Abstract
Barriers to access in higher education are most often understood in the context of disability, and the accommodations disabled students are legally guaranteed. This chapter highlights the ways barriers to access exist for all students, not just those whose access needs arise from disability status. Informed by Disability Studies theory, and my experiences in the classroom, I discuss how instructors can practice care in the classroom through an orientation to access which is not limited to disability. In urging readers to expand their conceptions of what “access” is, I argue access, and barriers to it, must be a foundational consideration in designing and teaching IR courses moving forward. The slogan “Access Is Love” comes from a project of the same name, created and led by three disabled Asian-American women: Mia Mingus, Sandy Ho, and Alice Wong.
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Notes
- 1.
I use person-first language (PFL) of “people/person with a disability” and identity-first language (IFL) of “disabled person/people” interchangeably in this chapter. The term “person/people with a disability” is most commonly used in the United States to discuss disability in 2021, and it ostensibly serves to separate the person from their disability, thus not allowing a person to be defined by their disability (Snow, 2007). The term “disabled person/people” is an example of IFL in which people commonly identify with a social identity of disabled, like woman or Black person (Ladau 2015). PFL has become commonly used in documents and conventions of international organizations like the UN, where language used to proclaim 1981 the International Year of Disabled Persons, has been ditched in favor of PFL, in documents like the 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UCNRPD). This is not an apolitical (Titchkosky, 2001) nor unimportant change in official language around disability which occurred in both the United States where the Rehabilitation Act Amendments of 1986 changed the Rehabilitation Act of 1973’s language from “handicapped individual” to “individual with a handicap.” The debate over IFL/PFL, especially as it pertains to the disabled social and political identity is ongoing and an important site for political analysis but is a distinction I do not seek to take a proverbial side of here.
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Jenks, A.B. (2022). Access is Love: Equity-Minded Pandemic Pedagogy. In: Szarejko, A.A. (eds) Pandemic Pedagogy. Political Pedagogies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83557-6_9
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