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After the Sit Out protest that a group of us staged on my university’s campus, to protest the university’s lack of accessibility in planning, as demonstrated by the new set of stairs without any marked or nearby ramped access, I stood in my shower and sobbed. I couldn’t get a hold of myself. I tried to explain to my spouse, happy that the protest had been so well attended, why I was crying. I had to dry off, sit down, and write it all out. I cried in the writing and remembering.

I posted what I wrote as a Note on Facebook, to share with my friends, those cheering from afar and those who sat with me in solidarity. Someone I know though phil-tech community suggested I polish it and send it to see if it could be published.

The result came out with the Chronicle for Higher Education online today. It’s part of the Sept 22, 2017 issue. They have entitled the piece “The Long Way Around.” 

Infrastructure is technology: it’s the technology that can either permit bodies and minds to exist in different spaces – or bar that access. You can’t think about technology and disability without thinking about the structures – administrative, bureaucratic, and physical – that can either make it easy to be somewhere or not.

The participants in Technology and Disability classes have expanded my ideas of what counts as this subject matter and have assessed different facets of our campus through their own research projects.

This summer has been busy with finishing up last details for an edited volume, proofreading my forthcoming book, and working on a major grant app. In the meantime, two of my shorter essays have found venues and been published:

• A blog post I wrote for IHadCancer.com about my chemobrain, called “Just Your Average Hard-of-Hearing, Chemobrained Amputee,” came out on July 19th.
• A lengthier reflection that I wrote for Nursing Clio, called “Finding My Amputee Brethren,” came out on July 27th. (For T&D students, you’ll see that I talk about our class speaker Mallory Kay Nelson and transmobility!)

All of this pales personal excitement has coincided with the energizing news of ADAPT protests and arrests at offices of legislators in different spots in the country. Honestly, it’s been hard to get much done, so busy watching the assertion of disability rights and the value of disabled life in the face of devastating legislation. I *wish* this was happening during the academic year so that students could keep up with the action unfolding. I look forward to the conversations I will have this fall with students. Disability organizing and action has made national news in ways that are only rarely seen!

 

It’s actually the end of Spring semester now, and I am just getting to writing about the end of Fall 2016 semester. Whoops. My apologies! I’ve been busy writing up and submitting Tech & Disability as a permanent offering for the new Pathways undergraduate curriculum. So, I’ve been working on class-things, just not as publicly.

I also plan to submit paperwork for a grad-level course on the topic – but one thing at a time! The class was mixed for its first two runs.

STS 3284, currently proposed my number for T&D, has made it through my department’s and my college’s curriculum committees and is off to the university and Pathways committees. Fingers crossed. They ask for a little modification at every stage, but it’s been interesting to see the process so far. My department chair has been incredibly helpful through the hurdles and forms. When the class is approved (fingers crossed), it will count for credit in both my department’s longstanding and excellent Medicine & Society minor and the newly developed Disability Studies minor, as well as my department’s new Science, Technology, and Society major. I’m pretty excited about the possibilities for students from these areas, as well as continuing with populations that I’ve already really enjoyed having in class (shout out to industrial design and public health-interested students).

As for the last run of T&D with special topics numbers,  I feel pride. Student research was wonderfully all-over-the-place. Here’s a few highlights, hard to summarize such a dynamic batch:

• One student presented a study of an adult-day center, looking at how technologies for mobility and safety were set up and talking about creating home like environments; she presented this work to leaders of this center, and I hope some of her ideas will be adopted.
• Another student with a passion for photography took some wonderful stills of signage for access on campus – often obscured with plant growth or unclear. His narration through the images was a really amazing piece of performance art.
• Two students did a group project documenting “accessfails” in our town’s downtown, from recycling cans blocking access to poorly maintained walkways, etc.. They are set to present this information soon to the Town’s ADA Committee!
• We also had some more traditional research papers in the mix, one about the phenomenology of technology for diabetes monitoring for Type I diabetes and another on technological access for people with cognitive and learning disabilities in the context of educational software and design.
• An industrial design student worked on better designs for hearing aid cases – and I wish his design was on the market for my own HAs! Since he presented the idea, I think about it every time I take mine out.

And last semester wouldn’t have been what it was without the assistance of Martina Svyantek, my teaching apprentice for this course. Yesterday, I sat and watched as she defended her prelim exams. Congrats, Martina.

Since I won’t be teaching the class again until Spring 2018, please do keep up with our Facebook page for news items on technology and disability. That page gets more updates than this one – and shorter so you don’t have to read through so much! 🙂

We are two weeks in, and the students are fantastic. We’re already having conversations about intersectionality and sharing experience and knowledge with one another. With a variety of backgrounds and trajectories, our conversations have been expansive. We get some experts in on the ADA next week, so that should be a treat too.

Field trip to the library bathroom – to learn how to measure to ADA specs!

I can’t believe it’s less than a week away before I have the pleasure of teaching Technology & Disability class for a second time around. I am grateful to my department for letting me teach this again, and I have a paperwork to make this a permanent offering in the works. This class was such a source of joy and education the first time around, and I am looking forward to more fun.

Very pleased to announce that Martina Svyantek will be joining me as a part of a teaching apprenticeship. Martina is working on her iPhD on the topic of disability in Higher Ed and will be an excellent resource and leader as we move through the semester. She will lead several of our sessions.

To highlight a few other highlights –

This semester, we will have field trips to a bathroom in Newman Library and VT’s Assistive Tech Lab. We’ll explore and measure the bathroom with our guide ADA specialist Mike Kutnak. At the Assistive Tech Lab, Christa Miller will introduce us to cool stuff, including mouses of various shapes, nifty keyboard layouts, a Braille machine, and more.

We will have the excitement come to us when Donna Smith of VT’s disability service office presents on Disability in Media, PhD student Josh Earle lectures on eugenics, and Mallory Kay Nelson skypes in to share her ideas about “transmobility” and the human form.

In terms of materials –

We’ll be reading serious academic papers, checking out first person accounts and blogs, watching some neat documentary footage – and there may even be some poetry in the mix. Be ready for some terrific “hands-on, minds-on” engagement and lots of discussion within our group. We can disagree and still be friends.

In terms of grading –

It’s Choose Your Own Adventure, so start thinking about what you want to create or write or assess  during this semester.

Thanks so much for signing up, those who have, or for checking this out, for those who maybe haven’t yet.

Please mark your calendars for Friday, February 19th, at 4pm. Historian Dr. John Kinder will be delivering a Mullins Distinguished Lecture entitled “The Cripple Ceases to Be: War, Veterans, and the ‘End’ of Disability” in Surge 118B.

This lecture is made possible through the CLAHS Diversity Committee and sponsored by the Departments of English, Philosophy, and STS and the Disability Alliance at Virginia Tech. ASL interpretation will be provided through the generosity of the WMASLS fund. Surge is a physical space with no stairs, and I can happily answer any other questions you might have about the space at shew@vt.edu.

“The Cripple Ceases to Be”: War, Veterans, and the “End” of Disability

Abstract: In October 1917, barely six months after America’s entrance into World War I, the US Army Surgeon General predicted, “Probably one of the strangest as well as one of the best things that will come to our country through this war, if its duration is of sufficient length, is that from now on the cripple ceases to be.” Like many other medical experts of his era, he was optimistic that newly developed military rehabilitation programs would soon erase war disability from modern society. Although World War I-era rehabilitation failed to reach its lofty goals, the dream of disability-free warfare remains as powerful (and illusory) as ever. In this talk, John M. Kinder examines Americans’ century-long campaign to bring an “end” to war disability. What accounts for this effort? And what can it tell us about contemporary attitudes toward war, veterans, and disabled people as a whole?

Biography: John M. Kinder is Associate Professor of History and American Studies at Oklahoma State University. He received his PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota in 2007, and he is the author of Paying with Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran, which was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2015. His research focuses on the relationship between war, trauma, and culture in the United States and around the globe.

Thanks,

Ashley

This class has been excellent. The material results of this class include: a graphic novella about prenatal diagnostics, ADA surveys of campus locations, a new design for adaptive ski harnessing, statistical data on disability in engineering curricula, many exciting potential units for classes (including units on the Friendly Restaurant accessibility project in Taiwan, technologies used by communities in the context of mental illness and dwarfism and blindness,  and more),  a few good syllabi for classes related to this one, and some really funky-fun research papers. The Choose-Your-Own-Adventure grading system has made this the most diverse set of projects and papers I’ve ever gotten from a class, and it’s been a pleasure to grade.  (Who says that?)  I couldn’t be more proud of a set of students. They have really engaged and tackled interesting questions.

I hope the material results reflect the intellectual results for all students. I have rethought many things, and their questions and comments have given me many things to think about — which is great because I’ve been told the class will run again in Fall 2016!

Thanks to all the participants. And thanks to Jonathan for putting some of the student work on the site for others to view!

Ashley