Disability, Avoidance and the Academy

Challenging Resistance

David Bolt, Claire Penketh, David Bolt, Claire Penketh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317511083
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Discapacidades en sociología

Disability is a widespread phenomenon, indeed a potentially universal one as life expectancies rise. Within the academic world, it has relevance for all disciplines yet is often dismissed as a niche market or someone else's domain. This collection explores how academic avoidance of disability studies and disability theory is indicative of social prejudice and highlights, conversely, how the academy can and does engage with disability studies.

This innovative book brings together work in the humanities and the social sciences, and draws on the riches of cultural diversity to challenge institutional and disciplinary avoidance. Divided into three parts, the first looks at how educational institutions and systems implicitly uphold double standards, which can result in negative experiences for staff and students who are disabled. The second part explores how disability studies informs and improves a number of academic disciplines, from social work to performance arts. The final part shows how more diverse cultural engagement offers a way forward for the academy, demonstrating ways in which we can make more explicit the interdisciplinary significance of disability studies – and, by extension, disability theory, activism, experience, and culture.

Disability, Avoidance and the Academy: Challenging Resistance will interest students and scholars of disability studies, education studies and cultural studies.

1 Disability, diversity, and diversion

Normalization and avoidance in higher education

David T. Mitchell

DOI: 10.4324/9781315717807-2

In The Bio-Politics of Disability, we argue for the recognition of disability inclusionist practices in Higher Education as purposefully insufficient (Mitchell and Snyder, 2015: 18–19). By inclusionism we mean to identify a term specifically associated with disabled bodies in the policy world of neoliberalism, and most significantly, applicable to recent diversity missions advanced within institutions of public education. Inclusionism has come to mean an embrace of diversity-based practices through which we include those who look, act, function, and feel different; yet my contention here is that inclusionism obscures at least as much as it reveals. While the project of inclusion for disabled people and disability studies in higher education is not necessarily consciously avoided, one might better conceive of it from the institution’s point of view as a not-so-unfortunate failing.

Avoidance in the academy, as the present book puts forward, is an active outcome of work undertaken in the process of accomplishing ‘diversity’ in higher education. However, diversity is an increasingly weakened concept emerging from neoliberal discourses of multiculturalism; the pursuit of diversity in education, as Ferguson (2012: 138–139) has shown, has failed to achieve a meaningful degree of inclusion for members of historically excluded, marginalized, and underrepresented populations:

With the government’s overtures to minority communities and its promotion of nationalist ideals like ‘self-determination’, the state began to refashion itself into a structure that would partially and selectively affirm minority difference, evolving ways in which institutions could use rather than absolutely dismiss the demands of minority activists. In such a context, minority activism would be for power both a potential antagonist and a collaborator, inspiring critical transformations and new funding technologies at the same time.

Yet, in part, these efforts to defuse the threat of minority activism in the academy by offering it a meager form of incorporation has been based on the insufficiency of a meaningful curricular address. In many ways the irony of diversity’s modus operandi is that it occurs just as neoliberal universities champion practices of flexible inclusionism as a primary accomplishment of a progressive, contemporary higher education. It stands to rights that efforts to include disability studies and disabled people at institutions of Higher Education is an awkward one – a process, I argue in this chapter, that proves purposefully insufficient due to a profound reluctance to achieve results that might meaningfully encounter the fleshy realization of such a mission. To openly include disability rather than avoid the messy materiality it offers, universities would have to drastically reconceive of their missions as training grounds for the professions of normalcy.

Branding: professionalism as product?

The avoidance of disability amid the professed diversity pursuits in institutions of higher education is, in many ways, a given due to the academy’s longstanding emphasis on producing members of a normative professional middle class as one key rite of passage into bourgeois (i.e., managerial) lifestyles. This emphasis is ‘professional’ in the sense of legitimating expertise to enter into supervisory domains of oversight that often entail managing the lives of people with disabilities (medicine, rehabilitation, architecture, law, special education, psychology, social work, etc.); ‘normative’ in the sense of a foundational mooring in diagnostic orientations dependent upon identifying deviance as the measurable outcome of analysis (i.e., the location of pathology as an end-in-itself with a vague notion of cure as a distant trailer); and ‘bourgeois’ in the sense of an ability to achieve a standard of living while touting degrees of heteronormativity that distance some bodies (the diagnosees) from membership in the human community while supporting others (the diagnosers) as embodying its essence. The ensuing discontents from such practices for those being diagnosed and, ultimately perhaps, those who perform the diagnosing entails the creation of a dividing line between professionals and the ‘clients’ they serve. I would submit that this professional dividing line, and not more traditional binaries such as impairment/disability or disabled/able-bodied, would serve as a productive scrim for pursuing disability studies-based critiques of avoidance in the academy.

Whether or not this capacity to produce employable professionals is expanding or diminishing (I would argue the former) does not necessarily affect the idea that normalization is the ideological rubric within which university graduates hone their saleable skills for future markets. Professional membership in what I have elsewhere called ‘the controlling professions’ (Mitchell and Snyder, 2006: 176) implicates all university graduates in the will to power that always exists at the baseline of diagnostic practices. Diagnosis of varying ilks has increasingly become the sin quo non of credentialing professionals at the contemporary neoliberal university in what Sennett (2007: 11) calls ‘the new culture of Capitalism’.

My argument here is not that the project of making professionals results in the foundational problem of avoidance in the academy. Rather my analysis regards the nature of the resistance to the embrace of progressive disability studies models. The problem circulates around the fact of the kinds of professionals the contemporary academy makes – those who leave the academy with skill sets primarily forged to fashion others as chronically failing various litmus tests of normalcy. Only to the extent that professionalization and normalization have become interchangeable at the contemporary university can we argue that one is, if not synonymous, at the root of the other.

As Davis (2013: 1) points out, the term normal is relatively new; it came into the English language in the modern sense of a citizen’s average or median capacity between the years 1840–1860. The practice of making a line perpendicular to another on a carpenter’s square, or ‘constituting, conforming to, not deviating or different from, the common type or standard [in] regular usage’ helps lay the groundwork for avoidance (Davis, 2013: 1). My understanding about how the modern university produces practitioners who apply this squaring process upon deviant bodies is of paramount importance. The practice of disability professionalization results in at least three foundational problems: first, disabled people can only be objects of manipulation with respect to social norms of functionality, appearance, capacity, and behavior; second, those who seek to apply these normative guidelines upon others do so with a great deal of institutional authority at their backs; and third, the academy, as the point of manufacture for these professionals of normalization, proves loathe to surrender this primary duty – perhaps its most saleable commodity – on behalf of other alternatives and in recognition of other ways of being-in-the-world (that which Heidegger refers to as dasein). The one place in which the university will grudgingly give some ground in its commitment to normalization as a powerful tool of professionalization arises significantly in the neoliberal arena of diversity initiatives.

The reason why diversity initiatives allow for what Chambers (1991: 31) terms ‘room for maneuver’ is that diversity is the ‘new norm’ (to cite the American television series of the same name). The ‘new norm’ is a neoliberal concept linked to processes of the privatization of formerly public holdings (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 301; Klein, 2007: 8). While selling off the commons provides the most common understanding of this practice within neoliberalism, I want to speak of the non-normative bodies that remain private tragedies while serving as reference points for the improvement of debilitated participants in normative national health schemes. University-made professionals of normalization keep disability a private-individuated affair by failing to attend to wider social contexts of reception for those diagnosed. Consequently, diagnosis keeps pathology a personal matter of dysfunction because it eschews references to a wider world of systemic, social exclusions.

But, at the same time, diagnosis extrapolates the diagnostic object into symptom clusters wherein the particularities of conditions are lost on behalf of consolidating generalizable medical categories of public aberrancy. Here a patient’s privacy is ‘protected’ by policies such as HIPPA laws in the United States, while the disparate nature of variable bodies comprising the classification is diluted or erased altogether. While diagnosis produces pathologies from attending to difference as deviance, the variability existing within categories of disability goes largely unrecognized. Thus, disabled people, for instance, often remark upon their inordinately divergent experiences of embodiment despite sharing the same diagnostic rubric with others presumably ‘of their kind’. That which ‘diversity’ yields at the level of generic categories of differential embodiment, it also undermines with respect to a fleshier encounter with diversity that exists within diagnostic groups. Thus, disability can be said to expose a general principle of diversity across bodies while being stripped of its own internal, mutating, and multi-variant diversity. It is a brand of institutional making but not of individual or community experience.

What guides the training of diagnostic practitioners, at base, in today’s corporate university is an operative notion of ‘consumer choice’ where potential participants pick and choose from a variety of disciplinary orientations (McRuer, 2006: 159). Thus, the contemporary university imagines itself offering products that are productively responsive to the demands of its market base – namely the families or support networks that enable choices among professional channels of credentialing available to applicant pools. In order to expand its market share and appeal to a wider array of potential consumers, the university presents itself as a place of tolerance, a place of flexibility (of participants, of expertise, of labor hours, and, increasingly, of part-time vs. full-time unevenly paid workers). In this sense the university becomes a place of intellectual cosmopolitanism with diagnostic authority as the shared foundation constituted by professional identities of normalization. Diversity initiatives, in other words, expand the student market base of contemporary universities (and therefore bolster profits) while also appearing to respond to multiculturalist critiques of a historically homogenizing institution and the culture it serves writ large.

Now, diversity emerges as one of the most operative words in the vocabulary of public relations firms, which increasingly shape the images of universities and community colleges alike. My filmmaker son, Cameron, in his documentary film, Branded (2013), exposes the branding process at work in institutions of higher education as one dependent on the production of an image of a cool, hip, chic, diverse culture newly available at contemporary universities. The marketing campaign produced for Temple University – titled, ‘Are You Temple Made?’ – promotes ‘branding’ as a desirable process that affixes to institutions and the individuals they train alike. Branding in the neoliberal period has been divested of all of its foundations in historical practices of slavery and the animal husbandry industry where intense heat is applied with an iron to mark an individual as the property of another. The revamping of branding as a recent historical claiming of positive purpose comes replete with a limited, stylized kind of ‘diversity’ in tow with regard to the representation of multiculturalism’s fetishized, yet still inelastic, identities of race, class, gender, sexuality – and disability.

For instance, in Are You Temple Made?, brown faces only appear on athletic playing surfaces in what Gilroy (2001: 185) refers to as cross-Atlantic product trafficking in ‘the racialized body, buffed, invulnerable, and arranged suggestively with precision’; the marketing montage also features Asian women wearing lab coats while peering into alchemic beakers of colored liquids to soften the rough face of Nordic white, masculinist, western empiricism; questions of class privilege go underground into an absence of discussion regarding rising student debt and the exhausting demands of juggling several part-time jobs while attending college full-time; ghosted queer lifestyles recede in a background of heterosexual couples lying with their heads in each other’s laps basking on campus quads like a lyric from The Beach Boys’ ‘Endless Summer’; disability is a distant memory of vulnerability ushered off screen by those walking robustly over park-like knolls and paved pathways in shorts framing muscular, tanned legs. Campuses are now full-blown media universes comprised of luxurious university lives that do not exist in the world outside of their increasingly securitized, mediatized walls. Following Baudrillard, Ventura (1988: 174) refers to this phenomenon as a ‘media event’: the digitally media(ted) space of the hyper-real where culture (lived experience) gives way to fantasy.

Most importantly, this artificial opulence of college lifestyle on display in higher education marketing materials is one that comes in the wake of the displacement of all evidence of the actual practice of education itself. As one professor remarks in Branded, ‘I don’t see anything that I do represented here’. The space of the classroom and practices of pedagogy have gone subterranean in the wake of this new chic campus culture on display. The futurity of professionalization becomes a marketable commodity as the ‘branded’ reputation of the contemporary academy becomes the product into which students purchase. Universities with diversity missions now arrive carefully packaged as access to lifestyles of multicultural fetishism and their public relations-derived images look increasingly like a cosmopolitan people pursuing a surfeit of leisure time activities. The branded university emerges across the display of a variety of diverse body types enjoying media-created environments with facts such as the hole in the ozone layer, local fracking initiatives, and massive oil spills as commonplace features of spoiled, increasingly toxic worlds left far behind.

For instance, at one of my former institutions of higher education there was a great deal of unselfconscious congratulatory back-slapping about the fact that the institution was the ‘most diverse university in the country’. This was neither true nor an ideal in danger of accomplishment at the institution in question; rather it was the ground zero of a marketing campaign that took up diversity early on (during the late 1980s, in the heyday of neoliberalism) as a path to widening its student market share. In other words, as Floyd (2009: 155) points out, post-Fordist innovation reversed the Fordist trend of mass producing products for an average, normative everyman (white, middle class, heterosexual, male, etc.), and instead innovated by diversifying at the consumer end of the market Capitalist continuum.

It is not merely a fact, for instance, that professions of normalization have increased (although specialization has been on the rise as a feature of neoliberalism’s cultural unfolding since World War II), but also that the kinds of people who participate in the formal application of social norms as their professional ‘objective’ continue to expand. More different kinds of people now graduate from the neoliberal university who know the ropes of assessing, identifying, evaluating, applying, and using an arsenal of socially-derived bodily and behavioral norms on an ever-expanding array of differently deficient people. Puar (2009: 163) refers to this process of expanding neoliberal concepts of shadow deficiencies across minority populations as ‘debility’. As one professor in the Health Sciences at a major university in the United States once stood up in a faculty meeting and baldly argued, in opposition to having to subject her research on childhood cancer to IRB research approval processes, ‘Why can’t we get unfettered access to the medical records of kids with terminal cancer? They’re just going to die and we need research data most of all.’

I am not going to prove the contention outlined here about a cynical institutionalization of diversity as a false idol of higher education, particularly because I trust readers of this book will be able to identify myriad examples of ‘diversity’ initiatives on display at their home universities or institutions of research. Diversity initiatives can be recognized as those largely rhetorical efforts to employ concepts of including more different kinds of people while, in effect, resulting in the production of practitioners of normalization rather than inclusion of non-normative outsiders’ perspectives into the knowledge base. At the same time, university diversity is often about making ever more diffe...