The History Department’s DEI committee is pleased to welcome Jay Dolmage to speak on Monday, March 17 at noon in Old Horticulture room 255 on the subject “From Academic Ableism to Access and Inclusion.”
Higher education has built and enforced definitions of disability that are primarily medical: we see disability all over our campuses, in all kinds of different departments, but it is understood as a series of unwanted symptoms, a problem to be solved – not as the positive identity and culture most disabled people understand it to be. In the history of disability in higher education, a rights-based approach has often meant that disabled students are invited in the door, they are counted and added to diversity statistics, but then the culture of the University makes no changes to account for their presence, participation, and thriving. On the other hand, we have had an opportunity, over the last five years, to redesign higher education in ways we never have before. What if we allocated all of the energy we spend on adapting to an old educational regime based on timing and testing into building a new one, one in which disabled students don’t always need to ask for accommodations but instead their needs are expected?
In this presentation and discussion, some possibilities for building a more accessible classroom and campus will be suggested and explored. Come and share your own experiences, ideas, challenges and questions.
About the speaker:
Jay Dolmage is committed to disability rights in my scholarship, service, and teaching. His work brings together rhetoric, writing, disability studies, and critical pedagogy. His first book, entitled Disability Rhetoric, was published with Syracuse University Press in 2014. Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education was published with University of Michigan Press in 2017 and is available in an open-access version online. Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability was published in 2018 with Ohio State University Press. He is the Founding Editor of the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies.
This talk will be streamed on Zoom with live captions.