, note in example 3 above, line 115 Margaret nods emphatically after Megan says

“this isn’t my fault / that the technology isn’t accessible” (line 114-15). Margaret’s nodding

serves as a backchannel, paralinguistic body movement that can signal active listening, as well as

agreement or alignment with what Megan is saying. So here, Margaret nods right as Megan


centers the problem not on herself as a disabled person but on the inaccessible institutional

infrastructure provided in the classroom, reinforcing Megan’s point, which is also a central tenet

of what is often referred to as “the social model of disability” (see, e.g., Crow, 1992; Lukin,

2017; Siebers, 2008)—that problems are located in inaccessible and ableist social structures and

environments, not in individual disabled people. Margaret’s signaling of alignment is highly

significant: her moves underscore her uptake of key critical elements of Megan’s narrative. In

particular, this kind of alignment is important to notice and pay attention to because many of the

stories shared by disabled faculty during these interviews are explicit counters to dominant

narratives about disability which might position the issue Megan recounts very differently. Now,

what’s also important to acknowledge is that because Megan is blind, I don’t know how much of

Margaret’s body language she picks up on (I’ve emailed her to open a conversation about this,

actually!) and here, some considerations about interview mode and modality are important.

In the interviews I conducted on the phone or on instant message I found myself

explicitly naming and describing my body language—for example, during one phone interview, I

verbally say aloud “right” and “right right” much more frequently than I do in an in-person

interview; in one instant message interview, I typed “nodding & laughing, actually” into the

instant message window when I reacted to something—because with those modalities, I’m aware

that people can’t see what I’m doing with my body even though I’m doing it because I want to

be an active listener or because I am enthusiastic about what is being shared. However, in an

interactional context where different kinds of information is—or is not—being used we have to

approach the analytic situation a little bit differently.

A second significant interactional element of this narrative is Megan’s use of “you

know”. There are nine instances in the full transcript of this narrative where Megan uses the


phrase, which also acts as what linguist Deborah Schiffrin (1987) calls a discourse marker (lines

29, 44, 48, 62, 70, 79, 82, 95, 125).iii According to Schiffrin, “y’know” can serve several

important discursive functions: first, it can serve as “a marker of meta-knowledge about what

speaker and hearer share” and second, it can serve as “a marker of meta-knowledge about what is

generally known” (1987, 268). Put another way, the phrase “y’know” does significant work in

checking to ensure that speaker and audience share knowledge that can then enable additional

storying, additional conversation to proceed. Take another look at example 2. In line 44, Megan

identifies her fear that a disability stereotype might be applied to her: “they’re going to think I’m

totally incompetent you know.” Here, her use of “you know” may be serving as a potential

check-in with Margaret to ensure that Margaret understands that stereotype, recognizes it as

general knowledge about disability.

Both of these examples—Margaret’s body language and backchannel feedback to Megan

during the interview and Megan’s use of the discourse marker “you know” at regular points in

her telling emphasize the important role that interviewers play as audiences for the narratives

they solicit. While many interviewing textbooks suggest the value of interviewers being neutral

recipients of interviewee’s narratives, so as not to overly influence the telling and the stories that

are ultimately shared, it is nevertheless important to remember that interviewers are never

completely neutral. When we interview people, even when we are asking them about events or

phenomena we have no knowledge about and which are not in any way aligned with our own

experience, we are still behaving, acting, responding. Interviewees do significant interactional

work during interviews to figure out who it is they are talking to, to determine what kind of

audience is receiving the narratives they are telling (see, e.g., Wortham, 2000; Frank 2000). That

interactional work is always consequential for the narratives that ultimately get told.


With that assumption as a baseline—assuming that interviewers are always doing

interactional work to establish a conversational rapport with interviewees, to frame and

contextualize the conversation that unfolds so that the interviewee’s words will help contribute

knowledge and information towards the research questions being asked—it feels to me even

more important that academic research include more data generation projects like the interview

study Margaret and I collaborated. We need more studies that are led by disabled faculty and

which center disability throughout. Such centering isn’t just about including or moving with

disability in academic research and knowledge-generation, although that’s deeply important to

me. It’s also about realizing new ways to tell stories.

Let me now return to the story I shared at the start of this talk. I am telling this story from

the vantage point of a tenured associate professor, in my 12th year as a faculty member. But I still

vividly remember—or at least I think I remember—graduate student me. And graduate student

me didn’t have any idea that disability studies was relevant to her. She thought she was just

making a few friends at a conference, and doing the best she could to attend panels that would

have scripts (because as a grad student, my experience with conference interpreting was less-

than-high-quality). So when she thought about disability, she really thought of it as a problem, as

something she had to deal with because she was the one with the disability, not something that

other people were in any way responsible for helping or contributing or sharing. I cringe at that

feeling when I remember my graduate student self. And I feel such a huge difference between

Megan’s “this isn’t my fault” and my grad student self slinking into her chair feeling ashamed.

While I am kind of casting these two stories as opposites in a way, there is actually

something of a continuum between them, a way we can think about the connections between

them in terms of how those around us, when we tell stories, make it possible to frame the world


in particular ways. Graduate student me didn’t know—wasn’t connected to—other deaf

academics in a way that might have led to different awareness or framing around disability, to

different ways of telling stories about disability. Graduate student me didn’t have someone to say

“y’know” to.iv And in Megan’s story, as I acknowledge above, there are silences—there are gaps

in her “y’know”s, things about her that she doesn’t bring out, for a wide range of possible

reasons, all of which are conditioned by factors such as gender and race and age and faculty

status and discipline and socioeconomic class and geographic region and all sorts of things —

but, to return to Campbell’s key term, they are definitely “contours of ableism.”

This is why we need these stories. This is why we need disabled faculty doing research

with disabled faculty, centering disability all along. With such stories, I hope we can change the

culture of academic ableism and create a different backdrop against which disabled faculty work,

live, teach, and research.

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http://www.technorhetoric.net/18.1/coverweb/yergeau-et-al/index.html

http://cjds.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cjds/article/view/295

i Interestingly, as I’ve reflected on my own stories of teaching while disabled, I’ve noticed a lot of shifts and movements around those stories, as I have addressed my disability differently in the classroom—in different ways, with different degrees of emphasis. I began my teaching career not talking about disability at all to developing a rather elaborate first-day-of-class script and am back to not openly engaging it quite as much (although I always do still mention why there are interpreters in class), but finding too that as I move into new kinds of courses (I’m currently teaching for the second time a disability studies class for undergraduates) that the positioning around my disability in the classroom is shifting once again.ii Or, alternatively, I could imagine titling the narrative “I don’t want to make it really super-explicit” – the choice of title is an interpretive, analytic move that significantly affects how readers (and analysts) are orienting to the narrative. I’m continuing to dwell with this narrative as I listen to what it is telling me about how to tell a story about disability, and my movement between titles is one point of the ongoing nature of this particular interpretation.iii Margaret also uses “you know” at one point, in line 88.iv Thanks to Jay Dolmage for this observation.

web viewstories of academic ableism: teaching while disabled. stephanie l. kerschbaum . university...

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