Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the forty-third installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I’m conducting with disabled philosophers and post here on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and personal prejudice in philosophy, in particular, and in academia, more generally; resistance to ableism, racism, sexism, and other apparatuses of power; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy.
I acknowledge that the land on which I sit to conduct these interviews is the traditional territory of the Haudensaunee and Anishnaabeg, covered by the Upper Canada Treaties and directly adjacent to Haldiman Treaty territory. I offer these interviews with respect and in the spirit of reconciliation.
My guest today is C Dalrymple-Fraser. C is currently a Ph.D. candidate and Vanier Scholar in the Department of Philosophy and Joint Centre for Bioethics at the University of Toronto. Their primary research interests include practical ethics (especially bioethics), social epistemology, and philosophy of disability, usually in combination, and not always in that order. C’s dissertation will explore the roles of different kinds of “silences” and exclusions in health practices, with a focus on disabled and queer communities. In their spare time, C can be found resting or resisting with friends, visiting other people’s pets, taking selfies with bees, and occasionally misplacing puzzle pieces and library books.
Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, C! Many graduate students in philosophy are concerned that their projects are not socially relevant, not philosophically important, or do not have practical implications. At least once in your studies, you considered dropping out because you felt that your work would not have an impact. Please explain why you felt conflicted about your position in philosophy and why you decided to continue in the field. Other students who are grappling with these issues might recognize aspects of their own situations in your response.
Thank you for the invitation to participate in this series, Shelley! I’ve learned a lot from the past interviews published in the series and I’m grateful for a chance to join the conversation.
I suppose that I’m often questioning my position in philosophy, but it was toward the end of my first degree that I most strongly considered leaving the field and academia in general. I’ll just mention two reasons here.
First, I was addressing the consequences of my failure to accountably seek support and accommodation for my mental health and health more generally. I struggled to accomplish even mundane tasks, let alone academic work, and developed bad coping mechanisms. Meanwhile, most of the representations of disorder, disability, and illness that I encountered in course readings were medically uninformed at best, stigmatizing on average, and largely raised only as limit cases or thought experiments about the boundaries of personhood or autonomy. This state of affairs didn’t help matters for my health or sense of belonging.
Second, a sudden wave of tragedies in my social groups and close communities, including several preventable deaths, made it much harder to go to school and think about, say, the compatibility of externalism about mental content with privileged access, the unity of the proposition, or other questions in which I was interested. It’s definitely a privilege to have been insulated enough from other goings-on in the world that it both took that long for me to feel this way and that I’ve never had to fight to “belong” in philosophy; but, it became difficult for me to justify my own position in philosophy when I could have been working in other spaces that I perceived to have more demonstrable or direct impacts on communities and peoples. Since the world keeps spinning, this is a challenge that I regularly confront.
I don’t want to suggest that people can’t do that work separate from their research, nor do I want to necessarily value some kinds of research over other kinds. I also want to resist the idea that research must be “impactful” in any specified way, because many norms around how we understand “impact” have been used to discredit different kinds of work and research and leisure that don’t fit our disciplinary ideals. But I couldn’t divorce my research and studies from the rest of the world in the ways that I would need to continue doing them as I had been.
Just as several reasons made me question my position or ability to continue in philosophy, many things played roles in continuing. For one, I was invited to a few volunteer opportunities that disrupted the boundaries between the university and the community in which it is located. Engaging in this volunteer work showed me additional ways that philosophy can be relevant to, or enriched by, issues and perspectives outside the discipline and academia.
Around the same time, I learned more about my family history of Alzheimer’s and redirected my remaining studies toward bioethics. At bioethics conferences and events, I have been able to talk directly with patients and professionals in ways that are often unavailable to people who are not in academic or health professions. This has allowed me to raise or translate concerns from groups to which I belong or to which I have proximity, and which are not often addressed in academic or professional contexts. I have friends in other graduate programs who were encouraged to switch schools or programs because their work was turning “more practical than philosophical,” so I can’t understate my fortune to have had these opportunities and the ongoing support of my mentors, peers, and friends. In short, institutional philosophy and bioethics have been spaces in which I could ask the kinds of questions important to the people around me and take up a certain kind of advocacy in research and teaching.
[Description of image below: C, a white person with facial hair, is sitting in a brightly lit office, facing the camera and faintly smiling. They are wearing round glasses with a golden glasses-chain, a vertically striped, button-down shirt, and a jacket with a floral design. Books on bookshelves fill the background of the shot.]
Your motivations to stay in philosophy were informed by a philosophy discussion group that you facilitated at a youth shelter. Tell us how your thinking and research have been transformed by your experiences with that group.
Unfortunately, our group ran for only a few months because of some disruptions to the shelter’s funding and ability to organize volunteer programming. Still, it was an amazing experience while it lasted. It’s difficult to put a lot of it into words, in part because I’m still learning from and reflecting on those experiences and also because many of the stories and knowledge circulated aren’t mine to share. There are a few things I have permission to discuss.
The experience made me reflect more on teaching practices and wider interpretations of accessibility. For example, we agreed on discussion topics collectively and did not assign materials. We wanted to acknowledge differences in interests, abilities, access to language and jargon, etc. and, because we were a drop-in group with a constantly changing membership, we didn’t want to discourage turnout.
Reflecting on the successes and failures in these strategies has directed me to stories and scholarship on why and when texts are necessary, who they centre or exclude, what the academic emphasis on written texts and documents over, say, oral traditions means for access—both in terms of who can read them and who can produce them—the price of textbooks, and so on.
Our discussions on my role in these conversations and spaces as a multiply privileged white academic also challenged me to listen and learn more about anti-oppressive research and teaching, and about relational accounts of knowing. Research as Resistance, edited by Susan Strega and Leslie Brown, and works by Margaret Kovach, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, and Shawn Wilson have been great entry points here, though I came to them quite late.
After one discussion, a regular member of the group commented that they liked the group because they felt heard, that although the care workers in the shelter were helpful and had good intentions, these workers tended to listen, as part of their jobs, with an agenda of identifying if anything was wrong. When the speech of the members of the group was regularly monitored for problems, they had a harder time being heard on their own terms.
I was glad that they experienced the space in that way, but I don’t think that I was a good listener. I had an agenda while facilitating the discussion, and that agenda was informed by the academic norms that I accepted and internalized. While it may be difficult or impossible to listen without some agenda, we can often be more critically attentive and accountable to our agendas. So, the comment was an encouragement to think about my failures to listen to others, on their terms, and to learn about how we can create and reproduce different kinds of “silences” as listeners in how we choose to be an audience. bell hooks’s Talking Back and Adrienne Rich’s poem “Cartographies of Silence” were important for thinking about these issues, in addition to everything that Kristie Dotson has written.
C, we met at the 2017 Canadian Philosophical Association conference in Toronto, where I commented on a paper you gave. Among other things, in the paper you talked about use of the metaphor of “silence,” a metaphor that some disability studies scholars regard as audist. Indeed, I mention audist metaphors in the first chapter of Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability. What are your thoughts on the metaphor of “silence” and how do you use it in your work?
Several activist movements have used the concept of “silence” to draw attention to instances and structures of power: how some groups of people are not given full opportunity to be “heard” and how other groups with platforms refuse to use these platforms to address issues. For example, ACT UP—the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power—adopted the slogan “Silence = Death” from a group of gay activists to draw attention to the deaths that resulted from a failure of government to address the AIDS epidemic during the Reagan/Bush era. In some protests organized by that Coalition, group chants such as “ACT UP! We’ll never be silent again!” were used. Black Lives Matter demonstrations have sometimes used the phrase “white silence = violence” to raise awareness about how white complacency upholds racism, while other variants of “silence is violence” have been used by many groups, such as organizations resisting the “culture of silence” toward sexual violence on academic campuses. For decades in the history of Western feminisms, there have been calls to “break the silence,” to “come to voice,” that “silence is complicity,” and so on.
By their uses of “silence,” these groups usually intend to address literal absences of sound and testimony; but they also invoke a structural metaphor of silence-as-oppression, a metaphor which is also pervasive in philosophical writings on power and testimony. This emphasis on silence as a form of oppression is important, and we should be careful to analyze specific mentions in their contexts of use. However, in more decontextualized discussions of silence, such as several academic theories, the often-unaddressed emphasis on the binary of silence-as-oppression and voice-as-liberation in Western society raises worries about exclusion.
First, the emphasis on this binary makes it more difficult to identify how silences can be used as strategies of opposition and resistance, since the dominant structural metaphors encourage us to interpret the silences of the oppressed as a mere condition or result of their oppression. Plenty of narrative evidence suggests that silence can be used as a strategy of refusal or resistance, such as against the phenomena that Nora Berenstain has called epistemic exploitation, or the history of what Emmalon Davis has recently called epistemic appropriation, among others.
For example, silence and secrecy have sometimes served as a strategy of resistance to the long and ongoing history of colonizing global Indigenous knowledges for academic and commercial profit. In Knowing and Learning: An Indigenous Fijian Approach, Unaisi Nabobo-Baba identifies silence as resistance and opposition among her taxonomy of silences among the Vugalei in Fiji. Kyo Maclear, in “Not in So Many Words: Translating Silence Across Difference” for Fireweed, discusses her “coming to silence” in white-dominated classrooms as a form of radical disengagement, a refusal to perform expected educational labour, although she notes that her silences were often interpreted as “voicelessness.” Over-emphasis on the metaphor of silence-as-oppression may obscure and block the use of silence as a strategy of resistance, just as an over-emphasis on silence-as-resistance could be used to obscure enforced silences.
Second, and more directly to your question, metaphors of silence and voice tend to treat verbal speech and hearing as defaults and desirable norms. These tendencies can exclude or stigmatize people who are deaf—including people who are deaf, Deaf, hard of hearing, deafblind, or identify by other terms—along with people who are otherwise nonverbal or have communication disabilities. When we equate silence with disempowerment and voice with liberation, we risk upholding ableist and audist norms.
While some people seem willing to acknowledge and denounce more “explicitly” negative metaphors that are more directly tied to identity groups and histories of eugenics—including “blind to,” “on deaf ears,” “a lame example,” “a schizophrenic theory,” “a stupid joke,” “a dumb argument”—there seems to be more reluctance to disavow metaphors that don’t as explicitly name a disability so much as mention a sensory apparatus or mode of communicating, such as “I hear that now,” “seeing is believing,” or “being silenced”.
I am both sighted and hearing, and therefore willing to defer on these points, but I don’t think it is necessary to remove these latter terms from our vocabularies if we can critically locate them in contexts of disability and deafness, and if we work to explicitly account for multiple ways of knowing rather than unreflectively reproduce the same hierarchies of senses and bodies. These metaphors don’t exist in isolation, after all, but occur in a climate that systematically disvalues the terms and people associated with deafness and disability: concerns about language around disability and deafness can’t be isolated from the material contexts of exclusion and lack of accountability in the spaces or conversations where we use this language.
I worry also that trying to eliminate the general metaphor of silence-as-oppression rather than adopt a more critical use of silence will make it harder to engage accountably with activist histories that have used the metaphor in very specific contexts and may risk diminishing or disavowing the importance and impact of these histories. Similar to Amy Vidali’s comments on disability metaphors, I think that the more we actively and explicitly divest from ableist frameworks and practices, the more we can free up our metaphors for creative inclusive uses.
Recently, you’ve begun to think more critically about how architectural design practices can condition epistemic justice and oppression. What connections have you come to recognize between these design practices, epistemic practices, and forms of power?
Last year I attended a conference with stairs everywhere (a sadly common and unexceptional affair), including a long series of wooden outdoor steps that led down from the residences to the main discussion venue. These outdoor steps were often horribly slippery due to persistent rain. On those rainier days, many participants would grasp the railing tightly, carefully placing two feet on each step before descending to the next to avoid a fall. I had to be even more vigilant, and worried about whether I’d be able to regularly navigate up and down the stairs to be able to join the conversation.
I did make it to the discussion venue each day. Moreover, other participants demonstrated willingness to offer support as needed. Yet, I couldn’t help but think of other colleagues, peers, and friends who would have loved to participate in the discussions that we had in the meeting, but who couldn’t do so given the structural barriers, given the design of the spaces in which the discussions took place, given the choices made about which spaces to use, and given the ways that disability didn’t seem to obviously figure into the initial and ongoing conversations on how to organize the conference.
Our epistemic practices—things like learning, researching, teaching, protesting, testifying, debating, generating consensus, drafting policies, and so on—always happen in particular spaces. Different spatial arrangements and choices can determine who has access to these practices and communities and what they are able to do within them when they can access them.
People who have been historically excluded from knowledge-production in architectural theory and practice are less likely to have their bodies and needs represented in the design and production of spaces and are thus less able to join communities or practices using these spaces. People who have been historically excluded from communities and practices will likely be excluded from decisions about which spaces are used for these communities and practices and from decisions about how to design future spaces. These exclusions are mutually reinforcing and track structures and exercises of power, particularly around disability. Aimi Hamraie’s book Building Access is a great resource on disability, universal design, and epistemic activism.
If we regularly build and use classrooms that disabled people can’t access, if our choice of building materials makes it harder for people who use a signing language to communicate, if protests or consultations and elections are held away from public transit or with other barriers, if our digital communications aren’t screen-reader ready or lack interpreters and subtitles and transcripts, if people can’t join the conversation because they can’t use the spaces for any reason—and these are not merely hypothetical “ifs”—then we should consider these practices as sources of epistemic exclusions as much as material exclusions.
There’s much more to say about the epistemic reproduction of inaccessibility in a more formal capacity, with connection to literature on epistemic oppression, speech acts, or semiotics—and I think even the feeling that the above observations seem pretty obvious tells us something about disability in philosophy—and this focus on physical exclusions is only artificially separable other related practices of segregation, displacement, and the histories of lands, peoples, and spaces.
Your interests in accessibility and accommodation are especially relevant to current discussions in philosophy with respect to laptop bans. What do you think about these bans? Do they seem antithetical to efforts to increase the heterogeneity of the philosophy classroom?
When, to better address these questions, I asked some people what they regard as the main arguments and evidence in support of laptop bans, one student reached out to tell me about a professor who banned laptops with the claim that: “Kant didn’t need a computer to write his Critique, so you won’t need them to study it.” Abstracting away from the other cases of inaccessibility in the course that the student described, this remark could be charitably read as an off-the-cuff joke. However, the remark also resembles much of the “purity” discourse that is regularly, though not always explicitly, found in debates around laptop bans or how to grade participation in philosophy, revealing which bodies and abilities these conversations presume.
There’s much to be said about ableist norms in philosophy and how these norms influence uptake of disabled students’ testimonies, how the rhetoric of these debates about “students’ best interests” tend to use the term students' in a way that excludes disabled students, and how accommodation practices serve to “other” disabled students or disclose their disability status to the class, identifying them as a problem for other students’ learning, and so on. Unfortunately, my experiences suggest that arguments from accessibility, inclusion, or accommodation are less likely to convince people than we’d like.
Philosophers and other academics who publicly advocate for bans on classroom-laptop use often appeal to research that suggests that laptop use is bad for learning. So, maybe we can look there for the moment. Rather than try to exhaustively address the issues with individual studies, I’ll centre two general remarks.
First, research projects on laptop bans regularly exclude disability from their study methodologies and interpretations of results. For example, philosophy professor Andrew Mills recently shared a collection of slides that summarize conclusions from studies correlating laptop use with undesired learning outcomes. Of the studies mentioned, I identified only two that explicitly discuss disability, that is, go beyond metaphorical references and phrases such as “disabling internet use.” The first study included only a single-sentence mention of disability, in its discussion section, cautioning against outright bans due to responsibility to accommodate. The second study quoted a disabled student in a footnote to raise an “issue” that may arise with bans: namely, that disabled students may need to type to “overcome a disability.” This second study mentions disability only once more, in a sample syllabus statement, which says that the instructor will make exceptions when “required by the Office of Disabilities,” not necessarily when required by the student. Notably, this second study reports demographics by age and gender, but not disability. I haven’t provided the citations for these studies because I’m more interested in the patterns that they participate in: when disability is mentioned, it is often only as a brief aside and framed as a problem or caution, rather than addressed centrally in study design or interpretations of results.
If we want to use data correlations in a debate where disabled people are key stakeholders, a stronger data set would better account for disability and the responses of disabled people. Studies that do not address disability will likely lack disabled representation. For example, studies that are conducted in course environments, but don’t explicitly account for how they include disability in methods or recruitment, are likely to discourage the enrollment or retention of disabled students. For this reason, I am very wary of research that doesn’t report on study attrition rates, as those who are rendered worse off by a ban are perhaps more likely to leave the course or study environment—especially if grades and academic standing are at stake! Even if my assumptions about representation in the study samples are wrong and there are representative samples of disabled students, most studies don’t give us adequate information to confirm this, because they so rarely discuss disability.
This concern applies to anecdotal arguments too. When instructors report that their laptop bans work well and that they’ve rarely confronted dissent or disabled students who object to the bans, I’m usually inclined to believe that what this means is that disabled students avoid their courses. Many stories I’ve been told corroborate this belief. When discussing accessibility or disclosure of disability, online or in academic spaces, I regularly hear from disabled students who preferred to “drop” a course or stop attending a course that didn’t account for disability, rather than to disclose or fight for their accommodations.
In response to research reporting correlations between student attendance and grades, Margaret Price once remarked: “I don’t disagree that nonattendance may produce lower grades, since teachers routinely penalize absences…”. Similarly, I’m not surprised by instructor or researcher comments that associate laptop bans with few complaints and improved grades, since banning laptops often discourages enrollment and retention of precisely the students who would be positioned to complain and whose grades are often negatively impacted by inaccessible teaching practices. It is no paradox that inaccessible courses can do wonders for improving student grades, since inaccessibility selects well for the people that best fit the current academic norms, standards, and objectives.
Readers and listeners who want to think and learn more about disclosure should look at the recent collection, Negotiating Disability: Disclosure and Higher Education, edited by Stephanie Kerschbaum, Laura Eisenman, and James Jones.
Second, I think it’s important to consider the kinds of hypotheses that are taken up as the focus of this research. That is, what questions are being asked? By whom? And who do the questions and answers serve? Most of the research that gets shared in these debates narrows in on students (minus disabled students) or on the changes that students should make rather than on changes to institutions or instructor teaching practices, apart from instituting bans. In short, we can ask other questions about laptops and learning.
Rather than ask whether laptop bans correlate with specific testing outcomes, we could ask: Which teaching and evaluation practices best accommodate the changes in digital access and practices in which recent generations of students are trained? How easily do these practices scale to different course sizes or translate across disciplinary norms? Rather than try to quantify “distracted students,” we could ask: What changes to our teaching practices better keep students engaged when they have more of the world at their fingertips? Rather than ask how laptop use impedes seminar discussions, we could ask: How can laptop use enable multiple modes of communication or promote more equity in class discussion? Or perhaps we could ask: Which strategies best facilitate technology use in education while acknowledging that not everybody has equal access to technology due to factors such as poverty and disability? There are, after all, courses that do not ban laptops but rather try to make them mandatory, without providing access or alternatives to students who don’t own one.
It isn’t that these questions aren’t asked. Browsing through HASTAC posts and comments, for example, reveals abundant resources and strategies, some nearly a decade old. Yet these are not the questions or issues most commonly discussed or centred in research whose starting point of inquiry is whether laptops are “bad,” when the research is focused on students and laptops, and when disabled students’ testimonies continue to be treated as “exceptions.” Ongoing discussions of classroom laptop bans need to engage in disability-informed research and counter-research on integrating technology in education.
C, would you like to say anything else on any of the subjects that you’ve discussed in this interview or recommend any articles, books, or other resources?
I sometimes struggle trying to generate written text, for reasons including disability, but find that talking and presenting often comes easier. So, I do a lot of my thinking out loud, talking to myself or others, going to conferences, and often use notes or transcripts to help stitch and patch those pieces together. A good portion of my answers here are a patchwork of this kind.
[Description of image below: An out-of-focus selfie of C and a bumblebee. The bee is resting on a sprig of goldenrod in front of a white sky. At the bottom of the frame, C, a white person with glasses who is mostly obscured by the goldenrod and framing, peers into the camera from behind the bee.]
I mention this writing process for a few reasons. First, I want to emphasize that my remarks in this interview are hardly just my own, but rather the product of many conversations with people and texts in person and online, and really can’t be separated out from my engagement with others or the different spaces that we occupied—as if any knowledge ever could be!
Second, I also want to make a general point about disability methodologies and different relationships to text, since we’ve been discussing silences, language, and academic institutions. Most sanctioned academic sources are text-based books and journals, while a lot of other academic work involves verbal exchanges and lectures and presentations, and these are often kept separate. A 2014 book review by Teresa Blankmeyer Burke, which was simultaneously published in American Sign Language, in English audio, and in English text, is one exception to this kind of separation.
Within these academic spaces and practices, there are many enforcing norms. Reading one’s conference talk from a page is considered a taboo, even if it is necessary for some disabled people. Joshua St. Pierre, who did a Dialogues on Disability interview in 2015, has written extensively on fluency, dysfluency, and cripping communication, for example. Meanwhile, to present, but to never publish, is considered tantamount to perishing, which does great disservice to disabled people, as well as people who live and work in predominantly oral traditions.
These academic norms are often complicated by other barriers to participating in academic spaces and knowledge circulation, such as barriers imposed by discriminatory travel and border policies, by lack of support for parents and caregivers, or by financial costs. For example, several public registration rates for conferences that I’ve attended exceed the average monthly rents for a single-bedroom apartment in the hosting cities. And so, in addition to the academic references that I’ve provided, I would also encourage us to respectfully enter other spaces where knowledge is circulated outside academia. What this means will vary by community and context, but could include poetry slams, zines, paintings, storytelling, protests, blogs, performances, dance, and other spaces or groups. This isn’t always easy, and there are important conversations to be had about the ethics of joining these spaces as academics, but if we solely focus on work produced and reproduced in academia, we will tend to miss a lot of people and knowledge.
C, thank you very much for your extremely informative and provocative remarks throughout this interview and for the many recommendations and references that you have provided over the course of the interview.
Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to C Dalrymple-Fraser’s remarks, ask questions, and so on. Comments will be moderated. As always, although signed comments are encouraged and preferred, anonymous comments may be permitted.
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Please join me here again on Wednesday, November 21st at 8 a.m. EST for the forty-fourth installment of the Dialogues on Disability series and, indeed, on every third Wednesday of the months ahead. I have a fabulous line-up of interviews planned. If you would like to nominate someone to be interviewed (self-nominations are welcomed), please feel free to write me at s.tremain@yahoo.ca.
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