Access as praxis: Pedagogies to nourish just imaginations


Nathan Viktor Fawaz, University of Alberta; Danielle Peers, University of Alberta

This session opens us to the question: What does it mean to be disabled in and by the higher education system? In mixed-ability settings – particularly institutions imagined around and for non-disabled people and normative rituals of acting and interacting, co-crafting an uncompromisingly disability affirming experience often does not include affirming the needs of the disabled leaders who are holding space for institutional access. Yet, we often find ourselves in positions of leadership in mixed ability spaces, not only because our arts and sciences of survival equip us with skill-sets for leadership, but —and most often because— if we are not leading, not holding the space with skill and precision we will not have access to these spaces at all, let alone to access with dignity, let alone access to space that has the chance to be affirming. Over the past three years, our professional collaboration has taken many forms: supervisor, doctoral student; co-developers and co-instructors of a graduate level course which takes a Disability Justice approach to integrating disability perspectives into adapted physical activity (APA) practice; as well Intern and Academic Lead, Equity Praxis and Systemic Ableism in the Office of the Vice Provost: Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion who, along with other members of the Council on Systemic Ableism are tasked with imagining the university’s new Disability Access Hub. Which is to say, as people with lived experience of disability and members of disability communities within and beyond the academy, we find ourselves in a constellation of leadership opportunities within the university to support individuals and institutions poised to interact with members of our community who historically and in an ongoing way determine or delimit our access to “life chances” (Spade, 2015). Throughout this time, we have had opportunities to think deeply about and within the scholarship of critical disability and critical Mad studies. As well, we have had opportunities to think broadly about access practices which may be enacted in a range of settings, with a range of resources available, toward a range of desired harm-reductive and transformative ends. And, we have had the chance to consider and to follow several pedagogical impulses (Springgay and Rotas, 2015; Springgay and Truman, 2019) toward supporting the alignment of individual and institutional best intentions with the capacity to act, react, and interact in accessible and affirming ways. It has been our experience that teaching in favour of axiological articulations that can support Disability-Justice informed action to arise in novel contexts by non-disabled students, practitioners, and institutional leaders requires outlining and intervening in several of what we have come to refer to as ‘technologies of dehumanization’. These technologies of dehumanization each come through a historical context into modern articulations which are identifiable and can be countered, deflected, refused, and resisted in multiple ways. We would like to share some of what we have learned so far, particularly related to pedagogy as a promising site of intervention toward collective flourishing and to learn from others who are doing this work in other institutional and community contexts.

This paper will be presented at the following session: