Nicole Schroeder: PhD candidate and founder of the Disabled Academic Collective

I chat with the amazing Nicole Schroeder, a PhD candidate at the University of Virginia, about her incredible collective. We also discuss the importance of representation of disabled academics in tenure and high-level positions in the academy.

Important links mentioned:

Nicole's website: https://www.nicoleleeschroeder.com/

Lienkie Diedericks: 0:15

Welcome to Enabled in Academia. My name is Lienkie Diedericks, your host creator, and hopefully not the only listener of this podcast about how to survive and thrive in academia as a disabled, chronically ill, and/or neurodiverse individuals. Here with me today, all the way from the USA, I have Nicole Schroeder PhD student at University of Virginia. Nicole's research focuses on disability and medicine in early America. Nicole, it's great to have you here.

Nicole Schroeder: 0:45

Thank you so much for having me.

Lienkie Diedericks: 0:47

Nicole, we spoke a little bit earlier, you've told me that you've been active in disability activism for for more than a decade. I was wondering if you could tell our listeners a little bit more about the collective you founded, the disabled academic collective, and more generally, the work you've been doing?

Nicole Schroeder: 1:03

Yeah, I'd be happy to. So this year in the United States, it marks the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And that is really the core legislation that permits students to freely study at public universities, and guarantees our legal rights to inclusion and public spaces. So in an effort to celebrate there were a lot of discussions here in the us about the future of ADA policy, the future of Disability Justice, and what inclusion actually means. So something that I have been struggling with for at least the past decade has been inclusion in higher education. So I went straight from undergraduate into a Graduate Studies program. So now I am in my 10th, year of straight studies. And, yeah, it's a little overwhelming. And I was diagnosed with a genetic condition in undergrad. So I have been disabled my whole life. But I found out that I had Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, when I was 19. Now I am 27 in grad school, and I am obviously still coping with my medical condition and trying to figure out what exactly that means moving forward in the profession, in higher education in scholarly works, how to negotiate a disabled identity, along with everything else that comes with being in higher ed. So in an effort to celebrate 30 years of the ADA, which basically ensured that I could go to school in the first place here in the US and receive accommodations, I wanted to form a space that offered the same kind of protections and safety to other disabled graduate students that I had found when talking to other disabled students. So I think while we have legal protections here, there are still gaps in community based care. And there are still huge gaps in representation and higher education. So for the majority of my time in both undergrad and grad school, I didn't really know other disabled individuals unless the school had a very like clear support group. And even then support groups only go so far. So I wanted to create a space where disabled academics could talk broadly about their experiences, but also share tips and strategies and provide support for students who are maybe coming into their disabled identities, and trying to figure out what that really means. So I founded a group, it's called the Disabled Academic Collective. It's a mutual aid group where undergraduates, graduate students, faculty members and staff who identify as disabled and as members of higher education. However, they personally wanted to find that can go for discussions and support and resources. So we have a website, where we post blogs that kind of reach out to our able bodied allies about issues surrounding academic ableism and the experiences of disabled students in higher ed. And then we also have a private Discord server that I run, where we have tons of different chats about, you know, securing accommodation and creating support groups on campus and what to do if your professor refuses an accommodation, kind of like those insider info questions that feels really scary to ask able bodied people but a little less scary to ask other disabled students who have been there and done it before.

Lienkie Diedericks: 4:33

So incredible and I just want to say to my listeners that the DVC discord sites it has changed my life I haven't really had you know, (awkward lurkers) I haven't really engaged that much yet. But the sheer amount of resources in there guys I cannot begin to tell you it is really what I always dreamt of having and because I think you can be so proud for making this and for the wonderful community that I think you've proven to us all is out there. So I can I'm going to look at your, your website for the DAC on the description and in the transcript. And I know you said that even though we are stuck here in the UK or in Europe, we're more than welcome to join.

Nicole Schroeder: 5:19

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Lienkie Diedericks: 5:21

Even though it's like predominantly US based group. Yeah, I think I saw quite a few UK based events on there as well. And a lot of information and the support, they I think can be transferred really easily into other settings. So I can really recommend to everyone to join that because, yeah, there's just a wealth of information, everything, almost every single question you have there is an answer for. And I think one of the things I most enjoy about the website is the professional support from disabled academics, thinking through grants applications, thinking through applications in general asking for adjustments in a professional setting. Yeah, it's, it's genuinely a wonderful resource.

Nicole Schroeder: 6:01

And yeah, I've been so like, overjoyed to see the ways that people are engaging with this, I didn't expect that it would have the number of members that it currently has, I certainly, I kind of formed this group out of a very casual chat over Twitter, but we hit the cap for Twitter chats, which is 50 members within like the first two hours. So from then on, I realized that we really needed to create something that could host a far larger number of people. And there are other groups who are doing similar work chronically academic is one of them, they have a Twitter account and a private Facebook group. But as someone who is a very reluctant Facebook user, I wanted to form a platform that, you know, people could engage kind of moment to moment. And then like search through previous posts, so something that's really important to me is that people have resources, if they want to publish a paper through like interdisciplinary work with other disabled scholars, it's really easy to check people's bios and introductions and find people who are interested in your field and to propose collaborations.

Lienkie Diedericks: 7:11

Absolutely. It's just, it's just a wonderful resource, you know, I so desperately at Kings would like to start a network where scholars working on any sort of disability studies area and you know, you'd find that in any faculty could come to, and share and share their research with each other and give us tips on how to navigate the publication world, for instance. And I also have found that little bit on the Discord!

Nicole Schroeder: 7:41

I think there's a lot of hidden curriculum, right when it comes to higher ed, when it comes to publishing or applying to jobs, or grants or fellowships, or all of these very skill specific kinds of activities. It's really hard. And it helps so much when you have an insider perspective, or someone who can just review it and give you brief comments.

Lienkie Diedericks: 8:03

Yeah, absolutely. And just support you. Sometimes you just need to be able to say to someone, you know what, I'm really, really anxious that they're not going to understand what my accommodations are. And yeah, you could tell someone that and then you can get on again, with doing the application and going through the practicalities of that.

Nicole Schroeder: 8:20

Definitely. Yeah, I think it's overwhelming sometimes when you experience ableism in the academy, and you feel like you're the only one who cares. So I'm glad that we all have like a shared source for righteous anger and shame. I think more than anything, the DAC has given me a space to vent and be frustrated with the very slow pace in which academia is coming into disability studies, and coming to value disability as a source of diversity. I think it's still incredibly slow to do so. So having a group of other disabled scholars who are all fighting for similar things at their institutions makes me definitely feel less alone in the fight.

Lienkie Diedericks: 9:02

Absolutely. And Nicole, I know, you're out there on the job market right now. I'm wondering if you could share some of your insights of your experience so far, applying as a disabled person who's just about to finish her PhD and entering the next level, so to speak.

Nicole Schroeder: 9:17

Yeah, I think there couldn't be a worse here to apply to the job market, at least in the United States. There are obviously some benefits to a pandemic and that for the first time work from home is finally permissible, which disabled people have long been advocating for. But obviously, there are hiring freezes at every university and caps on postdoc positions. So it couldn't be a worse market, quite honestly. But I'm finding that at least Personally, I think as a disabled person, I have always been pretty adaptable and like understood that it's important to create a diverse skill set. SoI am on multiple different markets between, you know, federal policy positions on ADA policy and the future of higher education to nonprofit work, to tenure track jobs to postdocs. I think as a disabled person, you learn very quickly that you need to be adaptable, and that you need to create a diverse skill set, because not every job will accommodate you. So it's best to have skills that can be leveraged in multiple different types of fields. Yeah, so I'm on multiple markets right now, which is like both exciting and that there's a lot of potential. And I think it's an exciting time to be thinking about how we reform after the pandemic and what we value. It's a time of change and hopefully positive change. But it's also a time where there's very little funding going into higher education stability studies, which is concerning because disabled people are suffering unprecedented losses in the current pandemic. And it's wildly frustrating to watch the academy kind of ignore all of the losses that our community is suffering right now. So I know my home University of Utah, University of Virginia, called back students who attend in person lectures, which for me was like incredibly disappointing and upsetting that we would ever rest the lives of our students or our local communities in order to secure funding. So I think it's one of just questioning what the value is of the university, and how it values disabled lives and disabled bodies. So during the pandemic, I've been asked to sit on a lot of different Commission's about reopening practices, best practices for inclusivity, inclusivity, and online learning. But the reality is that at the professoriate, disabled people are not wanted in higher education. So if you read Academic Ableism by Jay Dommage, the latest stats say that about 3% of the US, faculty are disabled and identify as such,and only about 8% or 7% of PhD students. So the numbers from undergrads, which is about 20, to 25%, down to the professoriate, which is about 3% is quite startling. And I think that universities really need to wrangle with who is doing disability studies and what Disability Studies is. So I haven't seen disability studies valued in any of the calls for applications in higher education, in history of medicine. There is no history of disability right now, in the United States, you can only do history of disability if you are applying to a job and and that's an added perk that you can bring to the department. But it's not explicitly seen as a field deserving of research and of itself. I think it's incredibly frustrating. And that five years ago, when I entered grad school, I thought, oh, surely by 2020, we will have disability studies as a major at every university, like how can we not write when we are actively targeting disabled students to pursue higher education, and they are for the first time in American history, actively getting to campuses, finding campuses more accessible, even though absolutely they're not perfect. So it's been incredibly disappointing to see that disability is still not really explicitly valued. And certainly in any kind of minority postdoc opportunity. Disability is still not cited as a symbol of diversity in the same way that race or ethnicity is.

Lienkie Diedericks: 13:47

That's really interesting. I wonder if this difference there between the UK and the USA, that disability is truly seen as a diversity and inclusion issue as well. I know it King, they're trying hard to make that the case of it's not very obvious, I think to most people that disability is actually an inclusion and diversity issue. And of course,it raises the intersectional issues as well. And that and that can be, I think, incredibly harmful to people of color, and people from the LGBTQ plus community who also disabled and the A lot of people who fall in multiple categories.

Nicole Schroeder: 14:25

Right, absolutely.

Lienkie Diedericks: 14:27

But yeah, I completely agree with you, Nicole about the devaluing of disability studies, I think it's always a sub subsidiary of another field of inquiry. So it'll be like most interested in disability law, then that's Disability Law. On bioethics, it'll be like a subset of that. Yeah, I can't think of any postdocs specifically in disability studies in the UK at the moment. So if you guys do know of that, please get your comments and let me know so we can get Nicole into the UK perhaps because

Nicole Schroeder: 14:58

Please, I'd love tocome back as studied abroad in London. So I do know the lay of the land.

Lienkie Diedericks: 15:03

That's fantastic. Cool, I was hoping you could tell our listeners a little bit more about disability employment month in the USA.

Nicole Schroeder: 15:11

Yeah, so in October every year, the US Department of Labor hosts something called Disability Employment Awareness Month, which is designed to draw attention to the fact that disabled people have disproportionate levels of unemployment in the United States, and to show that disabled people can obviously support any job market, right, our inclusion is really important. And we have a lot to give the job market and a lot of adaptive processes that are actively being used right now, especially in the pandemic, as ways of coping with a job market that is really confusing and awkward and stilted. So every year, this is the 75th anniversary, the US Department of Labor kind of encourages us businesses to think about their hiring statistics, and how many disabled people they hire and how many they retain at their company. So the goal is not just employment, but also retention of disabled labor. So this year, there were a lot of phenomenal groups who kind of brought that into the scope of higher education. So there was a group of students did a phenomenal job drawing attention to the fact that disability, as represented in the academy is not even at the same pace as the general us job market, which is obviously already problematic, and even more problematic in higher education. So they had a bunch of different events. If you go to their Twitter handle, I'll post below, they just have so many phenomenal resources and events that have been backlogged so people can watch through, they're all they all have full transcripts and everything. They're fully accessible. And they had a lot of Twitter takeovers from people who work in higher education and identify as disabled, talking about what exactly that is like for them. So we have a long way to go. But hopefully, because students are engaging in these ways, we're making progress, at least.

Lienkie Diedericks: 17:15

Absolutely. Nicole, one last question. If I could give you a disability, Genie, and you can ask her as many questions as you like, and as many wishes as you like, what would be some of the things if you could just snap your fingers right now that you change in higher education in terms of disability access?

Nicole Schroeder: 17:34

I think the biggest thing to change is just a representation, right? So as an undergraduate student, I kind of always wanted to see a person who looked like me, who was a cane user, or a mobility aid user, or who talked about disability in class or someone who articulated care needs, right. As a professor, I would love to see our higher ed communities acknowledge that we are far more intertwined. And our needs are far more intertwined than perhaps we ever articulate. So I think I would have loved to see a professor who was outwardly disabled and didn't fear discrimination because of that. I think a lot of the discussions that I have now with people who are also on the job market is surrounding disclosure, and whether you can be an hourly disabled person and what that means and what kind of disabilities are privileged on the hiring market? And is there a hierarchy of disabilities, right? So are mobility impairments still regarded as a positive form of disability, but perhaps mental health issues are regarded as a negative form of disability in terms of the job market, I think people are under an immense amount of pressure, to figure out both how they want to identify as disabled, where they can identify as disabled and whether or not it's safe for them to identify as disabled. And I would love if the academy kind of took the forefront of saying, yes, this is at least a safe space for you to identify, clearly. And we will provide the support that you need to find inclusion and community and your needs are equally valued compared to everyone else who was in the academy. I think the Academy is incredibly privileged to lead in research and lead and policy and kind of be the change that I would like to see broader society undergo, starting with representation that could be a big a big one. I completely agree with you. That's something we need to change.

Lienkie Diedericks: 19:44

Nicole, thanks for giving up your time today. I know you're super, super busy. And it was so lovely to talk to you and to get your insights from especially from a US perspective. And yeah, we'll be keeping our fingers crossed. That you getTo the position that both fulfills you but also provides you with the accessibility and the support that you need and deserve.

Nicole Schroeder: 20:08

Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Lienkie Diedericks: 20:11

Thanks for listening to today's episode of enabled in academia. Please do like, share and support this podcast on Twitter by following us @EnabledInAca. If you have any questions, suggestions or impressions, please tweet at us or send me an email at enabledinacademia@gmail.com. The music for this podcast, Room for Two is composed by Dan Lebowitz and is available on the YouTube Audio music library. As always, access isn't optional for us to be enabled in academia. Yep, I'm making that a thing.

Enabled in Academia

Nicole Schroeder: PhD candidate and founder of the Disabled Academic Collective

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