ID: A white background has “Disability and (Dis)Rupture in Pandemic Learning: Crip Priorities in Research During Global Crisis” written in black. The words before the colon are in bold and a larger font than the other; it is left-aligned on the page. In the bottom right hand corner is “Hannah S. Facknitz (they/she) and Danielle E. Lorenz (she/her)” written in black. There is a green botanic theme on the rest of the background; there are leaves and waves in different shapes and shades.
This is the second post in the Pandemic Methodologies series. See the introductory post for more information.
By Hannah S. Facknitz and Danielle E. Lorenz
In June, as part of the Pandemic Methodologies Twitter Conference, we wrote about our precarity as disabled graduate students (especially as educators) in Canada during the COVID-19 Pandemic. We wanted to talk about how the expanded vulnerability of disabled people during this pandemic and eugenicist responses to the crisis specifically affected people like us–multiply marginalized, disabled graduate students. Our COVID-19 lives have been brutal, deeply ruptured, and drained by institutions, especially those of higher education. Danielle and I attend separate universities–Alberta and British Columbia, respectively–but our experiences intermingle with and echo each others’ and those of other graduate students in Canada. Both of us are chronically ill, physically disabled, and neurodivergent. Danielle is a first in the family student, working class, and a woman. Hannah is Mad, fat, bisexual, and genderqueer.
The pandemic meant many educators became familiar with assistive technologies like auto captioning or easy-to-read fonts that, on the surface, improved certain disabled peoples’ ability to access certain spaces. Several committees Hannah served on for UBC’s return-to-campus planning adopted a new interest in accessibility approaches, methods, and ideas; incremental shifts that they could see percolating through the academy. This access was imperfect and uneven, however, instituted ad hoc, and only when faculty or administrative interest materialized. Much of the access, too, did nothing to address the structural inequities that explicitly and intentionally exclude disabled people from academia. Even when surface level accessibility was desirable, we discovered that disabled graduate students like us (as well as undergraduates, albeit in different capacities) were/are doing much of the work of educating faculty and staff on access pedagogy, technology, and ethics. It was the most precarious and multiply marginalized graduate students who performed this access labour. The pandemic in higher education was an historic moment that revealed with astonishing clarity the violent, explicit, intentional ableism of academia, and for folks like us–people who couldn’t often muster enough denial or privilege to move through violent institutions–the pandemic was too much. Continue reading →
