Recent coverage in higher education newspapers and social media platforms implies that chronic conditions, illnesses and disabilities are becoming more prominent amongst academics. Changes to funding ...structures, increased globalisation, marketisation and bureaucratisation of higher education have resulted in a performance-driven working environment where teaching workload and pressures to publish are further intensified due to excellence exercises in teaching and research. The result is low morale and an ever-rising number of reported mental health issues, burnout and stress-related illnesses within academia. This article explores some of these issues in the context of higher education institutions in the United Kingdom. We draw on our research and our experiences as speakers regarding ableism in academia to provide food for thought, stimulate a debate and raise awareness of those academics experiencing chronic illness, disability or neurodiversity, whose voices are not heard.
Andrew Culp and the Cultural Studies Association’s Performance Working Group Co-Chair Hui Peng discuss “relaxed performance” with Leigh Jackson, Director of Accessibility and EDI Programming at ...People's Light outside of Philadelphia, and Dr. Hannah Simpson, Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and author of "Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance" (Palgrave, 2022). This podcast is accompanied by a scholarly commentary by Patrick McKelvey.
It was recently argued that autism researchers committed to rejecting ableist frameworks in their research may sacrifice “scientifically accurate” conceptualizations of autism. In this perspective ...piece, we argue that: (a) anti-ableism vs. scientific accuracy is a false dichotomy, (b) there is no ideology-free science that has claim to scientific accuracy, and (c) autism science has a history of false leads in part because of unexamined ableist ideologies that undergird researcher framings and interpretations of evidence. To illustrate our claims, we discuss several avenues of autism research that were promoted as scientific advances, but were eventually debunked or shown to have much less explanatory value than initially proposed. These research programs have involved claims about autism etiology, the nature of autism and autistic characteristics, and autism intervention. Common to these false leads have been ableist assumptions about autism that inform researcher perspectives. Negative impacts of this work have been mitigated in some areas of autism research, but these perspectives continue to exert influence on the lives of autistic people, including the availability of services, discourses about autism, and sociocultural conceptualizations of autistic people. Examining these false leads may help current researchers better understand how ableism may negatively influence their areas of inquiry. We close with a positive argument that promoting anti-ableism can be done in tandem with increasing scientific accuracy.
Abstract
What does it mean to teach and learn about becoming human amidst disability and race in the elementary school classroom? This broad question guides my conceptual paper here in a manner that ...focuses on the fruitful possibilities at the intersections between the fields of disability studies and decolonial studies. The first part of this paper intends to explore how the concepts of "dysconscious racism" (King, 1991, p. 133) and "dysconscious ableism" (Broderick and Lalvani, 2017, p. 894) are useful tools through which to conduct an analysis of how our education system remains rooted in the practices of exclusion and/or conditional inclusion that continue to valorize a subjective self steeped in western colonial logics. Through decolonial studies and Global South disability studies, the second portion of this paper seeks to question the limits of strategies of resistance that reinforce western-centric conceptions of the self while also making a case for interdependence.
Stigma looms over the disability community.
The aim of this paper is to gain a deeper understanding of how societal stigma impacts depression among wheelchair users.
Mixed research methods were used ...on a sample of sixty full-time wheelchair users (M age = 43.78, SD = 15.50) whose disability was either acquired (n = 32) or congenital (n = 28). Data was collected via an anonymous Qualtrics survey. Qualitative and quantitative content analyses were performed.
Three major themes were identified from the qualitative analysis, including pity, discomfort, and invisibility which demonstrated that our participants felt frequently stigmatized in public. Several participants noted how assumptions were made about their competence, intellect, ability, and the entire disability experience based on the physical representation of their wheelchair. The quantitative results demonstrated a positive correlation between The Major Depression Index and the Able Privilege Scale-Revised, a scale constructed to examine personal power and privilege in relation to society depending on disability type.
Wheelchair users feel stigmatized by members of society, which is associated with increased levels of depression and perceived pity, discomfort, and invisibility.
In this article, we look at two biographies on the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and an academic article that share the common characteristic of adopting an approach to the life and work of this artist ...that presents ableist biases that are sometimes combined with gender biases. The effect of this perspective is to delegitimise Frida Kahlo as an artist, to invalidate her as a woman and to overshadow the political dimension of her life and work. Disabilty studies, as well as the experiential knowledge emanating from the disabled community, are called upon to propose possible counter-readings to hegemonic narratives.
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