Congratulations to UWaterloo English’s newest PhD, Dr. sarah currie! On April 26, sarah successfully defended her dissertation, “The Mad Manifesto.” The supervisor was Dr. Jay Dolmage, with committee members Dr. Heather Love (UWaterloo English) and Dr. Madelaine Hron (Wilfrid Laurier University). The internal/external was Dr. Kim Nguyen, and the external was Dr. Fady Shanouda, of Carleton University.
Abstract
The “mad manifesto” project is a multidisciplinary mediated investigation into the circumstances by which mad (mentally ill, neurodivergent) or disabled (disclosed, undisclosed) students faced far more precarious circumstances with inadequate support models while attending North American universities during the pandemic teaching era (2020-2023).
Using a combination of “emergency remote teaching” archival materials such as national student datasets, universal design for learning training models, digital classroom teaching experiments, university budgetary releases, educational technology coursewares, and lived experience expertise, this dissertation carefully retells the story of “accessibility” as it transpired in disabling classroom containers trapped within underprepared crisis superstructures. Using rhetorical models derived from critical disability studies, mad studies, social work practice, and health humanities, it then suggests radically collaborative UDL teaching practices that may better pre-empt the dynamic needs of dis/abled students whose needs remain direly underserviced.
The manifesto leaves the reader with discrete calls to action that foster more critical performances of intersectionally inclusive UDL classrooms for North American mad students, which it calls “mad-positive” facilitation techniques:
- Seek to untie the bond that regards the digital divide and access as synonyms.
- UDL practice requires an environment shift that prioritizes change potential.
- Advocate against the usage of UDL as a for-all keystone of accessibility.
- Refuse or reduce the use of technologies whose primary mandate is dataveillance.
- University environments are non-neutral affective containers.
- Operationalize the tracking of student suicides on your home campus.
- Seek out physical & affectual ways that your campus is harming social capital potential.
- Revise policies and practices that are ability-adjacent imaginings of access.
- Eliminate sanist and neuroscientific languaging from how you speak about students.
- Vigilantly interrogate how “normal” and “belong” are socially constructed.
- Treat lived experience expertise as a gift, not a resource to mine and to spend.
- Create non-psychiatric routes of receiving accommodation requests in your classroom.
- Seek out uncomfortable stories of mad exclusion and consider carceral logic’s role in it.
- Mad-positive teaching centers madness to create radical resistance to carceral logics.
- Create counteraffectual classrooms that anticipate and interrupt kairotic spatial power.
- Strive to refuse comfort and immediate intelligibility as mandatory classroom presences.
- Create pathways that empower cozy space understandings of classroom practice.
- Vector students wherever possible as dynamic ability constellations in assessment.