Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability - international

My Misadventures in Geneva, Part II of II

Visitor — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 16:47:54 +0000

Realizing that accessibility ideals can be culturally specific, and wanting to be pragmatic, I focused on disability issues that I believed would introduce productive new ways for all participants to experience conferences. From the outset, I urged organizers to develop a webpage that would be accessible to screen-reading software which if taken seriously could have unintended benefits well beyond a seemingly limited group. Chairing a university committee on electronic accessibility taught me two important lessons that I repeatedly tried to share with the organizers: 1) just like with physical architecture, if you build-in accessibility features from the outset, it’s far easier and cheaper than adding it in later, and 2) my eagle-eyed colleagues reap numerous benefits from websites designed with accessibility in mind, such as easily-searchable documents and streamlined information, as well as the ability to customize documents for one’s own use. Despite two years where I gradually went through all the stages of suggesting, reasoning, informing, educating, nagging, insisting, shaming, and cajoling, the website remained impenetrable to screen readers until barely a month before the event itself. This meant that the submission process and most conference materials weren’t available to people with print-reading disabilities, unless I asked for them, which meant that despite Kate Rousmaniere’s steadfast support, it quickly became “Catherine’s Issue” as opposed to something that needed to be done in the spirit of inclusion. After I threatened to have the DHA publicly withdraw from the event, they appointed an enthusiastic liaison who, despite her own lack of expertise, worked tirelessly to push the right people to get it up to speed. It was heart-breaking that after all of this effort, I felt I’d made more enemies than friends, that for the hardworking conference organizers in Geneva, I would always be viewed as a complainer who made things difficult in the name of some abstract minority that remained largely invisible. And to think that all of this could have been avoided if they had heeded my initial advice back in 2010!

In addition to insisting on an accessible web presence, Kate and I championed better communications. When Paul Longmore and I signed on two years before, we seized on the idea of a bilingual conference offering a wedge into allowing participants to appreciate what it’s like to be excluded. We pointed out then - as I would continue to do at every opportunity, including my brief public remarks at the conference - that a bilingual French and English event presented communication challenges not unlike those for incorporating deaf participants. Though problematic for various reasons, such an analogy at least prompted nods of recognition and expressions of empathy; this was the one place where I sensed an admission that environments could indeed be reimagined, that it was time to question the standard ways of doing things.

Thus, early on, I argued for creating an expectation that because of the disability component, we needed to model new ways of conveying information in order to reach a greater variety of people. More than once, I suggested we try raising funds to hire real-time captioners for the major sessions, pointing out that having someone’s talk transcribed on a screen would make it easier for non-native speakers who could read a language better than hear it. I advocated a concerted campaign to have presenters speak slowly and distinctly. How is it, I still wonder, that academics spend so much time worrying about what people will think of our work but with so little consideration for our audience? Sitting through person after person race through their text at lightening speed, I imagined they assumed a room full of super-listeners with total fluency in every language, concept, and proper name in multiple disciplines, not to mention with the ability to focus completely and continuously on what was being said. If academics stopped for one moment to think about it, we would realize just how ableist and exclusive most delivery styles are, and how limited and limiting our conference environments are as a result.
I’d hoped that disability might offer an opportunity to rethink some of these assumptions, if only to underscore the lesson that often less can be more for everyone. Saying fewer words but taking the time to say them clearly and offering explanations for outsiders would offer greater intellectual access to a larger number of people. My own experiences in the classroom have taught me how it can be useful to dwell on particular images and their significance rather than race through so many so fast; lingering over fewer might offer a new perspective on them for everyone in the room, not just those who couldn’t see them. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when the plenary talk delivered immediately after my pleas for clarity proceeded to demonstrate exactly the problems I had described.

In retrospect, I realize that, much as I constantly drove home the idea that disability offered an opportunity for rethinking access for everyone, I underestimated the persistence of older ideas about people with disabilities. It was still too easy for most organizers and attendees to believe that we were dealing with unfortunate individuals rather than people who challenged basic assumptions about physical and intellectual environments. They operated in a mode of catering to the needs of a single person rather than believing that they too had something to learn. Thus, when it turned out that I was one of a tiny handful of the attendees who were visibly identifiable as being disabled, it made depressing sense that they could easily conclude that my mission had been self-serving or for a virtually non-existent minority. Above all, they could convince themselves that all I asked for had been a complete waste of time and valuable resources; look at all we did for you, and still nobody came.

Why weren’t more disabled people there? I’m partly responsible. In the beginning I pushed for colleagues to go. But as things dragged on, and it became ever-clearer that disability was being marginalized by the organizers in Geneva, I lost heart. Given the incredible expense of getting to Europe and of being in Geneva, I couldn’t make a convincing pitch. The experiences with the website were especially disheartening, to the point that when people contacted me about applying, I was candid that I couldn’t guarantee a truly accessible intellectual or even physical experience. There’s also the reality that there aren’t yet that many academics with disabilities who have navigated the formidable barriers to full employment. As my struggles with the Geneva organizers made clear, the university environment remains inhospitable to those who don’t adhere to the usual ways of doing things; it’s no irony that so many scholars speak endlessly about standards in the very act of decrying standardization. This helps explain why too many of us go to considerable lengths - sometimes at tremendous personal cost - to hide any forms of physical, intellectual, or emotional disability. I’m guessing that for every one visibly disabled person, there are at least five others grappling with it.

For this reason, I’d like to think that my efforts were not in vain. Among the four hundred participants, I imagine twenty or thirty who were secretly grateful that someone pushed for broader forms of access. Just knowing that these ideas are on the radar somewhere has to be a little bit encouraging, and even empowering. I imagine another thirty to forty who walked away scratching their heads, unsure for now, but that somewhere deep down a little spark was lit that will make them more open the next time one of these ideas comes their way; they might even think of their own frustrations as they tried to listen to yet another rambling talk, and take a brief look in the mirror. Finally, I don’t have to dream about the handful of scholars I met in Geneva who are already engaged in this work because I saw first hand that they had already understood that they’d discovered something very new and exciting; email traffic reveals a new cadre eager to create disability-themed panels for next year’s ISCHE conference in Riga, Latvia. From the younger scholars to the organization’s outgoing president, these people will carry the torch to the next conferences where they will help to bring about lasting change for all.

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accessibility

Catherine Kudlick

conferences

disability

My Misadventures in Geneva, Part I of II

Visitor — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 16:21:30 +0000

I wanted to share this “Conference Report” that just appeared in the Disability History Association Newsletter since it takes up issues that I hope will be of interest to followers of the Longmore Institute. To learn more about the DHA and to read the newsletter, go here.

In late June 2012 I represented the DHA on the organizing committee for an international conference in Geneva, Switzerland that brought together the histories of education, youth, and disability. I write to share the fruits of this endeavor, which proved to be one of the most difficult experiences of my career. The two years leading up to the event and the event itself raised productive questions for our field. They underscored the challenges not just for getting our work out there, but also for raising awareness even - and perhaps especially - for academics who pride themselves in being harbingers of progressive change. The experiences also forced me to confront the conference theme, “Internationalization in Education,” in ways that reached well beyond intellectual content.

I embarked on this project with Paul Longmore just before he passed away two years ago, the idea being to raise the profile of DHA and to introduce the two other sponsoring organizations - ISCHE (International Standing Conference for the History of Education) and SHCY (Society for the History of Children and Youth) - to work in our field. Speaking with representatives of the other groups at our initial meeting, we shared dreams that our organizations would collaborate in creating a new kind of conference that would showcase exciting scholarship while modeling disability access and inclusion as we wove together our three areas of intellectual expertise. Having been invited to give the keynote in 2007, I was delighted to have found many kindred spirits in ISCHE, a friendly group about the size of the Society for Disability Studies. Since they had active subgroups exploring gender and colonialism, disability seemed like a natural fit for this organization that would take the lead in planning the Geneva conference. Like SDS, they even had a dance. Their president from 2009-2012, Kate Rousmaniere (University of Miami, Ohio), had been especially zealous in making the organization welcoming to young scholars and new scholarship from around the world; this year in Geneva there were approximately four hundred attendees representing nearly fifty countries. The North American leadership of ISCHE was genuinely committed and excited about working together.

DHA got some great visibility. Our name was on everything, including all conference booklets, badges, bags, and even pens and notepads distributed to attendees. I provided handouts about our organization, the website, and how to join that were included in the conference materials. We were publicly acknowledged at each major event. I venture to say the conference gave us an international presence and stature that not only enhanced our profile but also gave a greater sense of legitimacy; the name is out there in print and was literally brought home to the four corners of the world.

Thanks in part to the efforts of Kate Rousmaniere, disability history had greater presence than ever before in discussions of history of education. Sure, I cringed listening to some work that clung to older models of disability, particularly in the area of special education where paternalism largely seemed to live on, but work expanding these ideas could be found on several panels, many of which attracted younger scholars. One took up “The Internationalization of Blindness in 19^th and 20^th Century Europe,” with papers by doctoral and post-doctoral students from Belgium, the Netherlands, and Portugal. In another panel scholars from the USA, Mexico, and Australia grappled with schoolteachers and disabilities in the 19^th century. Individual papers explored physical education, children, examination practices, polio, the role of medicine and medicalization. Conversations around disability proved lively and intense. I loved watching lightbulbs go off as people realized - sometimes in the process of asking a question - that their own work had a direct relationship to the field. Such was the case with one beginning researcher who delivered an entire paper on intelligence testing initially without realizing its implications. Others were missed opportunities that a few astute observers commented on later, such as one of the plenary papers that discussed sex education, venereal disease, and forced sterilization.

But truth be told, disability history remains a tough sell, particularly in an international context where it’s easy for skeptics to dismiss it as an aggressive form of North American political correctness. Even in the United States and Canada, the topic itself still challenges academics in ways we aren’t ready to be challenged, whether because of discomfort, prejudice, ignorance, or some combination of these things. For people who haven’t thought about it, disability seems marginal and irrelevant to “real” history, in much the same ways that gender and race were considered insignificant a generation ago.

Thus, while seemingly ubiquitous on all the badges and pens, disability was strikingly absent from most aspects of the conference. My push to invite a promising scholar with a disability working squarely at the intersection of the three conference themes as one of the keynote speakers was rebuffed in favor of a more senior person who ignored disability completely. To be fair, a few of the plenary presenters nodded to the third conference theme, but for the most part this felt hastily added in and not thought through, more in the spirit of fulfilling an obligation than a genuine attempt to stretch intellectual boundaries. One plenary presenter believed it sufficient to mention that a leading educator of the early twentieth century had “eye problems.”

Kate Rousmaniere and I found it even more difficult to convince scholars to rethink the conference milieu, a key element that would make it possible for some people with disabilities to attend at all. The physical setting of a modern university building with ramps, elevators, toilets with wheelchair symbols on the doors appeared to meet Swiss standards of physical access. I suspected that some of this was more decoration, the physical equivalent of conference presenters mentioning disability without really engaging with it in a substantive way. But not being familiar with the fine points of local regulations, we had to cede to the standards of the place where we were foreign visitors and accept the word of our hosts. Months before, I had contacted a local disability rights group that offered guarded reassurances that the venue was in the words of one informant “adequate despite some problems that probably aren’t worth mentioning.” We breathed a sigh of relief: at least we didn’t have to worry about the physical environment.

But what of other disability-inspired innovations that would enhance the conference experience for all attendees? Perhaps because of how physical access has dominated conversations about disability rights in the United States as well as in western Europe, most people outside the disability world get a false sense that the Problem is addressed once they see a wheelchair logo or get a whiff of Braille in an elevator. In the spirit of our initial conversations about rethinking the conference environment, I struggled with how best to convince organizers and participants to take their thinking to the next level, somehow without being seen as imposing ideas that would be misunderstood as inappropriate or ridiculous. I was, after all, an outsider in more than one sense.

At the same time, my experiences with organizing other events revealed the incredible value for all participants of introducing a broader sense of conference accessibility, even if just to get people to think about what academics take for granted in these settings. I was forged in the crucible of the Society for Disability Studies board and mentored by Paul Longmore who organized various conferences. We engaged in endless conversations about creating accessible environments that involved a dizzying array of details: guidelines for presenters, establishing a policy for captioning and interpreters, provisions for audio description, recommending multiple formats for conference materials, making sure all venues were accessible for a variety of speakers, establishing a quiet space, and working with major chain hotels to remove scented products that triggered chemical sensitivities. No matter how many contingencies we planned for, someone would always complain, but the wiser veterans, who understood access as an imperfect work in progress, largely accepted that people complained because they actually could - where else might an academic organization make even the most remote gesture in acknowledging them? From having taught a course in a French university that compared US and French ideas regarding disability, I suspected that for a variety of political, cultural, and economic reasons, such expectations were largely unique to North Americans.

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Catherine Kudlick

conference accessibility