(DIS2) Disabled Experiences in the University

What does it mean to be disabled in and by the higher education system? Topics include but are not limited to: strategies and critiques by disabled undergraduates; teaching as a disabled educator; the politics of UDL; disability justice; situating the university in a disabling society; colonialism and education; the production of multiple axes of oppression; practices of EDI/DEI. Tags: Disabilities, Education, Teaching

Organizers: Chris Churchill, University of Lethbridge, Yiyan Li, University of Toronto; Chair: Chris Churchill, University of Lethbridge

Presentations

Evan Wicklund, Carleton University; Olivia Boonstra, Canadian Centre on Disability Studies (Eviance)

Moving Towards More Inclusive and Equitable Post-Secondary Experiences for Students with Disabilities: Realizing the Sustainable Development Goals

In 2021, researchers at Eviance (Canadian Disability Studies Incorporated) undertook a three-year project entitled “Innovating for Inclusive and Equitable Post-Secondary Education (PSE): A Pathway to Realizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)”. This collaborative project brought together three community partners from Disabled Persons Organizations (DPOs) and three academic partners to advance the SDGs related to quality education (SDG #4) and decent work (SDG #8). Project objectives were based on the premise that collaboration across universities and colleges which scale up innovative and inclusive approaches to Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is essential for realizing inclusivity in both PSE institutions and places of employment (Fovet, 2021; Meyer et al., 2014; Murphy, 2021). The objectives of the project include supporting Canada’s efforts to meet the SDGs as a pathway to decent work by closing gaps in the knowledge and skills of key stakeholders in PSE concerning inclusive education. These high-level tasks included: undertaking research about how UDL practices are experienced by diversely located students and graduates with disabilities (La Dyiur and Bair, 2018); generating and sharing information about innovative practices in UDL (Evans et al., 2017); creating and distributing digital resources and creating opportunities for collaboration on UDL for PSE excellence in diversity; fostering and increasing collaboration across Canadian universities, colleges and DPOs; and, establishing an accountability and monitoring framework for use by participating universities and colleges, and for subsequent use by PSE institutions more widely. In this session, researchers from Eviance will share our project findings and speak about our experiences managing our collaborative multi-year project. Specifically, we will outline conclusions from our activities, which include, but are not limited to: a) a primary analysis of the Government of Canada’s Survey on Disability pertaining to PSE; b) two literature reviews, one on the transition from PSE and decent work and another on UDL in PSE; c) an analysis of the experiences of students with disabilities gathered from a survey of over one thousand participants; d) a secondary analysis of the National Education Associate of Disabled Students (NEADS) townhall meetings about the barriers to inclusive PSE; and, e) a total of nine national social labs, where we brought together diversly located stakeholders (students, administrators, faculty, members of accessibility and accommodations offices, etc.) to address barriers and create innovative solutions regarding inclusivity in PSE and decent employment. We will also discuss strategies for working collaboratively with our partners and other contributors over the three-year period and share considerations about future work for advancing the SDGs. Our goal in this presentation is to summarize the impact our project has made, but also to initiate a dialogue with the broader disability studies community and seek to establish connections with other scholars and advocates interested in equitable initiatives in PSE and decent work. More specifically, we focus on the benefits and issues related to student activism (Bruce, 2020), intersectional and reflexive approaches to inclusivity in PSE (Beck et al., 2014) and the need for co-creation between students, faculty, and administrators to ensure inclusive practices for all students are sustainable (Gilles and Dupuis, 2013).

Fady Shanouda, Carleton University

The Carceral Geographies of the Sanist University

This presentation brings together Mad Studies and Critical Suicide Studies to examine university responses to student suicidality, including involuntary leave policies, defensive architecture, use of chemical and physical restraints during hospital transfers, and postvention protocols that all work to reify madness and suicidality as internalized, pathologized, and ultimately criminal states of being (Marsh, 2010). These responses are embedded within a broader psy-regime in Canadian universities that decenters madness and diminishes mad people’s expertise, depoliticizes and ahistorizes suicidality (White et al., 2015), and shifts the responsibility for care onto the individual (Aubrecht, 2019). These university-endorsed responses to suicidality, of which there are four to examine in this presentation, are relatively new and work to reshape higher education in ways that resemble carceral geographies (Moran, 2015; Ben Moshe, 2020). Mandated or involuntary leave of absence protocols (an extension of prevention measures at most universities) all but expel students from the university, including student housing, until they can prove improved mental health often through medical and psychiatric assessment (Green et al., 2022). All the while, the student is in distress, has lost the limited support universities offer and is without legal representation. Other prevention measures include defensive architecture or defensive designs (Currie 2023) in the form of increased surveillance (cameras, motion detection, remote monitoring, and alarms and lighting) and suicide barriers (capture nets, temporary gates, blockade fencing, and permanent iron barriers) frequently installed following the death of a student in specific on-campus sites forming new restrictive campus spaces. Students in distress might be subjected to chemical (drugs) or physical (handcuffs or zip ties) restraints in cases where they either voluntarily or involuntarily agree to be transferred to the hospital (Neilson et al., 2019; Chittle et al., 2022). Unsurprisingly, hospital transfers of this nature traumatize students, hindering future support-seeking and rendering the university a carceral space for mad people. Institutions have also responded to the rise of student suicides by developing comprehensive postvention protocols that describe, in some detail, the expected actions and measures every university department - from parking services to the president’s office - should take following an on-campus student suicide. Unsurprisingly, investigating the university’s role in the suicide is not part of these protocols. Together, these new carceral measures are justified through ideologies of risk and safety that, through the application of psy-knowledges, construct the mad body as out of bounds. These efforts shape the affective experiences of students’ madness, distress, and suicidality. They reinforce the notion of the mad and suicidal subject as pathological and criminal, leaving little room to consider the historical and socio-cultural conditions shaping students’ everyday learning experiences.

Savitri Persaud, University of Toronto

Mapping the 'wellness complex': Examining graduate student mental health through a critical disability studies lens

In Canada and internationally, the high rates of mental health reported among postsecondary students have been a point of concern, with various policies, strategies, and other interventions introduced as a result. However, the research underpinning these interventions has very predominantly been grounded in a biomedical orientation. Further, the focus has primarily centred on undergraduate students, with relatively little attention paid to the distinct needs and experiences of graduate students. The Mapping the Gaps study aimed to address these gaps through a critical disability-informed examination of graduate student mental health in three Ontario universities. A critical disability studies orientation turns our attention away from the individual student and towards understanding how systems and structures (in this case, the postsecondary institution and related policies and practices) may be producing or exacerbating disabling environments for students, while attending to how interlocking systems of power differently situate students within the institution. To accomplish our objectives, we utilized situational analysis, a postmodern extension of grounded theory that centres the situation (in this case, experiences of sanism in graduate education) as the unit of analysis. Data collection involved three distinct groups of participants: graduate students (n=26; focus groups), faculty (n=14; interviews), and staff (n=4; interviews). Our data analysis process took up conversation as an analytical tool, as our team engaged in a dynamic, dialogic, and iterative process of exchange and mutuality, in conversation with the transcripts and one another, to identify key actors and processes that influence graduate student mental health. Our findings reveal that biomedical and psychocentric understandings of mental health and mental illness dominate university-based programs, supports, and accommodations for graduate students experiencing psychiatric distress – and together make up a sector-wide schema of sanist knowledges and actions that we’ve termed the ‘wellness complex’(i). For example, our student participants described how, in order to access accommodations, they were required to have a psychiatric diagnosis that was documented by a medical professional. In this way, the institution mandated that students align with biomedical conceptualizations of their distress before accommodations would be provided. Alongside biomedicalism, psychocentrism was evidenced in the mental health promotion strategies utilized by institutions, whereby students were directed to take care of their mental health through individualized self-care activities and directions to build ‘resilience’, without attention to the larger, institutional issues contributing to their distress (e.g., inadequate funding packages). These biomedical and psychocentric conceptualizations conflicted with the lived realities of the graduate students in our study, whose experiences were deeply shaped by sanism and other intersecting structural oppressions (e.g., on the basis of race, gender, citizenship status and class, among others). Students experienced sanism from their peers, supervisors, and in wider university settings as a result of sanist standards and values (e.g., regarding independence and productivity) that underlie notions of belonging and success in graduate studies. Finally, our findings highlight the ways in which both students and faculty strive to resist biomedicine and psychocentrism; however, this resistance is largely constrained to individualized, micro-level actions such as individual students advocating to supervisors or faculty members advocating on behalf of an individual student for access to one-off accommodations. Our participants described that macro-level advocacy and changes (e.g., to the protocols and policies that produce the need for student accommodations) were not possible in the context of pervasive sanism and lack of institutional support for collective resistance and advocacy. These findings align with other critical work on madness in the academy, showing that biomedicalism and psychocentrism are largely naturalized in graduate education settings. Further, our analysis brings to the fore the processes whereby the academic institution acts in concert with other systems and structures (e.g., the psy complex, neoliberalism) to produce a ‘wellness complex’, within which responsibility for wellbeing is downloaded onto students (and allied faculty), making invisible the role of larger structural forces in producing graduate student distress. Mapping the ‘wellness complex’ allows us to expose, examine, and challenge normalized sanism and to contribute to necessary systemic change in graduate education; namely, to make space for all students – and particularly those experiencing psychiatric distress or disability – to mobilize, coalition-build, and thrive. (i) Our use of the term the ‘wellness complex’ is related to broader discussions surrounding the ‘wellness industrial complex’ (Gunter, 2019) in terms of the focus on self-responsibilization, disappearance of structural contributors to poor health, and the role of capitalism and neoliberalism. The ‘wellness complex’ as we understand it within postsecondary settings is also different in terms of our focus on how the various actors within and outside the academy come together to make up a sector-wide schema of sanist knowledges and actions.

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Non-presenting authors: Jennifer Myer, University of Windsor; Fady Shanouda, Carleton University; Merrick Pilling, Toronto Metropolitan University; Kendra-Ann Pitt, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine; Jijian Voronka, University of Windsor; Lori Ross, University of Toronto