Disability

Anxious at School:

Enablement and Disablement at Women’s and Historically Black Colleges

Sula Malina

November 22nd, 2014

“Academic discourse operates not just to omit, but to abhor mental disability—to reject it, to stifle and expel it”

-- Margaret Price, Mad at School

Introduction

For my next paper I want to examine how art therapy is used by children with autism and how their work is perceived by neurotypical people. I've been watching lots of videos made by news stations about talented autistic children and I've been amazed at how often they're turned into supercrips. One example is reactions to the paintings of a five-year-old girl in the UK. Here are some of the headlines:

"Worldwide impression"

"The Miracle of Little Miss Masterpiece"

"Silent Tot's Magnificent Masterpiece"

"Autistic Toddler's Paintings Sell For Thousands" 

For my next paper I want to focus on mental illness and the queer community. I will use the ideas brought forth by McCruer and Samuels in their articles about invisible disability. I would like to explore the intersectionaly of both of these "invisible" identities. I plan on doing online research to find personal narratives of coming out as LGBTQ and/or coming out with a mental illness. I plan on using a narrative of a queer student surviving sexual assualt at Bryn Mawr (http://www.autostraddle.com/on-being-a-queer-survivor-144496 ) in conjunction with Anne's On Being Transminded article. I will use the following primary sources from ICPR:

For my next paper, I want to take a look at academia as a disabling institution. Obviously, I'm coming from my own struggles this semester as a jumping off point, but I know that there are a lot of directions I can go--working further in the direction of my own experiences and physical disability or looking at mental disability, as in Mad at School. I'm also looking into a personal essay from a professor who has had to navigate academia as both a disabled person (I have yet to read the actual essay, so I don't know what kind) and an immigrant published in a book called The Politics of Survival in Academia: Narratives of Inequity, Resilience, and Success.

In my next paper, I would like to further observe Price's concept of kairotic space that enables or disables (wow) mental illness. I will use her manifestations of this concept as well as interview a student, preferably who has been involved in TLI and observed one or many classes critically, and a professor who is interested in accommodations for mental illness in the classroom.

I will reference Price’s observations, the accounts in my interviews, as well as “’Coming into Presence’ as Mentally Ill in Academia: A New Logic of Emancipation” by Rochelle Skogen and “Dispel the Stigma of Mental Illness” by Alice Andors. Ideally, I would include equal parts of student and teacher perspective.

Some questions I currently have include:

I want to focus on parents with disabilites. I found an article written by a mother with a physical disabilites about her impact on her son and an article written by the National Council on Disability about parents with disabilites. I want to analyze how having a parent with disabilities has been shown to impact children through both the personal account and the statiscal account. I plan to try to find more articles since these are both rather short. I also want to see if I can find anything about the difference between parents with mental and physical disabilities as well stigmas that surround being a parent who has disabilities.

For this paper, I'm interested in exploring the presence of anxiety in the classroom--something many of us have expressed experiencing throughout our lives. In particular, I would like to look into gender, race, and class differences in classroom anxiety, and perhaps gain an understanding of how Bryn Mawr as a primarily women's space might actually ameliorate some symptoms of anxiety in classroom settings (and, in turn, how a co-ed institution might disable those living with an anxiety disorder). I intend to tie this into a number of articles we have already read for class (including the web event written by Anne and a student about stress factors at an institution like Bryn Mawr, and the articles we read more recently about invisible disabilities in academic settings).