‘Welcoming Different Voices’ Hosted by Disability Studies Program, Eastern Washington University May 17-18, 2019 EWU Spokane, Spokane Washington
Our goal is to provide scholars, researchers, advocates and other community members a platform to work together to improve opportunities available for disabled people as a matter of social justice.
Neoliberal institutions such as academia have not expected disabled women to show up, as Tanya Titchkosky makes explicit, whether it is in terms of the built environment, teaching methods, or access to scholarship. My paper enters the interstices, self-reflexively contributing to/from/within those marginal(ized) spaces as a disabled graduate student. Using feminist disability studies and autoethnography approaches, I engage with the concept of ‘slow scholarship’ to imagine and re-imagine disabled academics’ relationships with/in academic institutions deeply permeated by neoliberal influences of time: the speeding up of time, not having enough time, and increased demands for productivity. I want to spend some time thinking through the embodied experience and material reality “of this workplace and worktime,” which is something that is rarely discussed (Mountz 1245). Specifically, I focus on stories by disabled and precariously positioned women – in texts, articles, blogs, digital stories, and conversations – which reflect the desire to “‘be’ differently in academia” (Black 23). These bottom up, creative, collaborative, storytelling approaches not only reveal structures which marginalize and limit membership in the academic community, but they also shift attention towards re-imagining our physical and cultural spaces to include and anticipate disability, and to re-story different ways of being in academia.
