 what would an inclusive university look like is our title. I'd like to begin by recognizing that we all work and most of us live on First Nations lands, including Musqueam, Stalo, Slewa Tooth, Squamish and Selk Territories. For millennia on these lands, the various Coast Salish and Selk nations have been engaged in learning and passing on knowledge to the next generation. And as instructors at UBC, we're grateful for the opportunity to continue this practice on their land. For this workshop, we invite you all to be comfortable, to move your body as you need to do and participate in whatever way works best for you. The workshop will continue beyond the bounds of this session and you can engage with the conversation at your own speed and in the form that you prefer. My name is Sherylyn Orba and I'm a professor and the head of department in Asian Studies at UBC Vancouver. I'm a 64-year-old white woman with gray hair, still a little bit of brown in it, but mostly gray, just above my shoulders. My pronouns are she, her. I'm sitting in my opposite home with the background blurred because it's very messy. Please note that this session is being recorded and closed captioning is enabled. In addition, we are delighted to have two ASL interpreters working with us today, Carmen Kerman and Jessica Carroll. I will now turn things over to another member of the project team that organized this workshop, Ayaka Yoshimizu. Hello, my name is Ayaka Yoshimizu. Today I'm speaking from the unceded lands of Muscovims, Squamish and Zeiratooth First Nations. I am non-disabled cis woman from East Asia and I speak Japanese as my first language. I have black straight hair up to my shoulders and today I'm wearing black long sleeve turtleneck shirt. My virtual background is a picture I took last summer in Agassiz from a canoe and it includes a stream, river banks and trees. I am assistant professor of teaching in the department of Asian studies. I believe most of you have received an email from us a few days ago and if you haven't, that probably has to do with the timing of registration for the workshop. As we described in the email, this workshop is the culmination of the project focused on disabilities, ableism and accessibility for disabled instructors at UBC, including faculty, sessionals and graduate student TAs. And this project was funded by UBC's Equity and Inclusion Office. In an effort to make our session accessible, we adopt a multi-temporal approach which involves part of our communication happening asynchronously. We have already sent you a few materials to share our project materials and outcomes and have already received a question. So thank you for the question. We will be inviting your participation during the workshop but some of the questions and comments will be responded after the workshop. And one of the facilitators, Shota Iwasaki, will explain this in a minute but some of his response to the questions will be sent out later instead of answered in the immediate live interactions. Due to the time constraint, we will not be able to go over all the materials we've sent you prior to the workshop. But if you have any feedback or questions about them, please let us know during or after the workshop. All the materials will be made available through the CTLT website along with the recording of this workshop. And all the links will be sent to you shortly. So now Corrine and Shota, our star graduate student members of the team will take over. All right, thank you so much. My name is Corrine DeFredes and I am a PhD candidate and TA in geography at UBC and an instructor at Langara College. My dissertation research is on cats, gender and domesticities. My phone is ringing, it should not be. I am a white trans man with short brown hair, light eyes, tortoiseshell glasses and gray and maroon gingham collared shirt and a maroon cardigan. Behind me is my living room slash office bookcase and some furniture and some wood paneled walls circa 1970. This workshop today is offered primarily for disabled instructors, non-disabled faculty and students are also welcome but with the understanding that the workshop will center disabled people's needs and experiences. You'll notice that we are also using what's called identity first language. So disabled person over person first language or person with a disability. And we're doing that because identity first language is generally the preferred format within the disability community because person first language is predicated on disability being understood as a negative or diminishing characteristic from which it's necessary to separate the person in order to elevate their personhood. By contrast, identity first language asserts the importance of disability as a social, cultural and political identity. Nevertheless, we understand that individual preferences vary and we encourage you to use whatever format or terminology you prefer for yourself. And I will kick it over to Shota. Hello everyone. I will be reading Shota's introduction which is in the chat. Hello everyone. My name is Shota Iwasaki. I have a speech disability. So let me introduce myself by writing in the chat. Sherilyn reads out this introduction on my behalf. I am a session lecturer and a PhD candidate in Asian studies at UBC. I am an Asian man with short black hair. I am wearing brown glasses, a blue Oxford shirt and jeans. Behind me are ivory sliding closet doors in my bedroom. My pronouns are he, him. I am very thrilled and surprised that our workshop has attracted so many participants. Thank you very much for coming today. I guess we are moving now to our panelists. In this project, as you all know, I think we first did a survey and then we did follow-up consultations with a number of people who have filled out the survey. And among those, several people were kind enough to agree to come and talk to us today about their experiences. So I'm going to introduce all of the panelists first. Sorry, I don't mean to interrupt. I think that there was another piece from Shota's introduction. Oops. Oh, I apologize. I didn't scroll up. Here we go. Here let me, this is so I'm speaking for Shota and it is in the chat if you would like to follow along. Here, let me briefly explain the multimodality of the workshop and my mode of communication. As Ayaka mentioned, we adopt the multi-temporal approach to our workshop. To further enhance the accessibility of our workshop, I'm sorry, to further enhance the accessibility of our workshop, we also adopt a multimodal approach with which your participation in different modes, speaking and writing is welcome. Please feel free to post your questions and comments in the chat throughout the workshop and we will do our best to respond to them. However, due to the time constraints, some of them posted in the chat will be responded to after the workshop. For example, in the workshop materials that will be shared later. Due to my speech disability and slow writing, my response to the questions and comments will mainly be made in those after workshop materials. I appreciate your understanding and cooperation. Okay, so now we will begin the panel. And we have five panelists here to speak today and it's my pleasure to introduce them. I'm going to introduce them all now and then remind you of who they are when they begin their presentations. So our first panelist was a member of the project team, Corrine de Freitas. We met a moment ago. A PhD candidate in the department of geography. Next, we have David Gramling, professor of German studies and head of the department of Central, Eastern and Northern European studies. Next, we will have Jennifer Gagnon. I hope I pronounced that right, Jennifer. Sessional lecturer in the School of Journalism, Writing and Media. Then Jessica Main, Associate Professor of Asian Studies and Chair and Director of the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation in Buddhism, Foundation Program in Buddhism. And finally, Shota Iwasaki, whom you met a moment ago, a PhD candidate in the department of Asian Studies. Before they begin, let me tell you the questions that we asked them to speak to in our consultations with them, many of which will be addressed in their responses, but not necessarily. They're here to say whatever they want to say. The first question, where have you tried to go to get instructional help and support? And what happened? Second, how does disability impact teaching and other areas of your work? Third, are there any specific skills, tactics and techniques that you have developed to enable your work? Next, we have learned from the survey that many instructors have not disclosed their disability in the workplace due to stigma and negative perceptions of disabilities. What do you think is a good way to reorient our perception of disability as identity and a vehicle for community building? While the participants are speaking, while the panelists are speaking, if you have questions, please post them in the chat and the panelists will either respond in the chat when they're done or later after the workshop is over. You're also welcome to send questions to us later on and your questions will be anonymized. So let's begin with Corinne, please. Thank you so much. Once again, my name is Corinne, a PhD candidate and TA in Geography at UBC and an instructor at Langara College. I identify as disabled or CRIP. I'm neurodivergent and have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which is a genetic condition that affects collagen. So that makes me like, yes, actually a literal mutant. And these are things that I value about myself and things that I believe have value in instructional and academic spaces. But unfortunately, the Academy tends to disagree. Critical disability studies research shows over and over again that the Academy treats disabled body minds as unexpected, undesirable place that it passes off discriminatory practices as intellectual rigor and that the few supports that do exist are offered begrudgingly as retrofits to a system that is purpose-built for inaccessibility. So J. Dolmage tells us that ableism is what puts the higher in higher education, that the university enables and elevates particular body minds at the expense of others. And this is important to acknowledge when we talk about professional development for disabled instructors because the very phrase professional development for disabled instructors is something of an oxymoron. Professional development is at odds with how the Academy sees and treats disabled people. And so that's what I wanna talk about. I wanna talk about the pipeline or more accurately the obstacle course where the pipeline ought to be. My experiences as a disabled graduate student have shown me that the university is not invested in developing my professional prospects, that there is no clear path from where I currently sit as a disabled PhD candidate to a tenure-track position within a research institution such as UBC. Because let's be clearly how am I supposed to imagine a professional future when the institution has made it abundantly clear that I shouldn't even expect to finish my degree? Graduate degree programs are set up with non-disabled students in mind and are tailored to their needs. And those of us who don't progress in the anticipated fashion or at the anticipated pace find ourselves facing mounting barriers over the course of our programs and increasingly pressured to drop out. Disability impacts how a person moves through their degree program. And the institution does not support much in the way of variation. So Margaret Price makes the point that not all academics exist in the same space time. Some of us inhabit what is known as Crip Time. And there are many reasons for this, including the time and energy that we spend attending to our disabled body minds, the reality of living with a variable condition or unexpected flares, just having fewer baseline usable hours in a day. And importantly, the ways in which the institution misappropriates what time and energy we do have. And so when we struggle to adhere to a timeline that never accounted for disabled body minds in the first place, we don't get supports or flexibility, let alone a more equitable system that anticipates our needs. We get additional paperwork and surveillance. So even though I have a full time status with reduced workload accommodation, my timeline was not adjusted proportionally. So now my degree program expires every semester and I have to apply for an extension and deal with the inevitable bureaucratic snafus that arise. And to add insult to injury, the grad chair who signs off on this paperwork is the same person who delayed my degree progress by two full semesters when I was a TA for him because he refused to grant my legally protected accommodations until he was forced to do so. So every semester I worry that he'll do the same thing to my extension paperwork. There are also material consequences. The funding structure in academia is set up for students who can prioritize their research above all else and complete their degrees efficiently and with no disruption. So in other words, students whose body minds require relatively little attention or intervention in order to function at the expected pace without interruption. And when funding packages or fellowships tie funding to that standardized timeline that's based on non-disabled body minds, disabled students suffer. I'm of course welcome to TA for funding but after a certain number of years, TA ships are no longer guaranteed. Moreover, having a full time status with reduced workload accommodation does not actually reduce my TA workload. Like that stays full time if I wanna eat and pay rent which means that I guess I'm supposed to reduce my workload in other areas like my dissertation. So mind on disabled peers aren't expected to finish their dissertations in under five hours per week but somehow I am. And other universities such as York have anticipated this and offer grants to offset a portion of disabled students TA loan but no such thing exists at UBC. Disabled people also have a considerably higher average cost of living. So in short, funding doesn't tend to go as far for disabled students and we're more likely to run out of funding with more of our degrees left to complete and we end up having to take on additional work that slows our degree progress even further. Then there's the accommodations process which I won't go into much because we have limited time and I've written about it in the annotated bibliography that we circulated and we'll circulate again after the end of this workshop but the takeaway is this that accommodations purportedly exist to facilitate disabled instructors work but in reality the system functions as an additional barrier, as an othering mechanism and as a threat to continued employment. I will also add that accommodations are only necessary when the baseline is inaccessibility and this for me has been a major difference between teaching at Langara and TAing at UBC. At UBC, my access needs have been consistently framed as unexpected, as burdensome, as discretionary and official accommodations are treated as a ceiling rather than a floor. Getting accommodations usually takes a semester or more and many of my access needs remain unmet. Meanwhile at Langara, which is the school with considerably fewer resources than UBC, my department has anticipated my needs which saves me time and energy that I can invest in my students and my performance. So as a result, I no longer TA at UBC if I can help it. In addition to the labor of pursuing accommodations, there's also the labor of EDI work. This is work that disabled people have to do either officially on the committee or unofficially as we navigate an inaccessible and hostile academy. So I personally come down on the side of if I'm going to do this work, no matter what, I might as well try and make change for more than just myself but it is an enormous amount of work. It is almost always uncompensated and it usually ruffles some feathers. So I know that to some faculty and staff I'm viewed as a nuisance. We're continuing to point out ableism wherever I see it and I see it basically everywhere. It is basically everywhere. But I do need to say here how rare the experience of working on this project with Sherilyn Ayaka and Shota has been. Other units should take note of what Asian studies has done to have one's contributions valued and to be compensated for EDI work that has the department's administrative and institutional behind it is really unusual and it shouldn't be. But I'm grateful for my collaborators in this and for what the Asian studies department has done on this front. I could go on for a lot longer than eight minutes about other barriers that disabled grads encounter. I could talk about the built environment, about the steeply sloped service driveway that I have to take my wheelchair down in order to use my department's single accessible entrance next to the dumpster. I could talk about how hard it is to move around in supposedly wheelchair accessible classrooms. I could talk about how mentors wrote off my professional future as I became more disabled, whether it's the former supervisor who ghosted me or the committee member who said it may not be worth it for me to finish my degree. I could talk about the social and intellectual isolation of spending so much of my time and energy on self-advocacy while my peers develop their instructional skills from reading groups, organized conference sessions, collaborate on publications, et cetera. I could talk about the emotional toll of hearing people in positions of power say to me with a straight face, we've never encountered your situation before. When I know that's not true because three disabled graduate students dropped out of the same program the same semester because of inadequate support. I could talk about the lack of awareness, the unconscious bias and the straight up maliciousness that I've encountered. And I would tell you that as a disabled person the effect is the same, I don't feel welcome or that my contributions are valued. But ultimately what I want to be understood is that these are the barriers that I encountered before even getting to the starting line of a career. And I don't have much hope that it gets better. If you aren't following Tara C. Denneke on Twitter, that's her handle, you absolutely should. Tara has written about their experiences as a disabled postdoc at UBC and it's eye-opening to say the least. So from a postdoc to applying for positions to ongoing pressures, barriers and demands that disabled faculty face, it honestly seems like the best career advice is to stop trying to have one. So UBC needs to do better by disabled instructors. The university needs to invest in our professional development across all levels because what we currently have isn't a pipeline, it's a pipe dream. And that's it for me. Thank you very much, Corinne. What a great last line, but we're both at the same time. Our next speaker is David Gramling. Once again, Professor of German Studies and Head of the Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies. Well, hi everyone. This is really exciting for me and I'm really honored and delighted to join this group of folks, most of whom I've never met. So I look forward to meeting you in due course. I'm so grateful for this invitation. I'm a little nervous because I've very infrequently spoken about this experience of my own. So I'm a disabled instructor at UBC. I am new to UBC. I just got here in January. So still finding my way around my office. I'm also surprisingly enough a full professor and department head in the faculty of arts. I am not a disability studies scholar, nor do I consider myself a present, a representative for anyone's experience except my own. I have been enrolled as a disabled student at every school I've attended since 1981. But up until 1990, there was no Americans with Disabilities Act. I came here from the United States. So for all of my formative years, the solution was assimilation and getting by. I was born with ocular albinism, which is a deficiency of pigmentation in my irises and my retinae. So this will mean that I will not recognize you or your face at more than two meters distance. Interestingly, I've found that I tend to overestimate this and think that it's actually five meters, but I did a little test in preparation for this meeting today and I realized, wow, really two meters away is usually about the best I can do. And you can imagine what that's like on a campus, a university campus where it's expected that you are able to identify people at great distances. So my brother and I were considered legally blind at birth. My grandfather who had the same condition did not finish elementary school. I finished elementary school because my mother is a fierce woman and she insisted that I sit in the front row of every class since first grade and I was given a telescope to read the board with. Ocular albinism affects and always has affected every aspect of my social, emotional, professional and intellectual life. And when I was 10, and we were quite suddenly asked to read 10 to 30 pages of a novel at a time, usually a nine point print or something like this, I couldn't do it. And I was ashamed to complain about this and my solution was to surprisingly enough to invest in foreign language classes in sixth and seventh grade where I could use my ears, my mouth, my mind and my body to do much of the work and not just my eyes. And so I became a language learner and a language researcher for this reason. So it is a particular offense to me when universities grant a kind of preemptory blanket exemption to disabled students from additional language learning when in my experience, learning languages saved my own intellectual and creative life from despair at age 11, 14 and 20. So that was my, yeah, that was my early experience was assimilation, very little discussion of what it meant to live as a disabled person in any of my contexts of learning. And in the 2000s when I was in graduate school, computers started coming out with Zoom features and that was a real major affordance for me. And now I almost always magnify my screen to 200 to 400% for absolutely everything I look at. Interestingly, when I was on the academic job market for the first time, I was encouraged by my department chair at the time to not disclose my disability to potential search committees lest they be scared off from hiring me. And now I'm thinking of some of the things that Corinne just mentioned. And it is somehow ironic that I became a literature professor who enjoys teaching classes of 200 to 300 students at once. But isn't that usually the story? In my case, I ran in the direction of the thing that was challenging me is it's what I was kind of taught to do early on in my childhood. So my simple message is just listen to what disabled people tell you about our experience and try extra hard, please not to misapply what we share to ends that we do not intend. For instance, I was at a luncheon last week with all the heads and directors at UBC. And I heard senior leadership at UBC talking about survey data from disabled students and using that survey data as a kind of green light to expand online education at UBC. So apparently disabled students have shared that we find it easier to use Zoom and other technologies than being in potentially inaccessible classrooms. But what I saw happening in that moment was that our experience was being harnessed to make an argument for a paradigm change toward online education that many of us do not believe to be in the interest of students' well-being generally disabled or non-disabled. So just because a Zoom platform makes things easier for me and they certainly do, it's much easier for me to recognize faces and name tags, et cetera on Zoom than in a physical classroom or a departmental meeting or a heads and directors meeting. That doesn't mean that I favor Zoom as a mode of instruction generally. And so what I was noticing was that disabled students' feedback to the administration was being used to kind of support a kind of interest convergence towards online education. What I like for those survey data to be mobilized to do is to actually make the physical campus of UBC more accessible to folks like me and Corrine. And simply disabled people's views are complex and our experiences are complex and they don't lend themselves to easy implementation. So we're more than something to include and mention in a strategic planner a PowerPoint. And so listening to the details of our stories and taking care not to misapply them is very important in all manners of university policy curriculum development and making sure an institution like UBC grows in the direction of greater justice for all students disabled and non-disabled. Thanks so much for having this lovely meeting and I can't wait to listen to our other panelists. Thanks, David. We will move on now to Jennifer Gagnon. Session of lecture in the School of Journalism, Writing and Media. All right. Hello everybody. I hope that you're able to see my slides up on the screen and I wanted to thank everybody for asking me to be here and to speak. I am a cisgender white woman. I wear cat's eye glasses and I have very bright red, punked out hair. Yes, you can have punk hair and be a professor too. And behind me is my office somewhere running around is my in-training service dog Ziggy which means inevitably he is up to mischief. My name then, as I said, is Dr. Jennifer Gagnon. I hold a PhD and an MA in political science. I can read and translate ancient Greek. I specialize in gender, feminism, violence and disability. I am an expert on universal design for learning. I have a book chapter soon to be published and I am the creator and chair of the UBC Disability Affinity Group through the Equity and Inclusion Office to support faculty and staff with disabilities. This group is also the first initiative of its kind at UBC to support disabled employees. I say all of this at the start because I've not told you some very other significant things about who I am. You see, I am a contract faculty member at UBC and have been since 2013. I am also disabled. I live with a rare genetic syndrome and many related comorbidities. And it takes more than one hand to list all of the ways that I am disabled. When I say then that I'm disabled, almost everything I said at the start vanishes. I constantly feel that I must prove myself as legitimate, as qualified, as competent and capable. And no matter how many letters I have in front of and behind my name, that word disabled always threatens to erase it. For example, these quotes that appear on your screen now, you aren't disabled, you're a professor. You couldn't do that if you were really disabled or your workload seems really high. You know that doesn't seem to be supported by your medical documentation that says your impairments are severe. Or how about this gem? But that accommodation isn't fair if not everyone can do that. These then are the types of comments I have encountered in just the last six months when I am advocating for accommodations and accessibility and when I disclose my status as disabled. You see, I am not only a disabled woman, but also a contract faculty member. My status as a contingent faculty member is a constant reminder that I am seen as merely a temporary resident in the field that could so powerfully represent me. That despite my identity and scholarship as a disabled woman, this position lacks job security. These harsh realities are all the more apparent as all of us navigate these times of uncertainty and pandemic. I have had to fight through my faculty association, through the equity and inclusion office and other places as I have watched the very few rights I have be eroded or outright swept away by the pandemic. My contracts are perpetually in jeopardy. While today I am one whole semester into a contract as a lecturer, I spent eight years as a session instructor. Just last year, I worked in three different academic programs at UBC, Political Science, Vantage College and Academic Writing. I taught 15 classes in both of the last two academic years. If you're counting, that's 30 classes in 24 months and yet I was considered part-time in every department. When I ask for work, when I volunteer, when I propose new courses, I am almost always met with, but isn't your workload already too heavy? You see, that is the intersection of precarious academic employment, ableism and sexism. When I am excluded because others judge that I am not as capable despite all evidence to the contrary. As a disabled contract faculty member, I live doubly with this precariousness and vulnerability as I am always trying to show that I am not a Pinocchio professor, that I am a real prof and that the only difference between myself and a tenured or tenure-track faculty member is that I have an exploitative and unfair labor contract that marginalizes me. I'm always trying to prove to folks that my disability is an asset to my work, not a liability, that my disability makes me a better and more empathetic educator, that it enables me to show more care and flexibility to my students. The university tells me that I am just the person to speak on disabled issues and yet when I try to speak about job security, accommodations or fair pay, I potentially jeopardize my own job and face retaliation. If you face discrimination, but can't prove it in writing, are you really discriminated against? You see, this is ableism. And here I want to draw upon the work of the amazing Tallilla Lewis. Tallilla Lewis defines ableism as a system that places value on people's bodies based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, intelligence, excellence and productivity. These constructed ideas are deeply rooted in anti-blackness, eugenics, colonialism and capitalism. This form of systemic oppression leads to people in society determining who is valuable and worthy based on a person's appearance and or their ability to satisfactorily reproduce, excel and behave. And here's the real kicker. You do not have to be disabled to experience ableism. All of us experience ableism. And what does ableism look like at UBC? We'll take this quote from a member of the disability affinity group. The university does not acknowledge its role in targeting disabled folks. The university does not recognize the racialized gendered structures of power that contribute to ableism and violence against disabled bodies. Think back to the day that everything changed. March 13th, 2020, the day that UBC officially went completely online due to COVID-19. Our entire lives, work, family, social were upended. And in essence, literally overnight, we all became disabled. You see, when I say we are all disabled now, I'm of course not speaking medically. Instead, I'm referring to what disability scholars call the social model of disability. Our current conditions under the pandemic then and now created an environment where we all needed accommodations. We couldn't carry on like normal because nothing was normal. Everything had changed. The social model of disability then separates impairment from disability. By arguing that how society reacts to and perceives impairments is the source of disabling. And that disability is therefore a social category, not a medical category. With COVID then, literally overnight, we all needed accommodation. We all needed accommodation to function and work. We had to work from home, attend virtual meetings, have sessions recorded, and be provided with flexible ways to engage with each other. You see, ableism has made the very possibility of gripping the university seem impossible for so long. Take a look at the stats. Disabled folks represent one in four people in Canada. That's 25%. And at UBC, according to the undergraduate enrollment survey demographics, 25% of all undergraduate students have a disability. But apparently only 3.7% of all faculty and staff at UBC identify as having a disability. That stat is about ableism. That stat then tells me that only 3.7% of faculty and staff felt safe enough to disclose disability in an equity survey. There are, without doubt, many more disabled folks working at UBC. But we are too afraid or vulnerable to make ourselves visible. You see, when the pandemic is in the past, I know that I don't want to go back to normal. Normal is ableist. I want to keep much of the accessibility ground that has been won. I want to be able to continue working from home as an accommodation. Going back to normal means returning to marginalization for many or outright losing our jobs as universities make cutbacks. There is a truly bitter irony here. Right at the moment that non-disabled folks are normalizing disabled accommodations and changes to work, our societies disregard and derision for disabled folks, including myself. We then have made that all too clear. When millions have lost their access to healthcare and disabled folks like me now find ourselves on the wrong side of medical and ethical guidelines, it really doesn't surprise me that I'm both fighting for my job and my life. But the benefits of our newly crypt pedagogies are not just for disabled folks. As a scholar engaged with discourses of disability, one of my goals has always been to infuse my classes with what the disability community calls crypt time. Ellen Samuels, Alison Kafer and Claire Mulaney have all written powerfully about crypt time. And in Kafer's words, it is a way not just of expanding, but of exploding time. All of our classes now add flexibility and additional dimension to time by including things like asynchronous modes into learning spaces. The nice thing about crypt time is it's not just for crypts or rather crypt time recognizes the ways that anyone regardless of disability status can benefit from a flexible crypt form of space and time. All of us benefit from increased access, flexibility and choices about when, where and how we work and learn. These initiatives then are about creating spaces of belonging for those of us who are so often made to feel that we do not fit in academia. When I think then about my experiences as a university educator, I'm very proud of my voice and my visibility. Audrey Lord's writings on disability and feminism taught me that my silence would not protect me. As a student, I never encountered a single professor or professional role model who disclosed to me that they had a disability. As a student, I knew to hide my disability until I could no longer hide it. Visibility matters. If I want ableism and precarious employment and academia to change, the strongest tools I have are my disabled voice and my disabled body. Failing to visibly include disabled faculty members sends a negative message to our disabled students. When we only see disabled faculty in permanently impermanent jobs, this undermines the prospects for disabled students to succeed. You already know a disabled colleague, even if you don't know that you know a disabled colleague. Ask yourself, why disabled folks are so afraid to step forward with our canes and our medical braces? This needs to change. The thing that keeps me going is knowing the impact that I have on my students. When a graduating student said to me, and I quote, I never thought I would graduate because I didn't think I could be successful as a disabled student. You changed my mind, end quote. I knew I'd made the right choice to be an out disabled professor. Because here's the thing, COVID-19 vaccine, it's not gonna solve all of our problems. But this, disability justice, social justice, fair employment, accessibility, inclusion, intersectionality and visibility, our voices, our advocacy, that can solve our problems. So thank you very much, everybody. I very much look forward to your questions. Do feel free to reach out to me either at my UBC email or to learn more about the Disability Affinity Group, either at my email or the email for the affinity group. Thank you. Thanks so much, Jennifer. And perhaps you've already done this, but could you share your email information in the chat? Our next speaker is Jessica Main, an Associate Professor of Asian Studies and Chair and Director of the Robert H. N. Ho family foundation program in Buddhism. Hello, everyone. I had real trouble getting business cards made because my title is very long. All right, so just to follow up on the introduction, my name is Jessica Main. I am part of the Asian Studies Department. I get to teach about Buddhism and Asian religion and do things that I like. And I am enormously grateful for that particular part of my existence. Other parts I feel more ambiguous about. I am a white cisgender woman. I'm sitting in my home office, but instead of a description of my physical surroundings, I wanted to use that time to make visible my brain. And that's, I'm invisibly disabled. So that's where everything happens. So the landscape that I work to hide very hard is my brain. The other part I try to hide is my root personality, which has a notable lack of gravitas. I have a hard time taking things seriously or I take things so seriously that I need to laugh at them. You guys decide. Here's a description of me leading up to this meeting. Okay, so I start worrying about this meeting about three weeks ago. What am I gonna say? What am I gonna say? I start worrying more last night. I don't sleep very well. From about 10 a.m. this morning, I can't concentrate on anything else because I need to pay attention to the start time, which is noon, so that I'm not late for the thing. So around, I don't know, 10, 15, my dog Tiger, who is lying behind me, notifies me with physical and audio signals that she needs to go outside and have some breakfast. That's great. Take care of that. Then coming up on noon start time and I'm getting more panicked. Nobody's around. Nothing's happening. Realize that I put this into my calendar wrong. Realize as well that I miss two important emails about the panel. So I see the next email and I start reading the materials, which I furiously download into my download folder. Then I start reading the material. Then I get unreasonably angry about the identity first versus person first paragraph in the email, not because I disagree with anything there, but because I know I'm gonna screw it up because it's one more thing to do. I convinced myself that anger is not a justified response and it's just my emotional dysregulation. So I go back to reading material. Then I panic again, because I thought, oh, it's starting at noon, it's way past noon, what's going on? Right, it starts at a different time. I remembered it actually starts at one, okay, back to the material. Oh shit, I haven't eaten anything today and I'm very thirsty, which is still true. So I went to the kitchen and then I got distracted by the baseboard next to my fridge. So then I went and got an oscillating tool. And I thought, okay, I can cut the baseboard. And then I thought, okay, no, I need to be doing the preparation for this thing that starts at one, don't be late for the thing that starts at one. Then I come back to my office with coffee and nothing else. I just looked over and realized that I also forgot to take my medication. I then worried about how I announced my participation today in a meeting yesterday, whether I offended the team members there, it was Cheryl and Anayaka. Did I screw up the respect rituals? And then I said, okay, stop, you can't worry about that. You know, you always worry about back to the material. And then I thought, oh thank Christ, somebody opened the thing at panel thingy at 1230 and so I can be in the thing and I don't have to worry about being late anymore, which I've been worrying about off and on for three weeks. Ah, now I'm gonna share my screen. I identify as a disabled person but only found out relatively recently. In 2015, I collapsed. Depression didn't know quite what was going on and have slowly, slowly been diagnosed as ADHD spectrum, other stuff. It most prominently shows up in the kind of thinking that I just described. And fighting against that kind of thinking. I can't do things that I wanna do. I can't choose to do them and I can't choose to direct my thoughts very well. When I am struggling, I get worse symptoms and when I am doing okay, I still can't direct this runaway teenage hyperactive train that is my inner world. I usually know what to do, but I can't do it and I need to try to trick myself into doing things. I need to spend inordinate amounts of time so that I can get past my short-term memory problems and lots and lots of energy. So energy has come up in other panelists' discussions. So many things that I'm so glad we're said better than I could ever say them have already come up. So let me do things that are a little bit lighter and fit with, again, how I am inside. This is a comic from Dinos and Comics, which is a comic about depressed dinosaurs who find hope with one another. In the first panel, you have a dinosaur standing at the anxiety counter who says to the other dinosaur, don't do anything without a plan. In the next panel, you have another dinosaur sitting at the ADHD counter who tells the dinosaur, do everything without a plan. Then you have the dinosaur at the depression counter saying, don't do anything at all. And the dinosaur who happens to have all three of these things saying fuck. That's a pretty reasonable and humorous take on what my day-to-day experience is like. UBC accessibility looked to me when I encountered it in crisis like the legal protections provided through a union and some of the other kinds of help that I could get, again, because of legal obligations, but it didn't appear as help you do your actual job. So UBC, I think, does a few things pretty good. There's lots of education and awareness. There are public positions that the university takes in support of these things. There are health caseworkers. There are some union protections. For example, for me, the state at work program, there is okay reimbursement for mental health costs which has increased in the time that I've been here. It was much lower before. There's some prescription coverage because damn, my medication is expensive. There's professional development funds that can be used for things that help me. Of course, it'd be nice if these things landed in the general pot rather than the, you have to spend the money that you're supposed to spend on doing things that professionally develop you on things that you need to do your job at all. I think that more of this could be made available and be mainstreamed. We could normalize the way we approach things. We could do a lot better. We could make things ordinary. And again, my fellow panelists have spoken so eloquently about this, I'm gonna keep moving on but I really echo a lot of what I've already heard. For me, I need to identify those parts of my life that take energy away from me. I need to control my sensory environment. I need to always ask for help and that's one of my most hated activities. You can't set things up to come into play or you do set things up, things do come into play but you still have to ask. You still have to ask for help. It's still an unusual activity every time something goes wrong. I know that shadowing and doubling helped me. They helped my executive function problems. I know that I've managed to develop workarounds and I can automate tasks and all these things can be assisted by a university that could offer accommodations or just be more accessible. But it doesn't seem to get at some of the critically difficult tasks that I just lose time for. So the loss of time has really been a theme so far and in the materials that were distributed I saw that theme coming up and over and over and over again. I don't have work-life balance, I have work-life because I don't know how I could have a personal life and a job at the same time. And I'm just gonna end with this slide that this corporate capitalist ableist slide that every once in a while I see and this was a repost. Oh, sorry, I'm getting some feedback. Are we okay now? Okay. This makes the rounds on different Reddit forums and I just wanted to point out some of my ADHD, the responses here that really twigged me. All these things are listed as being zero talent. It's like, well, number one is really rough. Number five, maybe I can read it, maybe I can't. Energy, no luck. I am passionate in the way that a excited teenager is excited about everything but that's not apparently appropriate. I don't know. I'm gonna stop here. But I just wanted to sum up by saying I can rarely be how I am on the inside, outside because it is not allowed. All right, thanks. Thanks, Jessica. Finally, our last panelist is Shota Iwasaki, PhD candidate in the Department of Asian Studies. My name is Shota Iwasaki. I am a session lecturer and a PhD candidate in Asian Studies at UBC. I am very glad and surprised that our workshop has attracted so many participants. Thank you very much for coming. I also wish to thank all of you who have worked to make this happen. I am a settler and I cannot speak fluently. I have lived with this disfluent speech since childhood but unfortunately I have not had a chance to learn sign language. I usually use my physical voice in daily life. However, in teaching and research settings where I am expected to convey a certain amount of information in a limited time and in a specific manner, I use a computer generated voice as you can hear now. Since I started teaching as a session lecturer, I have struggled with the following questions. Normal speech and flexible communication are implicitly and explicitly valued and expected in teaching. How can I teach with my disabled speech or without speech itself? How can I ask for an accommodation and support for my non-normative way of teaching? Today, I would like to share some of my experiences as a disabled instructor at UBC surrounding those questions. In general, stuttering is seen as a speech disorder characterized by frequent or pervasive disruption of the normal rhythmic flow and rate of speech. The core symptoms involve repetitions and prolongations in sounds, syllables or words as well as blocks and word avoidance or substitutions. Symptoms of stuttering and their extent and frequency can vary significantly depending on the person and the circumstances. Some of the representative symptoms of my stuttering are as follows. Generally speaking, when one reads a script out, it is said that it takes one minute for every 100 to 150 words. Personally, I can pronounce approximately only 50 words with frequent blocks and prolongations that disrupt my flow of speech. When speaking, I have to consciously form the shape of my mouth and the position of my tongue, especially for the first sound of a word to be able to pronounce it, which is mentally and physically exhausting. This is difficult to put it into words, but it seems to me that blocks and word avoidance and substitutions disrupt the process of giving meaning to what I am trying to say. As a result, I often have a hard time immediately putting my thoughts together into words. In addition, I feel that the extreme lack of verbal communication experiences has been further affected the development of my ability to create sentences. I also feel these would more intensively appear when I speak English, my second language. The challenges I have faced around my disfluent speech and teaching centers around values and expectations of normal speech and flexible communication. As many scholars in critical disability studies and CRIP theory have discussed, academia has its own values and expectations of time, efficiency, flexibility, and self-mastery based on the non-disabled body mind. These values and expectations would apply to speech and communication in teaching as well. As I mentioned at the beginning of this presentation, teaching usually expects verbally conveying of a certain amount of knowledge in a limited time and in a specific manner, especially, flexibly facilitating class discussion and interactive activities, in addition to answering questions from students in classroom have been valued and expected in recent years. In fact, such flexible immediate communication in classroom has been encouraged in almost all workshops for teaching and learning. As a disabled instructor with a stutter, I cannot meet such values and expectations of normal speech and flexible communication in teaching. To simply do my job as an instructor, I have to deal with them with extra time and energy, which is never acknowledged. My computer-generated voice with animated PowerPoint slides is my method to perform my teaching duties. However, I have to say that this method is a survival one and is far from sustainable because it takes much time and energy to teach using that method. I type everything I want to say in class in advance. Once I have prepared the lecture script, I transfer it onto an audio file with text-to-speech software. The adjusting pauses between words to make the voice and speech more natural and comprehensible. I also create animated PowerPoint slides that coordinate perfectly with the voice. I do this preparation for every single class. I understand that this method would not dismantle the values and expectations of normal speech and teaching, rather indirectly contribute to maintaining them. However, this is the only way to perform my teaching duties, of which I can think so far. In terms of questions from students in the classroom, I answer them in the next class with the voice and PowerPoint slides or ask my teaching assistant to answer them, if possible, especially in online teaching with Zoom. My TA can more easily respond to students' questions and comments in the chat box during my lecture. To do this, I asked my department to arrange a graduate student teaching assistant in the field that I teach for my course. The department's support is very helpful to me, but such a TA arrangement is always dependent of the candidate pool, which makes my teaching fragile and unsustainable. Therefore, I keep looking for a better solution. In terms of facilitating class discussion and interactive activities, I have not come up with any effective solution and often fail in the activities, which end with an awkward atmosphere and students' discontent. I asked the CTLT for their help before, but unfortunately, they did not have any teaching methods or instructional support that are helpful for my teaching with a speech disability. Finally, I would like to briefly mention student evaluations and teaching. Every time I teach, I receive a few comments about my voice and teaching style, like hard to understand due to usage of text to speech or like very difficult to stay focused due to the computer voice. Basically, most of the students are understanding and trying to adapt to the unusual nature of the voice and my teaching style, but it is true that some struggle with them. I have no idea how to deal with these comments in my student evaluations. Normal speech and flexible communication are implicit premises of teaching. It is very hard to even imagine an alternative. My current teaching method is a survival one and I have to keep seeking for better methods and support in various directions to do my teaching duties. It would be great for me if there would be a place to think together about possible solutions like a centralized hub for disability related support. Thank you for your attention. Thank you very much, Shota. So Ayaka speaking and thank you all the panelists for sharing your experience and perspectives with us. The panel discussion has been so rich and I'm sure that all of you have questions and comments so please keep posting them in the chat. We are a little bit behind our schedule so initially following the panel we are planning to present some of the key findings from the survey that we conducted last March about disabled instructors' experiences and perspectives of UBC's accessibility and supports. But since we have already sent the material to you we are thinking of changing our original plan and move right to a more interactive discussion inviting all of you to participate and we will circulate the survey results again. So if you have any questions about it please let us know later and now Corrine will take over. Thank you so much Ayaka, this is Corrine. I'm just posting a link in chat. Yeah, so anyway, Crip time. This is how it goes. We're having to be a little bit flexible so we appreciate everybody just rolling with it. So for the last 20-ish minutes we'd like to open the floor for discussion. The question that we wanna ask participants is what would you recommend the university or your program unit or faculty do to make UBC more accessible? And we're going to try to continue with this multi-modal, multi-temporal approach. So if you prefer oral discussion please stay here in the main room. If you'd like to have a written discussion we've set up a padlet page. I just put a link in the chat. For those of you who haven't used padlet before to make a post you just click on the icon at the lower right-hand corner of your screen. And you'll also find further instructions at the top of the page. The padlet will remain active after the workshop ends. So please feel free to continue to add your contributions and we will include them in the materials that we send around afterwards. And so for those of you who'd like to remain in the main room for an oral discussion please use the raise hand function if you want to speak. You can also continue to post questions and comments in the Zoom chat function. And as part of our follow-up materials we'll also send around chat record and panelist responses to questions posted there. So again, the question for discussion is what would you recommend the university or your program unit or faculty do to make UBC more accessible? If I'm seeing hands or missing any hands. Hi everybody. My name's Julie and I'm an assistant professor in the faculty of education. I have brown hair and some say blue eyes, but I don't know. And I've had two heart transplants. And so I guess all of the joys that go along with that I was diagnosed with heart failure while I was doing my PhD program. In any case, I was thinking I was gonna say we all have lots of ideas I'm sure, but I think in order for the university to take action we need to have a task force, a properly established task force on disability. And that's so that we can figure out how to move forward, and so that everybody has a voice or has an opportunity so that we can actually say, okay, this is what the community says. And so, but also have a way for people who don't want to disclose to channel as well. And because for all the reasons that everybody has spoken to, disclosure is a massive issue. And it can be devastating and emotionally challenging. And yeah, and so that's where my mind is at right now that I really wanna push for that. Well, there she didn't turn on my there. I've turned on my microphone. Now you can hear me. My name is John Breen. I'm a postdoc in the faculty of medicine. And my research is all around issues of employment and attitudes toward people with disabilities. And very interesting discussions today. I really appreciate being able to attend this. And I'm also very supportive of the notion of a task force to look at some of the larger issues associated with disability on campus. But I would also look at some kind of arms length office of disability advocacy. I think that there would be significant value in having a place for people with disabilities to come to pick up some of the issues that we all struggle with putting forward on our own for a variety of reasons, whether it's fear of disclosure, whether it's just discomfort with sticking your neck out, I guess. And putting forward ideas that you think might be of benefit by having an entity or an office that could actually carry that ball for many of us, I think would make life a lot easier and would save a lot of duplication. And I think perhaps be able to carry more weight than what any of us is able to do individually. I'm on that side of the disability crowd that's very visible. I either use a wheelchair or crutches. I have a service dog. It's pretty apparent. I don't think about issues of disclosure very often at a personal level. But I recognize that that's a major, major challenge for many people with disabilities. It's about a 50-50 split from the data that I've seen around disability, whether your disability is essentially invisible or not. And I think by having an entity on campus that is an entity on campus at a level that carries some clout, being able to attend executive meetings, being able to bring issues of disability forward at a level where they're considered early on rather than as add-ons or as after-the-fact solutions that are difficult to manage because the building's been built or the walkway's been built or whatever that might be, I'm sure all of us have been in situations where we've been told that's a really good idea. It's too bad we didn't know about it a little bit earlier. And it becomes ridiculous in terms of actually solving these problems. So anyway, that's my two cents for it. That's where I think that there might be value in moving this agenda forward. Thank you. Thank you so much for that. Laura, you're next. Hi there. Good afternoon, folks. Laura, I go by she, her, I'm a Dutch settler on Wasanic territory, and I am a short brown hair. I'm wearing Christmas ornament earrings because I don't have a tree, so I decorate myself. It is fantastic to be with you all today. I'm so excited about this conversation and I thank you. I think I, to the question, the discussion question and yes, I concur with John and my other colleagues who have gone before with the great suggestions. And I think for me, I'll add a couple of things. One is community is so important and the disability affinity group has been one, I think, great step that UDC has taken to support that happening because community really has been key for me in my journey as a disabled person. I think another thing that is important to me is shifting attitudes and how do we do that? Well, there are a few different ways. I think one of them, and John, of course, has so much knowledge about this as well. But one that I've found very effective is research-based theater and other kinds of affective teaching and learning tools. So I think perhaps it's bringing in more of that, more of the storytelling into our units and departments. Yeah, so a couple ideas. And I look forward to hearing from more folks. Great, just to remind everybody too, we also have the Padlet and you can continue to add to that afterwards as well. Does anyone else have anything they wanna add? Corinne, since we have five more minutes, do you wanna share our recommendations that we came up based on the consultations and survey? That sounds good, yeah. And also the PowerPoint with all these findings went out previously and we'll go out again. So there's a lot more in there that we recommend that you take a look at. But yeah, let's do that. I think that's great. Should I share the last slide? Yeah, pretty please, that would be amazing. I'm realizing I've done this so that I can't actually see my notes. Give me just a second. Okay, I can't see my notes. We're just gonna wing this. So for our recommendations, based on our findings from our survey, again, we'll send the PowerPoint around. And so we recommend that you take a look, see what folks have said and a lot of which you've heard echoed here today. Our first recommendation is to normalize discussion of disability, assume the presence of disabled instructors and plan for accessibility. Also to promote available supports and resources for disabled instructors. We've heard a lot of folks saying, you know, I don't even know what's available. I don't even know necessarily what I need. I don't know how to get there. And so making sure that the supports and resources are, and please, Ayaka and anybody else who's worked on this, jump in if I'm forgetting anything. Number three is to create a barrier-free, individualized, centrally funded instructional supports. Obviously we need to plan for accessibility and accommodations only become necessary in inaccessible circumstances. But there is still a role for accommodations. And so we need to make those accommodations much easier to get than they are currently. Currently, they seem to be very challenging to get, but not of terribly high quality. They take a long time to get. A lot of instructors opt to just deal with it themselves and sort of take on that extra labor and also that financial burden because of the barriers that are encountered and trying to actually access disabilities, or sorry, trying to access supports. They need to be individualized, obviously. Something that came up a little bit is that the most accessible option is options, not the supports that people need are as diverse as the disabilities that we have and as diverse as we are as individuals. So we need to make sure that supports are actually appropriate for people's needs and centrally funded because a lot of the burden currently falls to departments. And so it puts disabled instructors in the position of relying on departmental budgets and also relying on sort of intra-departmental politics, which is not a great position for instructors to be in, sort of at the mercy of intra-departmental politics. Number four is to clearly define institutional responsibilities and pathways and hold all levels accountable for legal obligations around accommodation because there are legal obligations around accommodation and even those aren't seeming to be met in many cases. So a barrier to holding folks accountable to getting those accommodations seems to be that the responsibility for supports, nobody's quite sure where it sits and everyone's pointing towards, you know, whatever other unit or office and it's a challenge to kind of track that down. And it's an extra burden for disabled folks who are trying to navigate all of that. So we need to have institutional pathways and responsibilities clearly defined so that it's actually easier to navigate and to find, to access what it is that you need. And the last one is to create mentorship and networking opportunities among disabled instructors. And you're so grateful to the work that Jennifer Ganyan's been doing with the disability affinity group. But one thing that came up over and over again in our survey was how isolated disabled instructors are. And so more opportunities for us to mentor one another and network so that we can support each other and also build our power within the institution. Did I miss anything? I may have missed some, I probably missed something. I think you're very thorough. And it's time, unfortunately. So shall we wrap up? Thank you so much everybody for being here and especially panelists for sharing your experience. I don't have any concluding remark and this is not really a conclusion obviously. So please keep sending us comments and feedback and through Padlet or by email. And again, we will be following up with links to all the materials and recording of this workshop. So again, thank you very much. And we look forward to seeing you in the near future. Thank you.