Lived Experiences of Ableism in Academia

2021 ◽  

Embedded in personal experiences, this collection explores ableism in academia. Through theoretical lenses including autobiography, autoethnography, embodiment, body work and emotional labour, contributors explore being 'othered' in academia and provide practical examples to develop inclusive universities and a less ableist environment.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bianca Gomez

This exploratory study investigates former international students’ experiences pursuing permanent status with the use of primary data from interviews with five individuals. Guided by the question, “what characterizes former international students’ trajectories to permanent residence” and based on the understanding that discourses of exclusion and control inform immigration policies today (Fobear, 2014), personal experiences are explored as realities of temporariness in which subjects are contained by the following forms of regulation: time limits, employment specificity, and temporary legal status. Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory is employed to showcase participants as “knowledgeable” (Sewell, 1992:4) and reflexive agents (Turner, 1986); how they persevere and negotiate their way to permanent residence by enacting creative strategies and enduring the emotional labour that characterize their search for and securing of ‘skilled’ employment while mitigating the immediate need for income, in reframing their mindsets and in their reflections upon the meaning of their pursuits for permanence.


2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Debbie Hopkins

Abstract While the term “climate change” is highly recognized by the nonscientific general public, understandings of its manifestations are varied, contrasting, and complex. It is argued that this is because climate change has become simultaneously a physical and a social phenomenon. Thus, climate change is becoming socialized through nonscientific interpretation. Research has considered the roles of independent sources of information used to inform these communities, ranging from media sources to personal experiences. However, little consideration has been made of the interplay between information sources and how these sources are perceived by nonscientific communities in terms of trust. This paper presents a qualitative study of 52 ski industry stakeholders in Queenstown, New Zealand. It explores the sources of information used by these communities to construct understandings about climate change, their perceptions of these sources, the dominant interpretive factors, and the interactions between the information sources. It finds that personal experiences of weather are used to interpret other sources of information and are drawn upon to corroborate and reject the existence of climate change and its relevance for their locality. This paper concludes that locally relevant information on climate change is required to ensure that it is applicable to nonscientific realities and lived experiences.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dane H. Isaacs

Background: The last decade has seen researchers and speech–language pathologists employ and advocate for a disability studies approach in the study of the lived experiences of people who stutter and in the design of interventions and treatment approaches for such individuals. Joshua St. Pierre, one of the few theorists to explore stuttering as a disability, mentions as a key issue the liminal nature of people who stutter when describing their disabling experiences.Objectives: This article aimed to build on the work of St. Pierre, exploring the liminal nature of people who stutter.Method: Drawing on my personal experiences of stuttering as a coloured South African man, I illuminated the liminal nature of stuttering.Results: This analytic autoethnography demonstrates how the interpretation of stuttering as the outcome of moral failure leads to the discrimination and oppression of people who stutter by able-bodied individuals as well as individuals who stutter.Conclusion: As long as stuttering is interpreted as the outcome of moral failure, the stigma and oppression, as well as the disablism experience by people who stutter, will continue to be concealed and left unaddressed.


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yvonne Brown

  Drawing on lived experiences and recent literature, especially, research by Nurse, a University of the West Indies academic, this article shows how memory, experience, place and history can reveal continuities in the civilizing mission of colonial and imperial projects. In order to validate my major claims, I excerpt a vignette from my published memoir regarding personal experiences at a predominantly, male teacher’s college in Jamaica (1962-1965). At the college, I deliberately engaged in a complex set of oppositional and strategic performances which led to my becoming the student of the year when I graduated. In a larger context, such performances are strategies which assertive women may wish to adopt, in order to disrupt the hegemony of male dominated educational institutions in Canada and the Caribbean.


2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shawn Anthony Robinson

The purpose of this study was to describe my academic journey as a gifted Black male with dyslexia. The central research question was the following: What were some of the stories along my academic pathway that seem significant? The research design positioned me inside the culture in which I am the topic of examination. The research methodology used for my analysis was autoethnography, which allows personal experiences to be explored through the intersection between narrative inquiry and ethnography. The approach allowed me to fully articulate my lived experiences, which provided a deeper understanding on how the intersectionality of race, dyslexia, and giftedness influenced my identity formation. An analysis of my journey led to the finding that the intersection of identity categories must be attended to, in order to support the learning of students with “triple-identity.” The article presents a theoretical model for exploring the intersectionality of those elements.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-59
Author(s):  
Tasha R. Dunn ◽  
W. Benjamin Myers

Autoethnography has become legitimized through its ability to connect culture to personal experiences. This legitimization has occurred alongside a titanic shift in communication made possible by digital technology, which has rapidly transformed, multiplied, and mediated the ways through which we engage one another. This essay explores and exemplifies the necessity of autoethnography to evolve in concert with the ways our lives have become inextricably tethered to digital technology. Due to this shift, we propose that contemporary autoethnography is digital autoethnography, a method we propose that relies on personal experience(s) to foreground how meaning is made among people occupying and connected to digital spaces. Digital autoethnography is distinguishable from traditional autoethnography because the cultures analyzed are not primarily physical; they are digital. In short, the work of digital autoethnography is situated within and concerned about digital spaces and the lived experiences, interactions, and meaning-making within and beside these contexts. Embracing digital autoethnography pushes us to consider and reflect upon the ways we have changed over time with the influx of digital technology. Additionally, the method provides a framework to keep autoethnography relevant in spite of the inevitable changes to human experience that will occur as digital connectivity becomes increasingly enmeshed in our everyday lives.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 38-42
Author(s):  
Sandy Radford

Early childhood teachers enact a relationship-based pedagogy in contexts requiring their consistent emotional labour, not just with children but also with their families. Leaders have additional responsibilities for the wellbeing of teaching teams, meeting the expectations of those in governance roles, and accountabilities to agencies such as the Ministry of Education, the Education Review Office (ERO), and the Teaching Council. Little has been reported about the impacts of this work for the wellbeing of leaders. This article gives voice to the lived experiences of a group of early childhood leaders, raising issues of workload, lack of resources and support, and stress. Comparisons are made with primary principals, noting similarities in experiences of workload and stress but differences in supports for principals that are not available to early childhood leaders. Although early childhood leaders are taking steps to protect their personal wellbeing, a systemic response is urgently needed.


2018 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 42-57
Author(s):  
Juana M. Sancho-Gil ◽  
Fernando Hernández - Hernández

[full article in English] This article builds on the results of a research project into the professional experience of seven academic women in universities and research centers in Catalonia, Spain. The aim of the Project was to explore the personal and professional experience of three generations of women in the process constituting their identity as university teachers, researchers and managers. The writing of their professional life histories has enabled us to investigate how they, as women, have become the types of higher education teachers, researchers and managers that they were becoming, and we wished to delve into the relationship between their personal experiences and the development of their professional careers. In this process, we have revealed the strategies of adaptation, resistance and creation developed by women, the forms of symbolic violence that they experience and the changes through which their careers have passed within the context of an institution that is still continuously revealed by different studies to be deeply discriminating and unequal for women.


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