U. Michigan Talk: Disability Rhetorics in Academic Spaces

ACCESSIBLE TEACHING AND UNIVERSAL DESIGN: PLACES TO START One of the key tenets of "universally designed" teaching is that it will make education not only accessible for all, but also better for all. Universal design thus offers possibly unforeseen advantages for students and teachers, and also for the society that higher education both reflects and shapes. That is, by designing education for the broadest possible range of abilities, we teach better, because no two students learn in the exact same way. But we also create better classrooms because our conversations, interactions, and collaborations include more of us, making them deeper, more diverse, and more dynamic. This then better reflects the true diversity of our world, and sends the message that the university can and should be a place to learn for any Ontarian, that the university should reflect our highest goals. A barrier to education for one student is also a barrier to our shared future. Given the differences between the medical and the social model of disability, as discussed previously, we know that designing an accessible classroom can't start with diagnosing disability. So the following suggestions are organized not by "types of disability," but by modes of teaching/learning. We need ways to design classrooms for the broadest possible range of students, and their abilities and goals. It can be tempting to create a "checklist" of accessible teaching, and to urge educators to audit and adjust their teaching accordingly. But checklists often reduce the complexity of the issue of access, and they also could encourage us to do the minimum, or to stop creating new avenues for access. The following list of suggestions for Universally Designed teaching should thus be read as places to start, not as boxes to be checked off. Universal design is as much about adjustment and revision as it is about planning. We need to plan for diversity, proactively. But we also have to listen to students and adjust to their needs, giving them creative and shaping roles. And we need to understand that sometimes, access needs will collide, and that there is no way to avoid mistakes. Finally, one of the key tenets of the "accommodation" model of education is that we might offer temporary and individual "fixes" for disability. "Accessible teaching," on the other hand, changes the culture and landscape of education so that all can be involved. Universal design actually goes a few moves further: assuming that the "normal" landscape and culture shouldn't just shift to allow students with disabilities in, but that higher education might actually be radically changed by disability and by students and teachers with disabilities. Universal design doesn't just even or expand the playing field, it invites the game to change. Universal Design really is about all students – these tips also show how access also cuts across linguistic, cultural, and socio-economic lines. Finally, you'll notice that most of our suggestions overlap with other key goals for education: from critical thinking, to high-impact practices, to deep learning. PLACES TO START: LECTURES AND PRESENTATIONS Space: Choose physically accessible locations for your classes. If you have a choice, select rooms with desks/chairs that are movable rather than with fixed seats. Think about the choices that students have for seating – does everyone not just have a place to sit/stand, but a choice of places to sit/stand? Once the room is full, will students still have choices, and will they still be easily able to come and go? Will all students still be able to see/hear you? Consider providing your classes with information about accessible features of the immediate environment (e.g. automatic doors, accessible washrooms, etc.). Keep aisles clear, make sure the room is well-lit, at least at the beginning of class as students find their seats. (Later, you can think about what lighting conditions will be best for students during the presentation itself, to accommodate both vision as well as possible light sensitivity.) Delivery: Clearly communicate with students about what your goals are for this lecture or presentation. Don't assume that students know what the pedagogical purpose of the lecture is. This communication can come at the beginning of a class, or you could send an email (or announcement) the night before. Sign-post your lecture or presentation. Tell students where you are about to go, and revisit where you've been. Like a pop song, great lectures have a chorus – key points that the speaker returns to throughout, and that will stick in the students' minds. When the lecture is over, involve students in re-capping the highlights. Keeping background noise in the classroom to a minimum is very important for all students. Force yourself to speak more slowly than usual, to pause more frequently than usual, and to repeat key ideas aloud. The goal is to sound clear – as though you were performing in a play, trying to have your voice heard over a crowd (or even speaking to the voice recognition software on a smartphone). Think about where you will stand/sit/move during your lecture. It helps many students to be able to see your face and mouth while you speak – how can you make that happen? Can you find an alternative way to write on a whiteboard or chalkboard, so that you don’t turn your back to the class? Try to keep your hands or other objects away from your face when speaking, avoid pacing, and try to pause video or audio instead of speaking over it. Stand away from windows or bright lights and projectors, and leave some lights in the room on when you project an image – make sure you can still be easily seen if you are speaking. Even if you don't think you need a microphone, it is almost always better to use one than not. Redundancy: Consider giving students guides or examples that show how they could take the most useful notes on the presentation or lecture. Make large-print copies of all materials available as handouts or online. Even if you only lecture or present from a set of notes, sharing these notes can be tremendously helpful. Post everything online before class: your lecture script or notes, your slides or web locations, pictures (perhaps with descriptions) and/or of the notes or figures you write on a whiteboard or chalkboard. If you can't post the notes ahead of time, post them afterwards. You might even post a set or two of student's notes on the lecture or presentation. Students can actually take turns posting their class notes and this can be a small assignment. Make sure there is high colour contrast between the background and the text for any handouts. If you are giving a slide presentation that will be viewed via projector, the contrast often needs to be more pronounced than on printed material. Black text on a white background, or white text on a black background, are the easiest to read. Use larger font sizes and more slides rather than jamming a lot of text onto a few slides – that's better for everyone. Translation: Translate difficult ideas, words, and metaphors into plainer language. You don't have to lose the complex phrasing, but you should try to add a simpler one, too. Remember, also, that many anecdotes, lots of imagery, and some examples might be culturally specific. You don't have to lose these, but you do need to translate them. All of this translation also forces you to say things twice, which is helpful for everyone. If you are showing images, websites, figures or slides, translate all visual material for students, regardless of whether it 'seems' like students in the class have visual impairments. It is good for all students, and for you, to clarify what you want students to see in a visual. Make sure that there is no relevant text on any slides, images, figures, or websites that isn't read aloud. Make sure videos you show in class are captioned and that captions are turned on, always – this helps everyone. It is also easier than you think to describe videos for students who can't see all of what is being shown – before you press play, tell students what they are about to see; when you press stop, recap what was seen. Think about the content of videos and images and provide lots of warning to students if any of the content could be upsetting or traumatic. Make audio or video of your lectures available when possible – caption videos using free online tools like YouTube's automatic caption creator. Or ask for help with captioning from your Disability Services office. If you provide audio or video, also provide transcripts. This increases accessibility, but studies also show that many students like to read transcripts and watch or listen at the same time. Be willing to accommodate the needs of students who use adaptive technology such as closed-captioning, personal frequency modulation (FM) systems, teletypewriters (known as TTYs), amplified phones, closed-circuit television (CCTV’s), large print computers and materials, Braille, and magnifiers. Be ready and willing to work with sign interpreters or CART interpreters – in both cases, providing scripts in advance of lectures or presentations can be very helpful. Slow down when you are using big words or complicated phrases and spell out key names. Allow the ASL interpreter to sit or stand near you so the student can watch you and “read your words” at the same time by watching the interpreter. Watch the student, but listen to the interpreter when they are interpreting what the student is saying; speak to the student and not to the interpreter. Take short breaks in your speaking to allow the interpreter to catch up; also, plan a 10-minute break for every 50 minutes of class presentation, as interpretation requires a great deal of concentration and endurance. Be aware that interpreters are bound by their professional code of ethics to interpret all spoken messages while in the presence of the student, including informal chatting. When video material is not close-captioned, provide enough light to allow the student to see the interpreter; the interpreter also needs to be positioned near the viewing screen so that the student can see the interpreter and the video simultaneously. Be aware that interpreters often work in pairs, with each interpreting 20 to 30 minute segments. This is because of the need for a high degree of concentration and because of the physical demands of the work. Don’t be concerned with the initial distraction that the interpreter’s hand movements may cause for the rest of the class; tests show that people quickly become accustomed to the interpreter’s presence. Advise the Office for Students with Disabilities if you are planning to cancel a class or change locations, such as taking a field trip. Interpreters are hired on an hourly basis, so advance notice of changes helps reduce costs and allows for better use of the interpreter’s skills. Interaction: Allow breaks during class – for students to move around, talk with one another, or just to relax quietly. Creating breaks also allows students to catch up on and digest what has been discussed. The "think, pair, share" approach allows for productive breaks. Give students a question or problem; give them time to think of their own answers; pair them up to discuss; then ask some groups to share with the entire class. This approach also allows "tolerance for error" – sometimes students new low-stakes opportunities to get things wrong or to air hypotheses and take risks in their thinking. Circulate note cards for students to write questions or comments, or to answer your questions, perhaps anonymously, and collect and address them. If you plan to just lecture in a class, with no discussion, still circulate and collect these cards to find out whether students have really understood all you have said. You'll be surprised – just because we say it doesn't mean students retain it. Have students take turns taking class notes on whiteboards or on large flipchart paper, and then post the notes around the classroom for future reference—keep them up all semester—build running answers to pertinent and revisited questions Give students chances to comment on the lecture or presentation and thus to help revise it for next time—ask students how the class might accommodate them, but also create venues for all students to negotiate for change. Show them how you are being responsive. Make note of one thing from each lecture or presentation that you want to change or vary for the next one. Share this process with students whenever possible. On a macro-level, change your lecture or presentations every semester to respond to what you learned from the last class you taught. Finally… Alter the ways you organize and deliver lectures or presentations. Too often, we compose these materials in the ways that make best sense to us, or in the ways we remember they were delivered to us. But everyone learns differently. Try something new, invite someone else to deliver your materials (or their own), have a silent lecture day where all of the materials and discussions take place online in a networked classroom, innovate. PLACES TO START: QUESTIONS AND DISCUSSION Space: As always, keeping background noise in the classroom to a minimum is very important for all students. One student speaking at a time is essential if all students are expected to listen. Think about where you will stand/sit/move during this activity. It helps many students to be able to see your face and mouth while you speak – how can you make that happen? Can you find an alternative way to write on a whiteboard or chalkboard, so that you don’t turn your back to the class? Ground Rules: Clearly communicate with students about how much time you have for questions or discussion, and what you are looking for from this time. Do you ideally expect every student to have a question? Are you looking for problem-posing, questions of clarification, extensions, applications, critique? Don't assume that students know what the pedagogical purpose of the discussion is. Review past material as you begin. Remind students that they need to be clearly heard: they should keep hands, glasses or other objects like pens or pencils away from the face when speaking; speak more slowly than usual; translate difficult ideas, words, and metaphors into plainer language, and so on. Even if you don't think you need a microphone, it is almost always better to use one than not – so if you have a wireless microphone, get students to use it too. Ask students to state their name before they begin speaking. Interaction: Be ready and willing to work with sign interpreters or CART interpreters during question and discussion periods. Slow down when you are using big words or complicated phrases and spell out key names, and urge students to do the same. See all of the above advice about working with interpreters during lectures. If students are having trouble communicating, avoid making remarks such as: “Slow down,” “Take a breath,” or “Relax.” This will not be helpful and may be interpreted as demeaning. Avoid finishing the person’s sentences, or guessing what is being said. This can increase their feelings of self-consciousness. Force yourself to speak more slowly than usual, to pause more frequently than usual, and to repeat key ideas aloud. Silence in the classroom is okay – it is actually good – and if you become comfortable with it, students will too. Remember that not all students are comfortable with extended direct eye contact. Repeat the key point of all comments or questions for the rest of the class, using your microphone if possible. For instance: "Jennifer just asked..." After you ask students a question, count to at least five in your head before answering it yourself. When you ask students a question, if you really want them to think and be able to give an answer, be willing to wait for it, then be willing to wait a little longer. Alternatives: Allow students to ask questions or share ideas in class anonymously, or without speaking ‘out’—circulate note cards for students to write questions or comments, or to answer your questions, perhaps anonymously, and collect and address them. Give students low-stakes opportunities to think and discuss content – this is "tolerance for error" – students sometimes need to get it wrong, take risks, or try out different ideas to learn. Provide ways for students to volunteer ideas or questions without raising hands. For instance, create a comment or question box you can pass around, take questions online before, during, or after the discussion, and so on. Facilitate smaller discussions among students before you ask students to share with the entire class. Many students need some time and space to try ideas out with one another first. This also gets many more students talking. Facilitate smaller activities – like an opportunity to write or solve problems quietly for a few minutes – before discussion and questions start, so that students have time and space to compose their thoughts. You might even consider asking students to pass these ideas around the room to share with one another, as long as you have warned them in advance that you will do so. Use online resources and content management systems when possible to extend class discussions. Students won't all get the chance to contribute in a large lecture, so offer the opportunity somewhere else. Students should be given many different opportunities and spaces in which to participate (and to be graded for participation). As a larger general rule, develop a wide range of ways to be “present” and to “participate” in class – these alternatives can speak to the many ways we have to be present and to participate in discourse in the contemporary work and social world. What if students were asked to summarize your lecture in 140 characters, as a cartoon, a chart, a map? Have students take turns writing down questions and answers on whiteboards or on large flipchart paper, and then post the notes around the classroom for future reference—keep them up all semester—build running answers to pertinent and revisited questions. PLACES TO START: GROUP WORK, COLLABORATION AND IN-CLASS ACTIVITIES Getting Started: Think carefully about how students will be physically arranged in groups – will it be easy for groups to form and for all students to be comfortable? Think about how the layout of your classroom will impact volume – will students really be able to hear one another clearly? How can you moderate the activity to control volume? Consider a variety of different ways to assign students to groups – rather than the default of allowing them to always choose their own groups. Insist on professional, civil conduct between and among students to respect people’s differences and create an inclusive environment. Talk to students about their past experiences with group work and allow them to establish some ground rules for successful collaboration. This discussion can be successfully done anonymously through the use of note cards. Offer detailed and step-by-step instructions in a variety of ways – on the board, on handouts, and verbally. Don't just assume that students will "figure it out." Making Connections: Clearly communicate with students about what your goals are for these activities. Don't assume that students know what the pedagogical purpose is. Connect these activities to larger class themes whenever possible. Scaffold these smaller activities towards large assignments so that students understand the trajectory of their work and so that they build materials and knowledge—so that they have these materials and this knowledge with them when they tackle a larger assignment, and are enabled to continue the creative process rather than saddled with the responsibility to begin it—this also combats procrastination and plagiarism. Interaction: Take part in these activities yourself when possible – not as an expert but as a peer. Use smaller activities to invite a variety of literacies and learning styles – not just reading, speaking, writing, arithmetic. Design collaborative work in multiple constellations and forms—pairs, small groups, large groups, online synchronously and non-synchronously, etc.—set alignments might privilege certain students and relationships. For instance, some students might be better at contributing after they have had time to digest material, while others might be better at thinking on the spot; other students will defer to others in large groups but actively contribute in pairs; all roles should be valued and included. Think carefully about how students will communicate and solve problems with one another – will the default be that they always have to speak up in front of their group? Will you just let them define their own roles? How can you make some changes that offer alternative modes of engagement and communication, value a variety of ways to contribute, and disrupt default power dynamics? For instance, consider creating some roles and rules that encourage students to build consensus, check in with all group members, and so on. Consider flexible timelines in and out of class – be very careful about asking for activities to be completed quickly. Timed activities rarely elicit the best thinking or teamwork and more often elicit the opposite. Remember that not all students are comfortable with extended direct eye contact and other forms of social interaction. Ensure that students get the chance to take breaks from intense social situations. Just as there are many different ways to participate as part of a work or social group, there should be many different valued roles within classroom groups – and there should be flexible ways to earn grades and credit for contributions. PLACES TO START: LARGE ASSIGNMENTS Planning Ahead: Clearly communicate with students about what your goals are for any assignment. Don't assume that students know what the pedagogical purpose of the assignment is. Have a discussion about your goals and desired outcomes, and help students understand how specific aspects of the assignment fit these goals. Be open to making some changes if students have ideas to offer. Communicate about assignments as early as possible in a semester, and help students schedule and plan for them. Show examples not just of ideal assignment submissions from the past, but also of submissions that were unique, so that students see what you are looking for, but also so that they realize a range of possibilities. You can model "tolerance for error" in many ways. Make large-print copies of all materials available; post everything online. Give clear assignment instructions and make prompts available in multiple formats. Scaffold activities towards large assignments so that students understand the trajectory of their work and so that they build materials and knowledge—so that they have these materials and this knowledge with them when they tackle a larger assignment, and are enabled to continue the creative process rather than saddled with the responsibility to begin it—this also combats procrastination and plagiarism. Flexibility: If the assignment is to be completed in class, consider the impact that increased pressure might have on students – not all students think or create at the same pace. If taking the assignment home and completing it more slowly might increase student learning and performance, then why not extend that accommodation to all? Recognize that students can express understanding essential course content in multiple ways. Diversify assignments or allow for exceptions to allow all students to demonstrate their specific talents (e.g. oral presentations, poster presentations, written assignments). Consider flexible deadlines. Consider creating flexible intermediate deadlines – guidelines for when particular stages or parts of the assignment should be completed, so that students can see what the ideal timeline would be. If possible, allow students to share draft work with you and with their peers, and then to revise. Offer students performative options; allow for some flexibility in terms of the delivery of assignments. Could an essay turn into a podcast? Could students leave a draft of a research question on your voicemail or email? Communication: Make time to meet with students individually as much as possible to assist with every step in the process, from clarifying the assignment, to brainstorming, to polishing. Show students how you expect them to perform highly specialized tasks like researching, quoting, citation, formatting. Most students never have a teacher show them explicitly how to do these things. Remember that the rules for these specialized tasks change from teacher to teacher, discipline to discipline, and culture to culture. Be willing to offer instruction, and accept student work, at a distance Feedback: Don’t be hyper-corrective—focus on content when you are evaluating work, and circle mistakes rather than fixing them. If you really want students to learn from their mistakes, help them identify one problem at a time. Consider using rubrics so long as students can fully understand them, they are provided well in advance of assignment due dates, and they are discussed in class. Consider developing these rubrics with students as a way to increase their understanding of your learning goals and of the assignment. Discuss the difference between summative, constructive and critical feedback. Always try to offer feedback that helps students improve their work, even if that improvement is for another class or another time. Consider using an MP3 recorder or video chat for comments on student assignments—try different modes and allow students to choose modes of response that are most accessible for them. Products and Processes: Create accessible and perhaps ‘searchable’ venues for students to archive all of their work—all of the drafts of each paper, all of their informal writing, and so on—try to create opportunities to revisit work and trace patterns in their ‘development’ so that students can become reflective and ultimately have a ‘meta’ understanding of the products/processes of academic work. Discuss your own working process: the ideal scene for your work, the personal supports you have or try to create, your own blocks and difficulties. Students can benefit from seeing how their instructors work. At the same time, recognize that there are many different learning styles, and that most students won't work the same way that their teachers do, and that this is a good thing. Use online resources and content management systems when possible, and use them redundantly—use discussion boards, post content for classes, use space for drafting and peer response. Create online spaces for students to help one another with assignments. Make a serious effort to understand and welcome cultural differences that might impact student learning processes and the "products" they create. Ask students to help you revise assignment prompts for the next time you teach the class, and/or to write down some advice they would give to future students for succeeding at an assignment. PLACES TO START: TESTS AND EXAMS Planning Ahead: Clearly communicate with students about what your goals are for any test or exam. Don't assume that students know what the pedagogical purpose of the test or exam is. Have a discussion about your goals and desired outcomes, and help students understand how specific aspects of the test or exam fit these goals. Be open to making some changes if students have ideas to offer. Point out the important sections in course plans, textbooks and readings to guide test and exam preparation; where possible, provide multiple samples of tests and exam questions and answers. Allow for the use of adaptive technology (e.g. screen-readers, screen enhancement software such as screen magnification). Experiment with these technologies with all students when possible. If possible, online tests should be tested themselves for accessibility. Ensure that a student can navigate them using an assistive technology such as a screen reader to read aloud the information on the screen, or screen enhancement software that allows the user to magnify the computer screen or change the contrast. For exams that have graphic content (charts, maps, illustrations), it’s best to call on the Office for Students with Disabilities to have the material transcribed into a format that’s accessible to the student; if needed, you can provide an alternate evaluation method. Accommodations For All: Accommodations often allow for, when possible, the use of memory aids in tests and exams. Consider this for all students, especially if the goal of the exam is to test something like critical thinking or problem-solving rather than memorization. Accommodations often allow for, when possible, extra time on tests and/or examinations. Consider this for all students, especially if the increased pressure of a timed exam might detract from other more important pedagogical goals. Accommodations often allow for, when possible, students to take exams home and complete them on their own time. Consider this for all students, especially if the increased pressure of a timed and/or in-class exam might detract from other more important pedagogical goals. As a thought experiment, ask yourself this: could you write a publishable article following the conditions under which you set your tests or exams? Accommodations often allow for, when possible, the use of a separate, distraction-free room for writing tests and/or examinations. Consider this for all students. That is, consider where the exam is taking place, and how that space might create barriers to ideal performance and learning. Would it be better to move to another space for the exam, to give students a choice of times to write the exam in smaller groups, or the chance to make suggestions about ideal times and places to write the exam? As a thought experiment, ask yourself this: could you write a publishable article in the times and places in which you set your exams? When possible, allow the use of a calculator, dictionary, computer and word processor with spell-check, as needed. Alternatives: Offer alternatives to traditional course work and methods of evaluation (e.g. an oral exam or presentation instead of a written exam; or essays instead of multiple-choice and short-answer questions). PLACES TO START: ONE-ON-ONE WITH STUDENTS Spaces: If the student is coming to your office, ensure the office is arranged in such a way that a person with a mobility device has access. Remove obstacles and arrange furniture to give clear passage to where you will sit and conduct the meeting. Consider an assistive device as an extension of the person’s personal space; don’t hang or lean on a wheelchair, or other devices. Most power wheelchairs are controlled by a hand-held device and should be left for the individual to control. If a conversation is expected to last longer than a few moments and your office is not able to accommodate a chair or scooter easily, suggest an area nearby that is comfortable for all parties to be seated. Interaction: Speak normally, clearly and directly to the person in front of you. Some people with learning disabilities may take a little longer to understand and respond, so exercise patience. Listen carefully and work with the person to provide information in a way that will best suit their needs. Remember that not all students are comfortable with direct eye contact. If you haven’t understood, do not pretend that you have; ask the person to repeat the information. Ask truly open-ended questions when possible and exercise a very high "tolerance for error" – students need to be given opportunities to think for themselves, think through questions with you, and to get things wrong. If students are having trouble communicating, avoid making remarks such as: “Slow down,” “Take a breath,” or “Relax.” This will not be helpful and may be interpreted as demeaning. Avoid finishing the person’s sentences, or guessing what is being said. This can increase their feelings of self-consciousness. When you approach a person with a visual impairment make sure you identify yourself and speak directly to them. Do not assume that the person cannot see you. If you are leaving a room or the presence of someone with a visual disability, be sure to let them know that you are leaving and whether or not you will be returning. Assistance: Ask permission before touching anyone, unless it is an emergency. If you are not sure what to do, ask, "Can I help?" Allow students to bring their service animal with them into your office or classroom; Avoid talking to or petting a service animal; this distracts the animal from its tasks; Do not feed or offer treats to the animal; Avoid deliberately startling the animal; Remember, not all service animals wear special collars or harnesses; if you’re not sure and you need to verify, it’s okay to ask the owner if it is indeed a service animal. If someone needs mobility assistance, offer your arm to guide the person – allow them the time to tell you whether they do or do not want help; Walk at a normal pace if you are guiding someone; Be precise and clear when giving directions or verbal information – for example, if you are guiding someone with a visual disability and you are approaching a door or an obstacle, say so; Identify landmarks or other details to orient the person to their environment. Translation: If you are communicating through an interpreter, look at and speak directly to the person, not their interpreter; Speak as you would regularly; Make sure you are in a well-lit area where the person can see your face; Keep hands away from your face; If in doubt, as for clarification to ensure you have been understood; Try to hold your conversation in a quiet area, as background noise may be distracting Be patient. If the person’s first language is a visual language (American Sign Language (ASL) or Langue des signes québécoise(LSQ)), or is not French or English, communication may take longer or be approached slightly differently than you are anticipating. Remember, the person is actually communicating in a second or third language. Repetition, clear enunciation, and plain language can help everyone you speak with. Help students take notes as you speak with them, or take notes for them – don't assume they will simply remember everything you say to them. Resources: Treat a person with a mental or psychological disability with the same respect and consideration that you do anyone else; Be confident and reassuring; Listen carefully and work with the person to meet their needs; If someone appears to be in a crisis, ask them to tell you how you can be most helpful; You can refer the student to counseling, offer to call on their behalf, or walk them over in person. Learn about the resources available on campus or in the community to assist persons with mental health disabilities.  PLACES TO START: IN A LABORATORY SETTING Space and Equipment: Investigate the lab space before your first class. Make sure there is enough room in the lab for all students, there are enough accessible benches and tables, etc. Call your office of Disability Services if you are at all worried about the accessibility of the space. Consider providing your classes with information about accessible features of the immediate environment (e.g. automatic doors, accessible washrooms, etc.). Make sure that there is a quiet space near the lab where students can go to escape from the stress, noise, and stimulation of the lab – and make sure all students know where this is, how to get there, and when they can do so. Think carefully about how students will be physically arranged – will it be easy for all students to be comfortable and to feel safe? Keep aisles clear, make sure the room is well-lit. Keeping background noise in the lab to a minimum is very important for all students. Think about how the layout of your lab will impact volume – will students really be able to hear one another clearly? How can you moderate the activity to control volume? Think about where you will stand/sit/move during the lab. It helps many students to be able to see your face and mouth while you speak – how can you make that happen? Can you find an alternative way to write on a whiteboard or chalkboard, so that you don’t turn your back to the class? Discuss safety concerns both with the student and with staff in the disability services office as well as laboratory support staff. Remember, there is a long history of constructing people with disabilities as the safety concern – be conscious of this stereotype and avoid it. In a private conversation with the student about their accommodation needs, discuss the ways the lab can be made accessible – how can you accommodate interpreters, service animals, assistive devices, and so on? How can students best work with and assist their lab partners – and be assisted – like all other pairs. Discuss safety concerns both with the student and with staff in the disability services office as well as laboratory support staff. Remember, there is a long history of constructing people with disabilities as the safety concern – be conscious of this stereotype and avoid it. Before You Begin: Make large-print copies of all materials available; Make sure there is high colour contrast between the background and the text for any handouts. Insist on professional, civil conduct between and among students to respect people’s differences and create an inclusive environment. Talk to students about their past experiences with lab work and allow them to establish some ground rules for successful collaboration. This discussion can be successfully done anonymously through the use of note cards. Clearly communicate with students about what your goals are for lab activities. Don't assume that students know what the pedagogical purpose is. Connect these activities to larger class themes whenever possible. Interaction: Offer detailed and step-by-step instructions in a variety of ways and in multiple formats – online before class, on a whiteboard or chalkboard, on a handout, etc. Don't just assume that students will "figure it out." Take part in these activities yourself when possible – not as an expert but as a peer. Think carefully about how students will communicate and solve problems with one another – will the default be that they always have to speak up? Will you just let them define their own roles? How can you make some changes that offer alternative modes of engagement and communication, value a variety of ways to contribute, and disrupt default power dynamics? Consider flexible timelines – be very careful about asking for activities to be completed quickly. Timed activities rarely elicit the best thinking or teamwork and more often elicit the opposite. Allow breaks during the lab – for students to move around, talk with one another, or just to relax. Creating breaks also allows students to catch up on and digest what they have been doing. Circulate note cards for students to write questions or comments, perhaps anonymously, and collect and address them during breaks. Many students feel it is a sign of weakness to ask for help or to admit that they don't understand. PLACES TO START: GENERAL SUGGESTIONS Flexibility and Reflexivity: Use different instructional methods to meet the needs of the greatest number of learners. Talk about teaching with fellow teachers, and with non-teachers, so that you can develop reflexivity about your pedagogy. Keep a teaching journal. Be open to learning about disability as a political identity, and about Universal Design as a political movement, to keep the practice rooted to its origins. Course Materials and Discourse: Language matters – For more information on language use and disability, read the Syracuse University Guide to Disability Language and Empowerment. Make sure that if you distribute PDFs, they are screen-readable. See this resource on Creating Accessible PDFs. Make sure that if you have created your own course webpage, it passes basic accessibility guidelines. You should be sure to use the WAVE web accessibility assessment tool to find out what you need to do to make sure the site is as accessible as possible. Choose course materials early. If you are assigning a number of readings, this will allow you enough time to have the documents converted into alternative formats or for students to request the formats they need. Making these materials available to all students will also really help all students. If possible, choose accessible electronic versions of course readings. This will allow students the ability to convert the reading into the format required, whether they use a screen reader, an enlarger or other technology. Be as precise as you can with regards to the texts and pages that will be used. This will help all students. Ensure course packs are complete. Please note that some PDFs (Portable Document Format files) are not accessible to students using a screen reader; when possible, choose tagged PDFs, which may be read by assistive technology. Provide an organized, well-written and complete syllabus including required readings, assignments, due dates and defined expectations, as early as possible; Consider providing all students with the course outline, the list of reading requirements and copies of all overhead materials, slides or handouts, etc. in an accessible, digital format, whenever possible. Some individuals with physical disabilities may have limited dexterity and/or be easily fatigued and rely on the use of assistive technologies or a note taker. All students can benefit from having these materials ahead of time. When digital formats are not available, provide print material sufficiently far in advance to ensure that transcription requirements (for example, into audio-digital or other e-format, enlarged format or Braille) can be met in time. Be as precise as you can with regards to the texts and pages that will be used. Ensure course packs are clearly legible, defect-free and complete. Disability and Disclosure: Encourage students to tell you about any accessibility concerns. But also let them know that you do not need to know what their disability is in order to make your classroom and your teaching fully accessible. You can do this both verbally early in the semester and by having an accessibility statement on your syllabus. Indicate that such conversations are confidential and are strictly for the purpose of facilitating any learning needs or accommodations that may be in place. Too much of the time, the disability statement on the syllabus is the only time disability is addressed in the class, and this only ensures that stigma persists and that accommodations are a secondary concern. If a student who is not registered with the Disability Services Office discloses to you that they need an individual accommodation, refer them to the appropriate process in your institution, but also make the effort to accommodate their needs, just as you would for any student. Discuss your guidelines for classroom behavior and interaction openly with students right away in the course, and detail your expectations in your syllabus. Show how you will also follow a set of guidelines for your own conduct. Discuss inappropriate classroom behavior with students privately if it is a problem in class. Directly outline the limits of acceptable conduct. In your discussion with the student, do not attempt to diagnose or treat them. If the student approaches you for therapeutic help, refer the student to the counseling department. If you are concerned about a student and unsure whether or not to intervene, seek appropriate supports on your campus. Expectations: Avoid making assumptions or generalizations about a person’s disability or capabilities; many persons with disabilities talk about being frustrated with people assuming what they can or cannot do, or trying to diagnose them. The least dangerous assumption you can make is that all students are capable and competent. Remember that in the modern classroom, there are many ways to be "present" and to "participate." Reevaluate your course participation and attendance policies to be certain that they are assessing what you want them to assess, encouraging what you want to encourage, and that there aren't other options that can accomplish the same goals. For instance, if you value the exchange of ideas, does it matter whether this happens in class or online? It may take a student with a physical disability longer to reach classrooms. Try to be considerate of this if the student is coming from across campus, if the weather is bad, or if your classroom is poorly located. Field trips and transportation need to be planned with accessibility in mind. Contact your disability services office to discuss any potential considerations and to seek advice on changes you may need to make; Plan activities at accessible locations so that all students can participate, or, as a last resort, substitute an alternative activity with the same learning outcomes; Provide additional time for the activity and for transportation; Always allow for the use of adaptive technology (e.g. screen-readers or screen enhancement software such as screen magnification) wherever class is taking place. Universal Design: Places To Start 4 [email protected]

Disability Rhetorics Within Academic Spaces Jay Dolmage, University of Waterloo University Initiative in Disability Studies Presentation and Conversation February, 2014 First of all I just want to say how honored I am to get the chance to meet all of you, and to be involved with such an excellent class. Melanie, thanks so much for this opportunity. The truth is, I believe that every English, Architecture, Education, Kinesiology, Sociology, Social Work, Medicine, Rehabilitation, and Women’s Studies student should take a disability studies class like this. But the reality is that it doesn’t happen – Michigan is one of the only places this happens in North America. So you are all lucky, but I also hope that wherever you go in your careers, academic or otherwise, you work to create similar opportunities to discuss, foreground, and move through and with disability. This was the goal of my book – to give people some opportunities to further these conversations and concerns. You have all read my book. I will say that, for me, that is already just a remarkable thing – to get to talk to people about something that took me a long time to create and that now has an actual audience. It is a little bit surreal. I want to really thank you for reading the book and when I say that I really mean it – thank you. I also want to thank you for the questions you offered about the work. I am going to orient this talk around trying to answer some of those questions. I started writing this book about 11 years ago. Back then it was a dissertation project. Because of my immigration status, I needed to finish my PhD in four years, so I rushed and I tried to jam as many ideas into that time as I could. The result was a dissertation that I wrote as though I would never get a chance to write anything ever again. I suggest that you not write your own theses and dissertations in that style. The result for me was a manuscript that could never really become a book. So I worked for several years to focus on just one part of that book: the parts about, specifically, disability rhetoric – thus the name, thus the book you read. But as I saw your questions, I realized that what I really want to talk about today are the things that didn’t make it into the book, the things that I am now working on as my next projects. I will talk specifically about three projects today. First, because several of you asked about the ways that I discussed teaching in the book, I will talk about a larger project that looks specifically at the teaching of writing, but does so by also examining the historical development of the idea of the contemporary university, and how the spaces and discourses of access in these institutions reaches into and rearranges bodies. As I do this, I hope to talk about the University of Michigan a little bit, too. Secondly, I will discuss the ways that very specific discourses about race and disability formed in inter-relation in North America over the last 100 or so years. This project looks at how, in the peak era, the first wave, of North American eugenics from about 1900 to 1930, debates about immigration restriction led to practices that redefined race and ethnicity through disability. Then, finally, because I got some great questions about the actual accessibility of this book – as a physical object, as a written text – I want to talk about a few of the things I have learned about access through this project, that I want to carry through into other parts of my career. But. Before I do any of this, I want to address a question that wasn’t asked by any of you, but has been asked by others about the book. How come you never talk about yourself? This is a book all about disability, but you never tell us whether you identify as disabled, or what your own personal connection is to disability. Well, I don’t have really good or easy answers to those questions. I present as a non-disabled or temporarily able-bodied white male. I don’t always experience the world as able-bodied, but most of the time I absolutely do. I see myself as an ally and a sibling, part of a family defined by disability. I don’t know exactly what to do with any of these positions or positionalities within disability studies more broadly. That’s part of why I don’t write about them in the book. But I also don’t write about them because the whole project of the book is premised upon finding multiple stories, multiple interpretations, tools, and ways to move. Whenever I tried to write about myself, I found I was hijacking the multiplicity and openness I was trying to create within the book. But I will talk a little bit about my own family now, because I do think that a couple of personal stories, at this point, might illuminate a few of the things I was trying to do in the book. I am going to suggest or guess that for each of you, your own experiences with and through disability hopefully also illuminate parts of the book already, and even more powerfully than any of my own stories ever could. When I started to do my PhD in English, about a dozen years ago now, I found myself in classes talking about rhetorical history and about pedagogy, and I looked around, and I didn’t fully recognize the worlds we were talking about. I had a professor named Kate Ronald who taught me rhetorical history, and she was one of the historians who first began to refuse the idea that there were no women in the canonical rhetorical history, and so she went and began to find stories about Aspasia and Diotima and others and rewrite that history. Well I began to feel like I needed to reject the idea that this same canonical rhetorical history wouldn’t have had people with disabilities at its very center. So I looked for and found those stories, and they drive this book. It was part of a larger process in my life. My brother Matt was disabled. And when he started to go to school, he was shipped off to a special school in a neighboring town. So my family fought for his right to go to school and to learn in his own community, with his neighbors, friends, and his brother and sister. We lost that fight in the Supreme Court of Appeal. So we moved to another town so my brother could go to school with all of the other kids in the community. When we did start to go to school together, we still had to fight for Matt to be included, truly included in the classroom. That really shaped how I saw the world, and especially how I saw the major social structures around me, like schools, and how I would always view the classroom. So that is the first part of my story. I do mention Matt in a poem at the beginning of the book, and I think the poem does the best job of actually capturing how much I learned about rhetoric and communication from Matt. This is a picture of Matt and I and some of our friends, after we have just walked and rolled home from school together. In the poem, I mention that Matt talked to me in birds, car horns, the wind of passing streetcars and subway trains, and also in music, played with a few fingers on one hand on synthesizer keyboards and sometimes on an old piano. I want to quickly play one of his compositions, played after he came in from a "walk" on the busy streets of Toronto. Talk a bit about the walk sign: Matt would have you hold out your hand to move his fingers like legs on top of it – he did in fact walk with his fingers and hands, but he also walked with you, and so it made total sense that the sign took two people. Describe the music. I hope that you can see some of this history surfacing in the stories of Hephaestus, for instance, who when I first saw him in his “wheelchair” looked exactly like my brother. But I also hope that I did a good job of showing how all of the other stories and theories of language and rhetoric aside, it was signing with Matt that first really taught me about disability rhetoric, about all of rhetoric. Okay, and now another story, one that, even in my own family, wasn’t always out in the open. When my mom was about the same age that I was in that last story, her mom became pregnant and she began to prepare to have a new baby brother. Her mom went to the hospital to have the baby, but he never came home. My uncle Robert was born with, most likely, Down Syndrome. The doctors told my grandmother that she really had no other option but to send Robert away to an institution. My grandmother also, then, refused to talk about Robert ever again. My mom grew up missing her brother, and she found out that he died at the Huronia Regional Center, an institution in Orillia, Ontario, before he was 10 years old. Later, she was able to get this picture of him. We have since discovered that dozens of kids at the institution died the same month that he did, all from simple colds that progressed into pneumonia. My mom became a social worker, and her first job was at this institution, where she discovered horrible conditions – other people saw them too, but very few tried to do anything about them. She left the job, but stayed connected with many people from Huronia, including Patricia Seth and Marie Slark. This past Fall, my parents acted as litigation guardians for Pat and Marie in a class action lawsuit that was settled for over 30 million dollars, admitting to the abuse experienced by those who lived at the institution. In the above story about my brother Matt, when I mentioned that after our loss in the Supreme Court, we moved to another town, I should mention that that town was Orillia, where the Huronia Regional Center was located, and where the institution was the main employer in this small place in Ontario where I grew up. Going out with my brother Matt in Orillia, people looked at us like he was on a day pass from the institution; entire families were grounded and supported on the idea that people with disabilities should be warehoused out of sight, and could be treated as less than human. Orillia was actually, when I look at it now, a thoroughly eugenic place – that is, its main industry warehoused a huge group of people to keep them out of the gene pool and out of sight, and so the entire town was invested in those values. I hope that some of that experience underpins or puts into relief my push to try and find the neglected stories throughout history – for instance in digging a bit deeper into the royal family history underneath the King’s Speech and writing about the “lost prince”. I have also always tried, when I am writing and researching about other institutions, like the college or university, to remember that they have historically been grounded in their inverse image, in the places where difference and disability were sequestered and where life chances weren’t portioned out, but were taken away. Given that I have now offered a few of my own stories, I’ll turn to that research now, trying to connect disability rhetoric with what is actually happening on campuses and in classrooms at the modern North American university, at places like the University of Michigan. Just as Orillia had its Huronia Regional Center, originally called the Orillia Asylum for Idiots, Ann Arbor had a State Psychopathic Hospital, built on Catherine Street in 1906. Show and describe the image, ironically it was built like a “cottage.” A Michigan professor of Nervous Diseases and Electrotherapeutics, William Herman, was the person who got the project started, and the hospital was always a venue for both the care, but also the study of mental illness and disability – I should clarify that people with all sorts of disability diagnoses lived here. In their laboratories, doctors from the University could study brain tissue from the Psychopathic Hospital across town, and from other psychiatric hospitals across the state. Without a shadow of a doubt, the presence of the State Psychopathic Hospital buttressed and supported the work of the other big institution in town, U of M, and the two had a binary relationship, one constructed in the shadow image of the other. This wasn’t rare. You may have seen a recent news item about the University of Mississippi discovering a graveyard on land it was clearing to build a Medical Center on. In clearing the land, they found over 1000 unmarked graves, believed to be those of patients at the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum. Show and describe story from HuffPo – “it may sound like the beginning of a horror movie” and other headlines. The shock registered in news stories seems to be that this discovery will halt the building, and there is definitely a little bit of drama invoked in articles about the discovery, mentioning the idea of “ghosts” and “haunting” and a “horror movie.” But nowhere is there any outrage or horror about the fact that these graves were unmarked, that these patients weren’t deemed deserving of a proper burial, that these lives were so demeaned. It reveals, first of all, the steady pattern of setting up such sites in close proximity to universities, where one group of humans could be held and studied by another, but also what the binary relationship has always been between universities and asylums like this one. Indeed, one way to map the spaces of academia and disability would be to look at the ways land was parceled out in the U.S in the early to mid- 1800s. While land-grant universities were popping up in rural spaces, asylums and “idiot schools” were popping up in other adjacent settings—on old farms and abandoned land. From within one privileged space, academics were deciding the fate of others in similar, yet somehow now pathological, other and impure spaces. As James W. Trent and others have shown, the history of eugenic research, testing, and promotion at Western institutions such as Stanford and Harvard shows us that universities have been the arbiter of ability in the United States. Eugenics might be defined as the ‘science’ of positively advocating for particular forms of human regeneration, coupled with the negative restriction of the propagation or recreation of certain classes and ethnicities. Eugenics was just this—the creation of biological and scientific bases for maintaining “traditional” and unequal social relations. American academics have delineated and disciplined the border between able and disabled, ‘us’ and ‘them.’ These line-drawers were able to solidify their own positions as they closed the doors upon others. The disabled, in this history, were more than left out: disabled people have been sterilized, imprisoned and killed. As Trent and others have pointed out, American academics systematically developed the means to segregate society based upon often arbitrary ideas of ability—the university was the place for the most able, the mental institution the space for the ‘least.’ Charles Benedict Davenport, a Harvard Ph.D and instructor and David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University, are recognized as the fathers of the American eugenics movement. Here is a quote from Jordan that nicely sums up his views: “It is not the strength of the strong, but the weakness of the weak which engenders exploitation and tyranny. The slums are at once symptom, effect, and cause of evil. Every vice stands in this same threefold relation” (qtd. in Quigley, 2). Starr Jordan and Davenport worked to apply these ideas to bodies they deemed weak. Margaret Quigley charts the outcome of these ideas, an outcome made possible by the privileged position of these men within North America’s “finest institutions.” Quigley writes that, By 1936, when expert medical panels in both England and the US finally condemned compulsory eugenical sterilization, more than 20,000 forced sterilizations had been performed, mostly on poor people (and disproportionately on black people) confined to state-run mental hospitals and residential facilities for the mentally retarded. Almost 500 men and women had died from the surgery. The American Eugenics Society had hoped, in time, to sterilize one-tenth of the US population, or millions of Americans. Based on the American eugenical sterilization experience, Hitler’s sterilization program managed to sterilize 225,000 people in less than three years (3). As Welsome, Trent, Sharav, Smith and others have argued, institutional basements -- like those at the Psychopathic Hospital here in Ann Arbor – were labs for the social and biological experimentation of scholars from the Ivory Towers. Paul Yakovlev, a Harvard scientist and resident at several Boston institutions, built a collection of nearly 1000 brains, turning mental institution morgues into labs and making some inmates dissect these specimens (Welsome 233). His collection was later donated to Harvard, where they are still proudly displayed. Fernald School (for the feeble-minded) came to be known by Boston academics as ‘”the zoo” because of the wide range of ailments represented there, and the bodies held there for easy viewing and study. In the 1950s, “residents” at this and the similar Wrentham School (for the feeble-minded) were fed radioactive isotopes in a scientific experiment. Young boys at these schools signed up to be part of the ‘science club,’ a club invented by the M.I.T faculty club, and they were given Mickey Mouse watches and armbands, and taken on special outings, in return for taking part in a “nutritional study.” 74 boys were fed oatmeal injected with radioactive iron or calcium (Welsome 231, 235). Welsome suggests there was “nothing unique” about this study, as the school had become a “veritable laboratory” with a “captive population” for academics from Boston (231, 233). Many of the pictures used (and still found) in medical textbooks came from these schools. These phrenological and physiognomical (now re-named “neuropathological”) studies led to a catalogue of dysgenic deterioration, the inverse of the pursuit of perfection at the university. Upward academic movement was fueled by the objectified bodies and minds in these basements and later in these unmarked graves. Eugenics can be seen, at least in large part, as the invention of the American university. The legacy of this invention is still part of our collegiate identity. The labs here in Ann Arbor, or in Mississippi, or at Wrentham and Fernald were labs for the development of negative eugenics—the destruction of supposedly inferior ‘stock’ through isolation and sterilization. Many children from large immigrant families were shipped here, and there was a radically disproportionate number of African Americans, Eastern Europeans, and lower-class children, all expendable according to eugenic thinking. Michigan, Harvard, M.I.T and other universities, on the other hand, might be seen as arenas for positive eugenics, the propagation of (supposedly) superior ‘stock.’ I hope that there are ways you can all think to connect this with things currently happening on your campus. We may like to believe that, today, practices of eugenics have not only been rejected, but that they’ve also been corrected. Yet the selectivity of the university environment must be continually interrogated. We must all evaluate the ways in which we ourselves continue to decide which bodies and which minds will have access to the considerable resources, privileges and advantages we bestow—and as we ask these questions, we must wonder whether what we ‘bestow’ is truly worthwhile if it translates into policies of exclusion, programs of incarceration and reductive definitions of human worth. In my work, I have tried to re-map the history but also much of the current policy at institutions of higher education with respect to disability, hoping to show connections to this eugenic history. For too long, disability has been constructed as the antithesis of higher education. Or, disability has been positioned as a distraction, a drain, a problem to be solved. Disability has been located outside of academia, or invited only in the back entrance. As Snyder and Mitchell have shown, "historically, disabled people have been the objects of study but not the purveyors of the knowledge base of disability" (Cultural 198). Further, more than just these proximate, local relations with asylums and hospitals, the university has always had a mutually-reinforcing and polarized relationship with societal institutions like immigration stations, reservations, residential schools, and prisons. That is, the privileged status of the university as the grand arbiter of ability has been an argument for other spaces marking the opposite of ability privilege, such as spaces of incarceration, sterilization, and deportation. The ethic of higher education encourages students and teachers alike to accentuate ability, valorize perfection, and stigmatize anything that hints at intellectual, mental, or physical weakness, even as we gesture towards the value of diversity and innovation. In my current book project, I interrogate and re-map the spaces and interfaces of the North American university, analyzing the ways that educational institutions have structured society by limiting access, as well as the ways that we might more actively, inclusively design pedagogy in response to, and with an awareness of, this architecture. I both map a particular spatial history and forge a set of tactics that might allow us to reform and revise and re-embody these patterns and routines. I search for ways to re-cast the rhetoric of disability, and therefore to re-shape our relationships with our own embodiment, with others, and with our critical differences, in concert with our responsiveness to normativity. Thus I also more deeply investigate embodied learning as it happens through writing, by examining the way space, embodiment and composition interact. In the book I put forward three spatial metaphors: steep steps, the retro-fit, and universal design. These three images represent spatial metaphors that come from within the field of disability studies and nicely articulate the ways space excludes, the ways space can be redesigned, and the ways space can be more inclusively conceived. First of all, the university erects steep steps to keep certain bodies and minds out. Secondly, to retro-fit our structures for access, we add ramps at the sides of buildings and accommodations to the standard curriculum—still, disability can never come in the front door. But finally, in theory and practice, we can recognize the ways that teaching can be universally designed—how we might create an enabling space for writing and a way to think broadly and inclusively about ability. Universal design is the design of space for the most diverse group of possible users, without need for adaptation. In education, this means designing curriculum for all students, with multiple means of delivery, engagement, and assessment. In addition to the spatial mapping of this book project, it also recognizes a series of chronologies and temporal narratives that have structured disability and higher education. I trace several key moments when disability issues have interacted and intersected with movements in higher education: from the eugenics era in the early part of the 20th century, to the rights movements of the 60s and 70s, to the emerging markets and technologies of accommodation of the last ten years. I also recognize the overlapping economies of education and disability: for instance the ways that the steep steps exemplify industrial capitalism, how the retrofit is a logic of fast or adaptive capitalism, and how universal design might be seen problematically, as exemplary of neo-liberal late capitalism. So, for instance, when we think about the "steep steps" at the contemporary university, with think of an architectural history, we think of real physical spaces – maybe the idea of the Ivory Tower, maybe the many steps in the Big House. (I do know there is a complicated history of that football stadium and inaccessibility, of course.) Or, think of Amory Blaine in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise. He develops a “deep and reverent devotion to the gray walls and Gothic peaks [of Princeton] and all they symbolized as warehouses of dead ages…he liked knowing that Gothic architecture, with its upward trend, was peculiarly appropriate” to his elite University (62). This same ‘upward trend’ builds stairs, as well as some ‘peculiar’ attitudes about who can come within the walls, and who can ascend the heights. Angell Hall at UM is a great example of the architectural and ideological message of the steep steps. Designed by architect Albert Kahn at a cost, in 1924, of one million dollars, its 8 gigantic, neo-classical Doric columns, massive esplanade of steps, tonnes of travertine marble – all conveyed a clear message about the aspirations of education. On its top floor, as you know, an observatory was built. This was a building through which the very idea of a stepped access to knowledge – about the entire universe – could be conveyed. The truth is that “disabled people in Western societies have been oppressed by the production of space…due in part to their exclusion from the discourses and practices that shape the physical layout of societies,” Brendan Gleeson writes (2). As Tanya Titchkosky argues, “the mapping of disability is an imparting of some version of what disability is and, thus, contains implicit directions for how to move around, through or with it…disability has a long history of being mapped as if it is a foreign land, and a distanced curiosity remains one of the most repetitive, debilitating, yet ‘normal’ ways of regarding the life and work of disabled people” (“Cultural Maps” 101, 109). In the modern university, students with disabilities are kept far away from the discussions within which their input could be most illuminating, most challenging. This exclusion extends from dialogue to infrastructure: as David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder write, “the built environment also includes the mythologies, images and characterizations about disability that comprise the majority of interactions in our imaginary lives” (Narrative xiv). What we have seen over the past 150 years of disability history is that, during periods of economic collapse or downturn, people with disabilities are the first to be constructed as drains or threats – Susan Schweik's work on Ugly Laws, or David Serlin's history of postwar prosthetics shows how industrial capitalism picked up or put down disabled bodies according to its needs. The ways in which disability is socially constructed in contemporary society can also be seen as, from top-to-bottom, in service of or at least very useful for this capitalist stepping: disability is an object of charity rather than part of the social contract, the disabled body must be made productive or expendable, exhibited or warehoused for profit, the disability itself must be easily monetized – all of these things ensure that disability can be easily controlled in order absorb or expel citizens from status positions, to move them up and down the steps. Liat Ben Moshe's work on disability and incarceration powerfully shows one such way this stepping works. Then, on the other hand, we have the retrofit. Buildings like the new Big House have been retrofit to address historically huge problems with access. Retro-fitting is usually forced or mandated. Another entailment of the retrofit is that it is a stop-gap measure—this leads to the entailment that a retrofit can, in fact should, be given low priority. Retrofits have a chronicity – and when I say chronicity I mean a time logic, a way that time is patterned and has a message – that renders them highly temporary yet also relatively unimportant. Thus the experience of seeking a retrofit usually reveals that they are slow to come and fast to expire. Anyone who has waited for a wheelchair bus, the key to an accessible elevator, etc and so on, knows what this means. Thus, as a building is retro-fitted to accommodate disability, as per the ‘specs’ of the Americans with Disabilities Act, for instance, ramps are added onto the side of a building, or around back, instead of at the main entrance. The ADA calls for reasonable accommodation. Common reason then seems to dictate that disability is supplemental to society, that it is an after-thought or an imposition. As Jeffrey Willett and Mary Jo Deegan write, many retrofits are “far too limited in number or implementation,” or are simply absurd (146). Their list of examples nicely illustrates the ways that retrofitting can preserve exclusion: The number of [accessible] hotel rooms and parking spaces cannot meet demands…accessible rooms [are provided] in largely inaccessible buildings…the person with a disability [may have to] travel two or three times farther to enter a building than the distance needed to use the able-bodied entrance. Ramps leading to these entrances may be the last cleared of ice and snow. Elevators may be poorly situated, slow, or too small. Many large lecture halls and movie theatres force people in wheelchairs to sit at the back (146). Some of you may have seen an article or an image posted online and circulated through social media in the last week about "the most passive aggressive wheelchair ramp in Britain." Show the image and describe. The facts of this story are that this is the house of a 7-year old girl who uses a wheelchair. Her mom petitioned the council of the public housing estate for access to their house, and the response, after two years of lobbying, was this, taking up their entire yard and costing almost 100,000 US$ (that all the articles about it mention this dollar value also helps to construct disability as a drain). But it is a terrifically depressing and perfect encapsulation of the logic of the retrofit: it took two years to get a terrible solution, one that marks their house out as a joke and a spectacle, one that will probably mean that 7-year old has to spend about 30 minutes to get to her front door: this is an aesthetic statement, an ideology in steel, it is a chronotope – an object that has the wasting of time and the depletion of energies built into its bolts – it is also a plain statement about the ways that disability is built into the spaces and times of contemporary society. I would actually argue that all retrofits are passive aggressive, and that might describe their affect and the ways they shape time. So what is the answer to the retrofit? The steps are steep, and they are also ‘steeped’ in tradition. Many universities make the argument that steep steps are stylistically desirable, that they fit with the template, the architectural ‘fingerprint’ of the school: all the buildings are the same color, with the same size ionic columns, maybe even the same number of stairs. These counter-arguments show the ways that in the construction and maintenance of the steep steps there is also a latent argument about aesthetics (see Hunter, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Disability and the Aesthetics of Landscape Architecture”). Change, then, is framed as a deformation, and a transgression of not only space but time. Many of the negative effects of disability can be created by cultural and even spatial constructions—the world is built to accommodate the normal body and mind, and we all experience some disagree of discomfort due to these limits. These limits also function to make the world inaccessible to people with disabilities. Or to make them come in the back door. But is there a way to increase access without negating the presence of disability? In a sense, this is what Universal Design does—it allows us to claim disability as we limit the normalizing and segregating effects of cultural geographies. For Universal Design to be truly successful, it must do so without claiming to erase embodied difference. The example I want to show of Universal Design actually comes from UM Professor of Architecture Robert Adams and his project The Asclepius Machine. As he describes it: Located between the scale of furniture and a pedestrian bridge, the Asclepius Machine animates and extends the operative range of our bodies. If assistive devices such as motorized wheelchairs or white canes for the seeing impaired are mechanical extensions of a sensing body, the Asclepius Machine is a biomechanical hybrid between mechanized bodies and extreme urban environments. Unlike most wheelchair ramps and other accessible forms of infrastructure that perform simply in service to those with so-called special needs, the Asclepius Machine is a performance vehicle that exceeds necessity, and motivates a more robust understanding of how our collective genetic diversity contributes to the vitality of everyday life. Discuss your understanding of how it works. I want to emphasize the importance of the priority of Universal Design. Universal Design might sound like the name of a rocket ship, or an alternative account of creationism—we might instantly think that U.D is just a constant hopeful extrapolation, or a deification of the teacher. The word ‘Universal’ is problematic for many. I hope to show the ways we can respond to this trouble productively. This problem of ‘universality’ is of course connected to normativity. We might suggest that most claims to universality also subsume the possibilities of rich and meaningful particularity. For instance, as Robyn Wiegman suggested, “critical race theorists have assumed that the power of whiteness arises from its appropriation of the universal…the universal [as] opposed to and hence devoid of the particular” (“Whiteness Studies” 117). Yet she argued that, insofar as this assumption is made, “we have failed to interpret the tension between particularity and universality” (“Whiteness Studies” 117). Wiegman argues that normative and unexamined structures must be rendered particular so that we might understand their power. I choose to write about Universal Design mainly because of the verb—Design. This suggests that UD is a way to plan, to foresee, to imagine the future. The ‘Universal’ of UD also suggests that disability is something that is always a part of our world-view. Thus, when UD is successful, it is hopeful and realistic—allowing teachers to structure space in the most inclusive possible manner. One of the central tenets of UD is that it helps all students, regardless of ability. In this way, I think that UD shows us that access cannot be an after-thought. Universal Design offers us a way to locate itself not in response to changing, hostile geographies, but as a proactive architect of future possibilities. There is some danger here of falling into what critical race theorists would call interest convergence—the idea that conditions for the minority group improve only once the effort can be justified as helping the majority as well (see Bell). As Georgina Kleege and Brenda Brueggeman point out, for instance “much of what has always disturbed us about the rhetoric around mainstreaming has to do with the way it is presented as something that is valuable for the majority culture…culturally enriching non-disabled students” (“Gently” 183 italics mine). In arguing for Universal Design instead of just accommodations, many have suggested that UD is of greater benefit to more students—UD can take adaptations and use them to help everyone. Yet such an argument can lead to a situation in which the needs of the majority once again trump the needs of those who have been traditionally excluded—people with disabilities. Things get complicated, as well, when you consider the idea that access needs often compete with or oppose one another. With this in mind, I will also share a link to a huge list of teaching practices that I have developed over time – I have tried to frame these as "places to start" towards Universal Design, rather than as a checklist – the checklistification of accommodation and universal design being, in my mind, a big part of the problem (for instance "accommodation letters" that betray a very narrow version of what academic work and creativity looks like). But I do want to try and share these ideas as widely as I can, and try and get feedback on them when possible. The list is available on the academia.edu site for this talk. I am actually working on a small project for a book that Professor Yergeau is editing, and in that piece I am looking at a really big corpus of statements about Universal Design from university websites all across the US, doing simple things like classifying where on the academic sites the statements show up, but also doing things like creating word clouds of the verbs used to describe UD, identifying examples of interest convergence, the "chronotopes" I have mentioned before – the ways that the language invokes times – and so on. It is sort of a rhetorical project and sort of a digital humanities project. So I do want you to know that I am really skeptical of how Universal Design is currently getting discussed. But I do still believe that UD, registered as action, is a way to move. In some ways, it is also a world-view. Universal Design is not a tailoring of the environment to marginal groups; it is a form of hope, a manner of trying. Universal Design is a means of thinking through multiple sites, while also acknowledging that fixed locations, like the steep steps at Angell, or passive aggressive retrofits, continue to make strong rhetorical statements. The push towards ‘the Universal’ is a push towards seeing space as open to multiple possibilities, as in-process. The emphasis on ‘design’ allows us to recognize that we are involved in the continued production of space. In an academy, a classroom, and a conversation that is truly accessible, that strives to acknowledge (and create) place for our different bodies and minds, that has the power to lay bare the workings of normativity, and to affirm identity, Universal Design is disability praxis. We are not set free into an undifferentiated universe, but we begin to look for the spaces in which we can all learn and move differently. Most importantly, making space for others does not deny their difference; it does affirm a shared connection based upon negotiating the politics and the turbulence of this difference. While the structure of the current book project – moving from steep steps to the retrofit to universal design – suggests a "three bears" approach, discussing but dismissing a range of possibilities and then finding a "just right" solution, in the book I hope to truly question and challenge the promise of universal design, a concept I know you have already talked about in your class. In that spirit, I am really interested in hearing more from you about how this has been discussed in your class. But my main point today is that there is a tremendous amount of important work still to do to think about what the disability rhetorics of higher education are and will be – and I would suggest that Professor Yergeau is really leading the way in exploring this. I also think there were several questions that you all asked me where I feel like you caught me in a footnote or a mention that really came from my dissertation, where I was actually trying to connect the huge rhetorical history project you see in Disability Rhetoric, with the current pedagogical and classroom emphasis of the new book. I guess the new book project is my way to answer those questions. I promise I was thinking about the classroom all along, even (maybe especially) when I was writing about Hephaestus or Metis or Bertie. But I also want to say that for those of you who are more interested in hearing about the classroom, and even more specific teaching techniques and practices that might embody disability rhetoric, please, let’s talk about that, during the questions, or just after the talk, together. I am imagining you may have some new questions for me now, after you have read the rest of the book. So I want to leave a lot of time for that. But – and this brings me to the last part of my talk – I want to discuss some of your questions for me about the accessibility of my writing – or, if the questions weren't directly about my writing, they were about academic writing and how I am positioned within that world. I loved those questions you asked, because I think about this incessantly. I will admit that I look at Disability Rhetoric as somewhat of a failure in that light. I think it is very accessible for an academic text; but that isn’t saying much. There was a really interesting article published this week in the New Yorker. (I don't actually read the New Yorker, but I do click on links on Facebook, especially when the title with the link says "Why Is Academic Writing So Academic?" and I am in the middle of doing some of the physically difficult work of academic writing.) In any case, the article itself basically suggests that the current material, working conditions for academics are so bad that they are creating bad writing, they are making writing worse and worse. In the author – Joshua Rothman's – words: "since the liberal-arts job market peaked, in the mid-seventies, the audience for academic work has been shrinking. Increasingly, to build a successful academic career you must serially impress very small groups of people (departmental colleagues, journal and book editors, tenure committees). Often, an academic writer is trying to fill a niche. Now, the niches are getting smaller. Academics may write for large audiences on their blogs or as journalists. But when it comes to their academic writing, and to the research that underpins it—to the main activities, in other words, of academic life—they have no choice but to aim for very small targets. Writing a first book, you may have in mind particular professors on a tenure committee; miss that mark and you may not have a job. Academics know which audiences—and, sometimes, which audience members—matter." So let me say this about Disability Rhetoric. My own father, when he started reading the book, quickly sent me an email suggesting that I consider writing a version of the book for a less academic audience. I just think I wasn’t at the stage yet in my career to have the confidence to do that. The book took me about a decade to write in its current form. That writing process had a few important binaries, including the binaries of hope and despair, fluency and absolute impasse, but also complexifying vs. simplifying. The entire process of writing the book up until the point when it was accepted for publication was about adding complexity, trying to sound more sophisticated, bring in more theory and reinforcement and research, thinking about the scary academics who were going to review my book – sometimes I could even imagine who they might be, when they came to me in my dreams. I do think the audience who could determine my future was actually pretty small. But then, the entire process since the book was accepted was about simplifying, putting things in plainer words, adding translations, appealing to a broader audience. My hope is that that experience helps me to develop a different process in the future, maybe not with less despair or worry, but definitely with more openness and simplicity. I do think my experience tells us something about academia. I would suggest that as students of disability studies, we can add another dimension onto the argument Rothman is making in the New Yorker, and admit that the process of making academic writing more and more academic is a steep steps architecture, it is a process of ableism and it reproduces ableism. Putting it in those terms really matters. In the last few years, I have also had the experience of founding and editing a journal, the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies. Show the site This journal works really hard to make all of the scholarship it publishes accessible, providing multiple formats, descriptions, and so on. But it is also on an open access platform, meaning that the scholarship is available for free to anyone in the world. This has been really eye-opening, because we have had so many readers, over 20,000 now, and from 90 different countries. It will sound like a humblebrag to bring those numbers up, but I think the point is that disability studies work is incredibly important globally, that there is a huge audience there, and that we have a responsibility to remove economic barriers, just as we have a responsibility to remove other types of barriers. On one hand, we could believe that the audience for academic writing is shrinking and shrinking, and yet I see this evidence that the demand for our work, when we make it accessible, is tremendous. So one of my resolutions, once I got tenure last year, was to only publish in open access journals, whenever possible. My next book project, the proposal for which was accepted by the University of Michigan Press, will be open-access and online, and will be written as much as possible in plain language. So this, finally, is what I propose as the future of disability rhetoric: finding the linguistic and symbolic and technological means to make our work available and accessible to the broadest possible audience. Thanks tremendously, again, for reading the book, for all of your questions, many of which I know are still unanswered, and for the opportunity to continue the conversation here with you today.  IF I HAVE TIME: Another set of excellent questions from your class were about the uneasy alliances between disability, race, ethnicity, gender, class, sex, sexuality. I feel like I do a careful job working with these connections and disconnections in the book, but my most recent work tries to consider specific histories of these intersections, specifically interrogating the eugenic histories of North America. In this work, I look at how processes, discourses, rhetorics and technologies of immigration at the turn of the twentieth century worked to redefine race and ethnicity by using disability as a way to accent and colour race. In recent work, I have been examining the ways that the immigration stations at Ellis Island in the U.S and Pier 21 in Canada were in fact used as laboratories for eugenicists. Immigration, to these eugenics proponents, felt like the perfect experiment for shaping the racial future of America. I have tried to show that, at Ellis Island for example, the key triumph of eugenics was the creation of new categories of disability, and photography readily facilitated these inventions. The terms “moron” and “feeble-minded” were both created at Ellis Island to classify immigrants. A regime of literacy and I.Q testing, but also a regime of vision, was responsible for the solidification of these terms, terms that are still used to this day, despite their racist and pseudo-scientific roots. Perhaps the most overt example of this fusion can be found in the 1918 Manual of the Mental Examination of Aliens, published by the U.S Public Health Service for the use of medical officers performing medical examinations at Ellis Island. The images immediately below come from the pages of this Manual. Show slide. Walter Benjamin has argued that one of the earliest functions of photography was as a physiognomic tool, to catalogue the human body in a way that translated embodied signs into insinuations of a mental hierarchy: “up to the highest representation of civilization, and…down to the idiot” (“Small History” 252). The Manual is an example par excellence of this physiognomic photography. The document clearly outlines a visual grammar for discerning “feeble-mindedness.” Feeble-mindedness, as it was invented at Ellis Island, was a usefully nebulous classification. In the Journal of Heredity, Howard Knox, arguably the most powerful man at Ellis Island and the number one surgeon at Ellis Island from 1912 to 1916, wrote that “fortunately the term “feeble-mindedness” is regarded by most alienists as a sort of waste basket for many forms and degrees of weak-mindedness, and since it is incorporated in the law as a mandatorially [sic] excludable defect, it is especially suited to the needs of the examiners who for the sake of conservatism and certain fairness include many imbeciles under the term” (“Tests,” 125). Knox’s motivations, of course, were always eugenic: “fortunately,” he wrote, “the laws are such that feebleminded aliens may be certified and deported before they have had an opportunity to contaminate the blood of the nation or to commit any crime” (“Tests,” 122) This grammar, providentially, could lead inspectors to any number of possible rhetorical usages. The Manual warns that, “A great many feeble-minded persons on ordinary inspection present no physical signs whatever [sic] which would indicate real lack of intelligence. Nevertheless, the examiner should have made close examination of facial expressions, both in normal and abnormal persons, especially as to whether they might be gloomy, sad, anxious, apprehensive, elated, hostile, confused, sleepy, cyanotic, exalted, arrogant, conceited, restless, impatient, etc. An examination of the photographs which appear herewith may prove interesting and instructive in this connection” (13). The photographs then show several men (and, on other pages not shown, women) labeled as varying grades of “imbecile” or “moron.” The images make direct connections between facial characteristics and defect. As Elspeth Brown suggests, eugenicists at this time assumed that “photography could map intelligence” and the Manual reflected this belief (118). Brown links this belief to the era’s “promise of standardization through photography” (i). She traces industrial uses of photography in the progressive era of the 1910s and 1920s and suggests that photographs were seen as “unmediated scientific tools” because of their supposed “indexical relationship to the real” (20). As Martin Elks has shown, there was a clear visual protocol used to classify the “feeble-minded” through photography in this era (381). Most people will grant that disability has always been a highly visible or visual phenomenon, thinking mainly of the sorts of physical disabilities (and people with those disabilities) that are, in the words of Lennard Davis, "a disruption in the visual field" of the so-called normal viewer (128). But it is less widely understood how even supposedly "invisible" or less-visible mental or cognitive disabilities have historically been defined through visual regimes and technologies. Such protocols were clearly produced and reproduced at Ellis Island. These techniques then rhetorically influenced the ways that everyone, from eugenics proponents, to Ellis Island inspectors, to common citizens, looked at one another. Susan Sontag suggests that “the industrialization of photography permitted its rapid absorption into rational—that is, bureaucratic—ways of running society” (21). This tendency can obviously be recognized in the use of photographs of mentally “inferior” types to guide line inspection at Ellis Island. Sontag elaborates: “photographs were enrolled in the service of important institutions of control…as symbolic objects and as pieces of information” (21). The photographs of the “feeble-minded” functioned bureaucratically as means of control. And their “subjects” became spectacles of rejection. These techniques and documents then rhetorically influenced the ways that everyone, from eugenics proponents, to Ellis Island inspectors, to common citizens, looked at one another. I am going to take time to talk about a small series of photographs that extended this work across American culture, making every non-white alien a possible eugenic menace, a body and mind to be framed according to criminological, pathological, and even freakshow referents. As Nancy Ordover explains, “American eugenicists, armed with charts, photographs, and even human skulls, were there to provide the visual and mathematical support that rendered racism scientifically valid and politically viable” (9). I have been working to show some of the key ways that photography provided this grounding, and developed eugenic rhetorics that linger to this day. Beginning in 1905, Augustus Sherman, an Ellis Island clerk, took a series of pictures of immigrants who had been stranded at Ellis Island. Under two different Ellis Island commissioners—Frank Sargent and then William Williams—Sherman worked as the unofficial photographer of immigrants. Sherman often photographed specific individuals and groups at Commissioner Williams’ request. He was eventually promoted to senior clerk and personal secretary to the Commissioner of Immigration (under Williams) and often served on the Boards of Special Inquiry that were held there daily, to determine the fates of possibly undesirable immigrants. He became an important bureaucratic cog and Ellis Island personality, involved and instrumental in all of the immigration station’s machinations. Sherman took more than 250 of what he called “immigrant type photographs” between 1905 and 1920. These images became incredibly popular at the time, circulated as postcards, framed and displayed in prominent locations, reprinted in periodicals, religious texts, and governmental reports. The majority of photographs simply capture an ethnic group or racial category on film, and label the subjects—for instance as “Russian Hebrews,” “South Italians,” “North African Immigrant” (see below); or sometimes he labels a type more generally as, for example, “Eastern European Immigrant” (see below). As Ellis Island Chief Registry Clerk from 1892 to 1925, Sherman had special access to potential subjects for his photographs. Andrea Temple writes that he told staff, “if you see an interesting face […] contact Gus Sherman immediately!” (16). He sought out the strange—“there could never be […] anything too exotic to capture on plate” (Temple 16). He photographed only detained immigrants—those who could sit still for a long photo shoot because their future was uncertain. These were people who had been already processed through the snapshot diagnosis of the line inspection, and seen as somehow questionable. They then became available for further viewing and “capture” on film, because they were, at least temporarily, not allowed into America. Show slide. This image is labeled "North African Immigrant," and the picture shows a seemingly middle-aged man with a beard, a knit or woven hat, and a large hooded jacket, frayed at the bottom and closed with buttons at the front. His legs are bare. He also has a tag affixed to his jacket with the number 2 printed on it. This image is labeled "Eastern European Immigrant," and the picture shows a young man with a beard, a woven hat with a wide brim angled to the side of his head. He wears a sort of cape, a vest, and a white shirt tied at the neck. He plays a flute that he holds in front of him. Because of the length of the photographic process, the cumbersomeness of the technology, Sherman was compelled to capture subjects in a literal state of limbo—without a country. Those with nowhere to go could be made to be still long enough to be photographed. Sherman photographed his subjects in their full ethnic costume, capturing them in their traditional dress often for the last time—before they were rejected and sent home, or made their way to New York, leaving their traditional dress behind nearly as soon as they landed in Manhattan. If these immigrants did eventually make it to New York, they almost immediately began the process of assimilation, leaving their old identity behind, Sherman’s images perhaps the fading evidence of their previous lives. It has been noted that the newly arriving immigrants’ immediate removal of traditional dress left a literal “sea of clothing” at Battery Park (Temple 16). As Andrea Temple writes, Augustus Sherman “captured these people as they would never look again, as they might want to forget they had ever looked” (17). Sherman’s photographs are examples of the emerging form of “documentary photography” in this era. This propensity for human documentation overlaps with the rhetorical function of the Manual photos, as physiognomic and comparative texts. Indeed, having an inventory of over 250 photos, each labeled according to race and ethnicity, allows for a cataloguing and sorting of bodies. Further, the idea that these images are also effigies is noteworthy. This “documentary photography” was also popularized by Lewis Hine and Jacob Riis. These two men also had close connections to Ellis Island and the immigrant experience, and both are most famous now for their bleak photographs documenting the impacts of industrialization and urbanization in America. Yet Peter Mesenholler makes a key distinction between the photographs of Hine and those of Sherman. His suggestion is that while Hine represented immigrants as victims of industrialization, Sherman represented immigrants as types—his photographs serves as a form of “human documentation” and as “effigies of people who have no social status” (Mesenholler 19). Messenholler suggests that the photographed subjects at Ellis Island then became “effigies” used to “classify and control deviance” across the nation (Messenholler n.p). Ellis Island held up the defective, alien body as a warning to the rest of the country—this alien, this exclusion, could be you. Interestingly, Ellis Island, before it became an immigration station, was also at one point called Gibbet’s Island, so named after the gibbet, a somewhat medieval device, a kind of wire cage, used to suspend and preserve the bodies of dead pirates, after they had been hanged, and to hold these bodies up in New York harbor for passing sailors to see, and therefore to recognize the perils of the pirate life. This statement of corporeal power, this display of force, this use of the specter of the Other body, might be seen as a powerful symbol of what later took place on this same island once it became an immigration station. Sherman’s photographs could be held up as examples and effigies of the bodies the nation had rejected, and thus as threats to all bodies in America and on their way to America. In an 1907 National Geographic article featuring Sherman’s photographs, the unnamed author begins by noting that the immigrants photographed “are here shown just as they landed, most of them being still clad in their native costume, which will be discarded, however, within a few hours” ("Some" 317). Sherman’s pictures were first widely published in 1906 in a very, very popular book entitled Aliens or Americans? by Howard Grose, a Baptist minister. This book devotes chapters to describing given races of the “new immigrants” and making finer distinctions within races. For instance, in the chapter on “Italians,” Grose writes that, “Most northern Italians are of the Alpine race and have short, broad skulls; southern Italians are of the Mediterranean race and have long, narrow skulls. Between the two lies a broad strip of country, peopled by those of mixed blood." (132). While allowing for variation within each “race,” the book advocates for a fine set of divisions within each group, and a multiplication of differentializing characteristics. The question posed by the title of the book is, finally, just a rhetorical one. These are all Aliens, until they can be fully converted to Christianity. Each chapter of the book is also followed by a set of questions, designed to reinforce Grose’s didactic message about the need to religiously convert the masses. But in this school-book format, we also recognize that the question of the title of the book applies to each of the pictures, as in a test—look at each image, and you decide whether these people belong. Clearly, the images are meant to look foreign—the viewer is meant to understand that these people are Aliens, not American until they can be converted. In this way, the diagnostic glance of the immigration inspector is transferred to the reader, to all good Christian Americans. Sherman’s photographs accompany each chapter, and provide visual evidence of racial differentiation. In the same way, the “Dictionary of Races or Peoples,” presented as part of the 1911 Dillingham Immigration Commission Report to congress, is a key parallel text for an analysis of the Sherman photographs. The “Dictionary” was co-authored by a group of immigration restrictionists, the Immigration Restriction League, many of whom had links to the American eugenics movement. This dictionary was used as a guide by the immigration service at Ellis Island and elsewhere from 1911 until the early 1950s. It is quite possible that immigration agents, on a daily basis, referenced both the “Dictionary” and Sherman’s photographs—yet it is impossible to know exactly how the two artifacts were put to use. Yet the photos, their placement in Grose’s book, and the similarities between Grose’s book and the “Dictionary” all speak to a broader socio-cultural trend, a movement towards new racial classifications and thus “new” forms of racism. Matthew Frye Jacobson has written that in this era, the concept of “variegated whiteness” became prominent, and it was important to be able to mark ethnic others, even if they may have been previously understood as “white,” as now somehow not authentically or fully white. He explains that “the salient feature of whiteness [before this era] had been its powerful political and cultural contrast to nonwhiteness,” yet artifacts like the “Dictionary” and Sherman’s photographs reveal how “its internal divisions, too, took on a new and pressing significance” (41). In his estimation, the “Dictionary” was “fundamentally a hierarchical scale of human development and worth” based on this idea of both marking out non-whiteness, and on selective distinctions in a field of variegated whiteness (Frye-Jacobson 79). The “Dictionary” manufactured brand new populations of non-whites, or not-fully-whites. Sherman’s pictures further helped people to “see” these new populations and to define the American through the creation of the alien. Looking at the somewhat simple “immigrant type photographs” of Sherman, we may think a rather harmless cataloguing is all that is at work. Yet these photographs provide evidence of a much larger project of racial division. When Sherman’s images are linked to texts like Grose’s, or like the “Dictionary,” then the explosion of the flashbulb not only renders a vision of the Other, but this vision can be persuasively linked to an increasingly variegated and hierarchical genetic order, to a scientific “truth.” To figure out who was American, one had to scientifically create, locate, mark, and showcase the expulsion of he and she who were not. Foucault suggested that such classification was a “new racism”: “a racism against the abnormal, against individuals who, as carriers of stigmata, or any defect whatsoever” allows them to be detected and seen as a danger. Foucault argued that this “new racism” was most successfully enforced by Nazism. Yet Ellis Island was a place where this “new racism” was also successfully developed. The Dillingham Commission’s “Dictionary,” co-written by prominent eugenicists, did indeed signal a shift from ethnicity to race as the determining, classifying, and stratifying factor in a new calculus of discrimination, a division within which defect and disability became the common denominator. This, in his words, “is an internal racism that permits the screening of every individual within a given society” (Abnormal 317). This “new” racism automatically and always interacts with the “old” racism of identifying differences between larger ethnic groups. As Martin Pernick points out, there are historical bases for this shift—movements more gradual and diffuse than Foucault suggests, yet still recognizable. Pernick writes that early twentieth-century eugenic rhetoric helped to convert ethnicity into race – linking race to the idea of “heredity as immutable” (56). As I have argued elsewhere, a clear line can be drawn from Ellis Island and the rhetoric of immigration restrictionists and American eugenicists, across the Atlantic, to Germany and the Nazi T4 program. Nazi doctors named American eugenicists as their ideological mentors at Nuremberg. The chalk marks at Ellis Island might be seen as a precursor to the armbands and the tattooing of the Nazi regime. In 1936, Nazis gave a medal to Harry Laughlin, IRL founder (Carlson, 12). He was recognized by Hitler for his “model eugenic law” (Carlson, 12). Hitler also praised the 1924 American Immigration Restriction Act in Mein Kampf. Show slide. This image pictures three men, on the roof of a building (a common backdrop for Sherman's photos). At the left, seated on a bench, we see a man with his head turned to our right, wearing a knee-length jacket, beside him another man stands on the bench, so as to draw attention to his smaller stature – he stands at about the same head-level as the seated man. He is wearing an ankle-length jacket with fur trim, and his chin is raised in the air. On the far right, we see a third man, also standing on the bench and just slightly taller than the man in the middle of the picture. He wears a turban and his head is larger than those of the other two men. He also wears an ankle-length coat, and he holds his hands on his waist. "The image is labeled Subramaino Pillay (Right) and Two Microcephalics." This image shows a side angle of "Perumall Sammy" and the hand-written notation at the top of the photo suggests he was "ceritifed for congenital deformity of the abdomen, two arms and legs being joined at the abdomen…" He wears a long jacket, opened at the front where a pair of legs and arms, bound and partially covered with silk, are shown to be attached to his stomach. He has a mustache, long hair, and a hat perched at the very top of his head. The original Sherman photographs contain short captions, written on the photographs themselves in pen or typed (see images above). These include simple classifications like “Russian Giant” or “Burmese”; Histories of arrival and origin; Or a combination of histories of origin, classifications, and specific diagnoses (“Perumall Sammy, Hindoo, ex SS Adriatica April 14, 1911, certified for congenital deformity of the abdomen, two arms and legs being joined at the abdomen”). It is important to ask what happened to people like Sammy Perumall. The fact that he was being photographed does not bode well: he was at least in detention, and likely waiting to be deported, though this is impossible to know with certainty. But if we don't at least ask what happened to these people, then they simply become symbols or effigies. If Sammy Perumall was deported, did he have family in India to return to? Was he separated from family who traveled with him? Did he have sponsors in the US who could come to his defense and prove that he should be allowed to stay? Walter Benjamin suggests that the captions that accompany a photograph carry an “altogether different character than the title of a painting” (“Work of Art” 6). These captions are often “directives,” and can be “explicit” and “imperative” (Benjamin “Work of Art” 6). Sherman’s own, hand-written captions catalogue difference, but also direct our view explicitly, training us to classify each individual according to race and ethnicity at a glance. This "training" was quite literal. Often, the Public Health Service stationed its newest doctors to work as inspectors at Ellis Island as an extension of their education, thus initiating these doctors through the Ellis Island diagnostic process. Many inspectors were also former immigrants themselves, who had come through Ellis Island and then returned to work there. Further, in the images that he captures of bodily “abnormality,” the scribbled caption asks us to view the human as sum of his or her dysfunctional parts and to fuse race and supposed bodily “abnormality” or disability: not just deformed, but a deformed "Hindoo." In this way, the photographs of Augustus Sherman extend the rhetorical work of the “Dictionary of Races and Peoples.” Specifically, the photographs work to fuse pseudo-scientific “evidence” of racial difference with “evidence” of bodily “abnormality.” In their fusion of the image with a sort of diagnosis, these photos develop much of their rhetorical power from their allusion to the frames of the anatomy textbook, textbooks developed in locations like the Psychopathig Hospital here in Ann Arbor, as mentioned before. As Martin Elks has suggested, at this time the “camera became a “diagnostic tool” providing empirical proof of psychiatric sympotomology and physiognomy” (372). The key to Sherman’s rendering of the “deviant” other was the fact that this reading of the body’s signs was connected to a clear nationalist project at Ellis Island. As mentioned before, while the photographs are part of a program of assimilation, they are also part of a process of abjection. The photographs construct a binary relationship between the American reader and the Alien subject, a ghostly national type as the inverse of an array of alien and “defective” types. The larger thesis of this project is that we all carry Ellis Island and this history with us today. We are subject to the same gaze, governed by the same rhetorical vision. Also, a somewhat larger leap I am hoping to make is that the actual technology of photography developed, from the very beginning, as an ableist and eugenicist tool. I think that studying these photographs, together with the rhetorical space of Ellis Island, and the discursive explosion of eugenics, allows us to recognize unique and complicated connections between spaces, words, images and bodies. As bleak and pessimistic as the message may be, I also think that studying these texts allows us to recognize the historical—and the current—predominance of specific visual rhetorics. This study should hopefully allow us to "view" the other ways that, through technologies like photography, or through other "explosions" of media, we continue to frame and develop race and disability, as we freeze and arrest difference. I think it is important to note that the historical over-emphasis on the visuality of disability and race was also discriminatory in a very straightforward sense: if you couldn't "see," you were further excluded. My hope is that Disability Rhetoric, as well as my other research projects capture this clearly, while refusing to reinforce this exclusion. It is in that spirit that I provide thick visual description for all of the images in the book and in this talk today. PLEASE REMEMBER THAT THESE ARE JUST ROUGH NOTES, PROVIDED FOR ACCESS 30 31