Everyday Survival and Collective Action: What We Can Learn From Disabled Faculty About Access and Care

Speaker: Margaret Price, Associate Professor for English and Director of the Disabilities Studies Program at The Ohio State University

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The pandemic has raised surprising questions about everyday academic life. For example, “How is it possible that I am required to do a full-time job while also providing full-time care for my family?” or “How can I negotiate questions of ‘safety’ with my co-workers, my community, even my closest loved ones?” Long before 2020, however, these questions were already active topics of conversation in interdependent communities of people who are disabled, BIPOC, queer, and marginalized in other ways. In this interactive talk, Dr. Margaret Price draws upon data from a study with disabled faculty to highlight the themes of access and care. Those themes are often co-opted by educational institutions which claim to center access and care while pursuing initiatives that in fact achieve the opposite. Stories from Price’s survey and interview study allow us to learn more about the everyday lives and strategies of disabled faculty members. They also demonstrate that all participants in higher education will benefit from a cultural shift toward shared accountability and interdependence in order to foster sustainable forms of access and care that support workers.

About the Speaker

Dr. Margaret Price is co-founder and lead PI of the Transformative Access Project at The Ohio State University, which “re-imagines access as a collective process that centers race, ethnicity, disability, class, gender, and sexuality.” Her award-winning research focuses on sharing concrete strategies and starting necessary dialogues about creating a culture of care and a sense of shared accountability in academic spaces. She is at work on a book about inclusivity in university culture, which is under contract with Duke University Press, and her most recent publication is “Time Harms: Disabled Faculty Navigate the Accommodations Loop,” published in South Atlantic Quarterly in Spring 2021. In Spring 2022, she will travel to the University of Gothenberg, Sweden, on a Fulbright Grant to study universal design and collective access. Her website is http://margaretprice.wordpress.com.