Ep. 34 – How Do We Support Members of Our University with Disabilities?

[00:00:00] Karma: You’re listening to LatinXperts, a podcast of Latino Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. LatinXperts features the voices of faculty, staff, and students, as well as friends and alumni of the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, the Latino Research Institute and the Center for Mexican American Studies.

[00:00:32] Karma: Join us for this episode of LatinXperts.

[00:00:43] Karma: Thank you for listening today. This episode is special because it is an episode of both LatinXperts, the podcast of Latino Studies at UT and Audio QT, the podcast of LGBTQ Studies at UT. I’m Karma Chavez and I host both shows and our subject matter today really lent itself to reaching both audiences.

[00:01:05] Karma: The question we’ll consider today is how do we support members of our university community with disabilities? Disability Justice and the academic project of Disability Studies have made important interventions into the ways people think about subjects such as access, time, productivity, normality, citizenship, the body, politics and much more.

[00:01:29] Karma: Although some critics of early disability rights and Disability Studies work noted a lack of attentiveness to the multiple systems of power that constitute the lives of people with disabilities, a growing body of work places intersectionality at the center. Creating space for folks such as Latinx people with disabilities, queer and trans people with disabilities, and queer and trans Latinx people with disabilities.

[00:01:54] Karma: What does this work look like for those who labor and study in universities? The Crip Narratives Collective is a $572,000 Mellon Foundation Award that will fund a regular convening of students with disabilities, post-graduate fellows, faculty members, and artists over a three year period at UT Austin.

[00:02:16] Karma: Through small and large group conversations, public events and publications, the collective will build a network of academic mentorship for people with disabilities at UT Austin and beyond. The program was one and will be overseen by Dr. Julie Minich, Associate Professor in the Departments of English and Mexican-American and Latina/ Latino Studies and Professor Allison Kafer, Associate Professor in the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies and the Department of English and Director of the LGBTQ Studies program. Julie and Allison, welcome to this joint episode of LatinXperts and Audio Q.

[00:02:54] Julie: Thank you so much for having us.

[00:02:55] Alison: It’s great to be here.

[00:02:56] Karma: Well, I’m excited to talk to you. know, I love you both. First of all, congratulations on getting this grant. That’s so awesome. Where did the idea to collaborate on the Crip Narratives Collective come from?

[00:03:08] Julie: I think a big thing that it came out of was just noting a kind of tension here at the university that there’s really amazing disability scholarship, disability activism, disability justice work happening on campus and happening in a lot of different places on campus.

[00:03:25] Julie: It’s a really exciting place and time to be working on these intellectual questions to be researching and teaching about Disability Studies and about disability justice. But it’s also a very, very, very inaccessible campus. Just as like one of the most obvious examples, we had a hard time even like finding our way into the building today.

[00:03:48] Julie: Especially coming out of the Covid Pandemic where the move to online work made so many things academically, both more inaccessible but also ironically more accessible. And then the sudden shift back to everything in person did the same thing. Like things that had been suddenly smoothly accessible, weren’t anymore.

[00:04:10] Julie: But then also things that were rendered inaccessible were suddenly accessible again. And so it was just this moment of like really shifting and thinking about access in these new ways. And it just seemed like a good moment to not work in spite of these tensions, but sit inside them and try to see, what we can do with and against and in spite and because of them.

[00:04:31] Karma: Mm. Did you wanna add anything to that, Alison?

[00:04:35] Alison: Yes. I agree with everything Julie said. I also think that there are specific structural things that were happening at UT around this time. So a few years ago we got a Disabled Faculty Equity Council started. There also was a move to start a disability cultural center, akin to the Gender and Sexuality Center and the Multicultural Engagement Center.

[00:04:58] Alison: And so having these structures in place that were about making space for disability justice work, but also doing the kind of intersectional solidarity work made us think about okay, so what would it then mean to get a group of folks who were doing academic work around Disability Studies, but are also trying to think about ways to shift conditions here at UT and at other institutions to become more accessible?

[00:05:25] Alison: I also think that all of these initiatives, so the kinds of tensions that Julie was describing and also, one of the rationales behind those organizations starting is that, I think in many ways at the institutional level, disability has been thought of as this thing that other people help with.

[00:05:46] Alison: Because the people who are quote unquote suffering need assistance. And so I think in imagining the collective, we were thinking about what would it look like for disabled faculty to be talking to disabled students and disabled staff about how to navigate the institution. So really thinking about how disabled folks at various levels of the institution can do collective peer mentoring. And what does that look like, both in terms of scholarship, but also community gathering at the place.

[00:06:19] Karma: Mm-hmm. I have so many questions. So one I want to maybe get some things clarified that folks may not be familiar with.

[00:06:26] Karma: So would you say disabled people or people with disabilities, which I realize people have different points of view, I’m not gonna ask you that question, but, who is included in that category?

[00:06:36] Alison: I think one of the great interventions of some of the critical work and Disability Studies and the disability justice movements that you alluded to at the beginning is a real expansion of what that means.

[00:06:48] Alison: So typically at universities, the only people who counted under that label were people who had official diagnoses and went through official offices to get those diagnoses recognized. And for us, I think we’re more interested thinking about those folks, but also people who, for all sorts of reasons might not have that kind of official documentation, but are being impacted by ableism at the institution.

[00:07:13] Alison: So people who have undiagnosed conditions, people who have conditions that might not be recognized. So a lot of environmental illness, for example, chronic pain, chronic fatigue, those things aren’t always documented in the ways institutions require. So having a much more expansive idea about who’s encompassed in the group.

[00:07:35] Karma: So another question I had then for Julie, I’m gonna pitch it to you first, in your title for this group, you used the word Crip, which some might think of as a slur. So can you explain?

[00:07:46] Julie: Yeah. So the word Crip comes out of I guess people would say affectionate reclaiming, right?

[00:07:53] Julie: Like it comes from initially activists taking a slur and making it their own, but they don’t use the full slur, right?

[00:08:03] Karma: Mm-hmm.

[00:08:04] Julie: Crip can mean a lot of different things. We have together and separately in our own work have done a lot of grappling with that term. And we have noted that there are ways in which people have tried to make the term analogous to queer.

[00:08:20] Julie: But I think that for me to use that comparison is helpful as a starting point, but not to just end there. Like it’s used in that same way. Because Crip has gotten very taken up in academia in certain ways. So in some circles, it’s seen as the hippier, edgier, more theoretical term.

[00:08:40] Julie: It can also be seen as the more in your face term. It can be seen as the more alienating term precisely because of the way it’s taken up in academic circles. And there’s a question of if it’s used by academics who don’t necessarily always have connections to disabled people and communities of disabled people, not everyone is comfortable using the term to describe themselves.

[00:09:05] Julie: And for us, I think these contradictions of the term are what make it so important to use. We were actually discussing on the way here when we put out a call to bring people into the Crip Narratives Collective, what kind of work will that term Crip be doing for us?

[00:09:25] Julie: Is there a possibility that there will be people who won’t see themselves in that term, and what would that mean for the work of the collective?

[00:09:32] Karma: Mm-hmm. Is there anything else you wanted to say? You’ve also used that term for a long time in your work, Alison.

[00:09:37] Alison: Yeah. I echo everything Julie said.

[00:09:39] Alison: I have been frustrated by the way that the term that really had this grounding in activist communities in some ways has been seen as an academic term. And so thinking about losing that activist history, I also think this might be a place to also foreground that a big dimension of the activity of the grant is to bring in disabled artists.

[00:10:00] Alison: And a lot of artists who are doing work around disability, I think particularly thinking about disability in relation to sexuality or relation to race, are using the word crypt to describe the work that they do. I think thinking about how the term has different meanings and different histories is part of the work we wanna do is questioning it.

[00:10:21] Alison: I also think that in the time I’ve been at UT and trying to be part of various initiatives to increase accessibility of all sorts or to combat academic ableism of all sorts, there are times that the terms that the group of people doing that work has used to define themselves. So thinking particularly about disabled people, the institution has then returned to us and said, you need to use this other language because it’s more acceptable.

[00:10:51] Karma: Hmm.

[00:10:52] Alison: And so I think that Crip does that kind of assertive work of self-definition and self claiming that’s harder, in some ways, easier for the institution to reclaim in the ways Julie was talking about. But in some ways, I think it’s harder for the institution to incorporate.

[00:11:10] Alison: I can’t imagine an institutional body saying, no, you must use this language of Crip and describing the work that you’re doing. Right. And so that’s kind of appealing and interesting, right? Yeah.

[00:11:19] Karma: So this is helpful, I think, for people to think about the use of that word, but in the context of the use of other words.

[00:11:25] Karma: So I guess one thing I wanna ask you about then is how does academic mentorship differ when we’re talking about disabled people? What are the particularities that you’re really thinking with and through? I know Julie, if you wanna start

[00:11:41] Julie: Yeah. I really love this question because one of the things that it calls to mind is , I guess the nuts and bolts of disabled mentorship would come down to questions of like of disclosure or questions of when is an accommodation or a diagnosis or like official documentation of a disability, when is it like a strategic opening that gives you a kind of way to move in an institution?

[00:12:08] Julie: And when is it a closing down of possibilities? And these are questions that disabled people in academic spaces are negotiating all the time and talking with each other about all the time. Like on my syllabus, I have a statement that says, , if you need accommodations, you don’t have to have a documented disability.

[00:12:30] Julie: You just have to talk to me about the accommodations you need. You don’t have to tell me the reason. Right? And that’s a way of basically inviting students to start thinking about themselves and the accommodations that they need outside of a kind of institutionally regulated framework.

[00:12:46] Julie: But we do this kind of work all the time with each other as friends, like we confront situations, right? And ask each other, what do you think about this situation? And how do you think I should respond to this situation?

[00:13:00] Karma: What do you think, Alison?

[00:13:01] Alison: Yeah, I love the way you framed disclosure around thinking through when it opens things up and when it closes things down. Cause I think it does do both of those things, so I think academic mentorship for disabled people, right? That’s what you asked. Exactly. Yeah. All of the things that we have been taught that the university is about, so rigor, productivity, achievement, clarity, coherence, stability, like these are also things that get held against disabled people for not being able to manifest them in the way that we’re supposed to.

[00:13:35] Alison: And so I think mentoring also in a way that can be really terrifying, but I think it can also help us think about how to articulate a different set of values of what the university is or can do.

[00:13:47] Karma: Mm-hmm.

[00:13:48] Alison: So thinking about moving through time and space differently and how does that shift what happens in the classroom?

[00:13:56] Alison: And then I think the mentoring can offer a chance to help us give each other language about how to describe that and in syllabi or in the kinds of statements that we have to generate in evaluating our work. I also think that many of us who are out or perceived as disabled have encountered other people describing our bodies or our minds in ways that we would not do so.

[00:14:25] Alison: And so figuring out how to intervene in those kinds of conversations. I mean I have seen an email chain where someone described the way my hands look and work in ways that I would never have wanted them to do in an official way. And so I need other disabled people to help me think through how to intervene in that, especially when those kinds of things are done purportedly as modes of support.

[00:14:49] Julie: Right. I think I wanted to also come back to the Crip question, and I wanted to say that sometimes the language of mentorship is language that I really resist. And Karma, you and I have had conversations in which, I have been resistant to this language because sometimes I feel like mentorship is institutional code language for teaching you how to conform to the expectations and mandates of the institution, right? Rather than making demands of the institution. And so thinking about our earlier conversation around the word Crip, we don’t use, we don’t say Crip. Mentorship. In our grant, we say disabled mentorship. But if I put those two words together and I think about what Crip mentorship is, I would think of Crip mentorship as not just mentorship around like how to succeed in an institutional space according to institutional norms, but like mentorship around like how to resist the institution.

[00:15:55] Julie: And work against the institution and transform the institution and turn the institution like it’s mentorship around transformation, not just of each other in an institutional space, but also what the institution is.

[00:16:09] Karma: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[00:16:11] Alison: And I think that’s one of the reasons we leaned into the language of collective, because I think that means not figuring out how to navigate the institution so that you as an individual can thrive, but how to navigate and transform the institution so many more people thrive.

[00:16:27] Alison: Right? So it’s about bringing other people along.

[00:16:30] Karma: Yeah. I love that. So this is a three year grant?.

[00:16:35] Alison: Yes,

[00:16:35] Karma: You’ll be working on this for three years. So what do you imagine the practical work of this to be looking like, say starting in the fall and throughout the duration?

[00:16:46] Julie: So we’re going to form a cohort. And so as part of the grant, we’re gonna have six faculty members, including the two of us. We will also have over the life of the grant, two postdocs, two graduate fellows, and two undergraduate fellows. Is that, are those numbers correct?

[00:17:04] Alison: It might be four undergraduate fellows. I’m not sure.

[00:17:08] Julie: So it’ll be faculty, postdocs from outside the institution, graduate students and undergrads. And we will convene regularly to discuss our work. Each faculty fellow will also organize a residency with a Crip artist on campus. There are resources in the grant to ensure that those artists are paid and paid well for their time, here at the University of Texas. So that instead of \what often happens in relationships between scholars and artists, where artists struggle to earn a living and scholars make a living, writing about the work of artists. This will be a chance, for the artist and the scholar to collaborate meaningfully and where real resources will be directed to the artist as well. .

[00:17:57] Alison: I think the other thing about the artist piece is that that’s particular to disability. Is that art by disabled people has often been seen as a kind of therapy and not recognized as artistry. And so we really wanted to, with the budget and the planning, stress that these are artists making art and it has value.

[00:18:23] Alison: As a creative intervention in the world, it may also have a healing effect on the person creating it or the people encountering it, but wanting to insist that the fact of the person who made it having a disability doesn’t mean that the creation should be understood only in medical or therapeutic terms.

[00:18:47] Alison: So paying disabled artists is actually really radical because often it’s this assumption that there is no need for payment because it provides some healing to the artist.

[00:18:57] Karma: Right, right. Yeah, that makes sense. So I can’t do the math on how many people, but the collective itself, and is there gonna be an opportunity for other people outside of the collective to participate, to benefit from the materials you’re creating, that kind of thing.

[00:19:14] Julie: Yes. First there will be events with public events with the artists that are designed for the entire university community. But also we have the mentorship component and the component where our meetings as a collective we will be talking about our work, but we will also be talking about navigating institutions.

[00:19:36] Julie: We will be talking about, and this is where, cross disability, cross rank, we want to think of this as a place, not just where faculty are mentoring postdocs and postdocs are mentoring students, but where we are all mentoring each other. And our goal is to also produce writings about our work together that are specifically aimed at like how we are envisioning institutional transformation.

[00:20:01] Alison: I think another thing we’re hoping to do in terms of affecting people at the university beyond the group and the collective is, I don’t think that most events at the university are planned with access in mind. And so often access if it happens is because of a specific person advocated it for that specific event.

[00:20:24] Alison: But what would it look like if every at UT, large or small, built access into it from the beginning. And so I think we’re hoping with these residencies and these series of public events to really start to educate the broader campus about what an accessible event might look like or do. And I think even expanding our ideas of what an accessible event might look like or do.

[00:20:48] Karma: Hmm. I love that so much because I think even in, events, I am always trying to think about accessibility, but I think I’d put an emphasis on the trying. And I think that in my experience, seems to be about as good as it gets around here too. , I’m so thrilled about this. Will there be, a website or an Instagram or, whatever the kids do so that we can follow your work?

[00:21:11] Alison: We had not thought about that, but yes, we should create one of the things that the kids do.

[00:21:15] Karma: I mean, you have these undergraduate fellows. I think they, they love that thing. I just, I love hearing about what you’ve described today, what the work’s gonna be like, and I think it would be great if we could follow that in an easy, technologically accessible way.

[00:21:27] Alison: There you go. Yes.

[00:21:28] Karma: Last question. We’re about running outta time here, but I did wanna ask you, so in addition to this, you two have recently just published a co-edited book called Crip Genealogies, with a couple of other colleagues with Duke University Press. I’m wondering what you hope to accomplish with that book and how it might or might not relate to the Crip Narratives Collective.

[00:21:47] Alison: The book opens with an invitation and it very explicitly names different groups of people who might not have found a home in Disability Studies and says that we are hoping that the book offers a different encounter with the field.

[00:22:03] Alison: So thinking about people, I think we are really thinking about people who, and we are these people who have been told that Disability Studies or disability doesn’t belong in conversations about race or sexuality or gender, while also being really frustrated by conversations that have been at work in the field that don’t talk about disability except in isolation from everything else.

[00:22:31] Alison: And so really thinking about what would it look like to have a field, a group of people, not necessarily a field, but a group of people who are always thinking about disability in relationship to as entangled with in collections about, quote unquote the field of Disability Studies.

[00:22:51] Karma: Well, Allison, I think what you said there that’s a great way for us to wind up the show today. Allison, Julie, thank you so much for being here today.

[00:23:00] Alison: Thank you, Karma. This was really fun.

[00:23:02] Julie: Thank you, Karma.

[00:23:03] Karma: Our guests today were professors Alison Kafer and Julie Minich. They are the creators of the Crip Narratives Collective, which is a Mellon funded award that’s gonna take place at the University of Texas over the course of the next three years.

[00:23:17] Karma: So be on the lookout on their Instagram or something when they come up with it. So this again has been a special joint episode of LatinXperts and Audio QT and I’ve been your host. Karma Chavez, and thank you so much for listening.

[00:23:32] Alison: Hi all. This is Ashley Nava-Monteros, the Communications Associate Latino Studies.

[00:23:38] Alison: Thank you for listening to this week’s episode. Make sure to check out the Latino Studies Instagram page. Follow us @LatinoStudiesUT to keep the conversation going.