The new year brings a fresh start to our lives; it’s a natural time to reflect on the year past and make plans for the coming year. In The Mind Hears New Year tradition, we have updated our list of recommendations for making your workplace accessible and refined the layout of the recommendations. You can view and download the full list of recommendations for making your workplaces (in-person, hybrid and remote) accessible for your deaf and hard of hearing colleagues at this link. Below we provide an outline of the best approaches for increasing workplace accessibility and provide links to blog posts that explore particular aspects in detail.
Universally design your workplace: Our spaces become more inclusive for all when we improve access for any subgroup of our community. Consequently, by increasing the accessibility of our workplaces for our deaf and hard-of-hearing (HoH) colleagues, we create a better workplace for everyone. This includes hearing folks who have auditory processing disorder, use English as their second language, or are acquiring hearing loss during their careers. Chances are that someone in your department has hearing loss, whether they’ve disclosed this or not, and will benefit from your efforts to make your workplace more accessible (see The Mind Hears blog post about where are all the deaf and hard of hearing academics). This is why you should universally design your workplace now and not wait until someone who is struggling asks you to make modifications.
Sharing the work: With a google search you can find several resources on workplace accessibility for deaf/HoH employees, such as the Hearing Loss Association of America’s (HLAA) very usefulemployment toolkit. One drawback of these resources is that nearly all of the suggestions are framed as actions for the deaf/HoH employee. While deaf and hard of hearing academics need to be strong self-advocates and take steps to improve their accommodations, our hearing colleagues can help us tremendously by sharing the work to create accessible workplaces. Speech reading conversations, planning accommodations, and making sure that technology/accommodations work as intended is never-ending and exhausting labor that we do above and beyond our teaching, research, and service. Your understanding and your help can make a large impact. For example, if a speaker doesn’t repeat a question they were asked, ask them to repeat even if you heard the question just fine. The people who didn’t hear the question are already stressed and fatigued from working hard to listen, so why expect them to do the added work of asking speakers to repeat? (see The Mind Hears blog post on listening fatigue). Repeating the question benefits everyone. The changes you make today can also help your workplace align with equal opportunity requirements for best hiring practices (see The Mind Hears blog posts about applying for jobs when deaf/HoH here and here). The Mind Hears coordinated the listing of advice for different academic settings below to help you become better allies today.
One size doesn’t fit all: If a participant requests accommodation for a presentation or meeting, follow up with them and be prepared to iterate to a solution that works. It may be signed interpreters (there are different kinds of signing), oral interpreters, CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation), or Assistive Listening Devices(formerly called FM systems). It could be rearranging the room or modifying the way that the meeting is run. Keep in mind that what works for one deaf/HoH person may not work for another person with similar deafness. And what works for someone in one situation may not work at all for that same person in another situation, even if these seem similar to you. The best solution will probably not be the first approach that you try nor may it be the quickest or cheapest approach; it will be the one that allows your deaf and hard-of-hearing colleagues to participate fully and contribute to the discussion. Reaching the goal of achieving an academic workplace accessible to deaf/HoH academics is a journey.
This multi-media autobiographical post by Dr. Stephen Klusza has two parts. Here, in part 1, Stephen shares with us his journey leading up to his decision to get a cochlear implant in graduate school. Part 2 will be released in late August 2021. Part 1 includes a video with song excerpts and images that augment Stephen’s story at the bottom of this page. You can find part 2 at this link.
— Stephen
I was born in the most perfect year, you see.
There was nothing too special about 1978 per se, but some of my most cherished moments were only a few years away. Born in the hazy and humid throes of Florida summer, I was just another toddler trying to make sense of the world around me. Around then, my parents grew increasingly concerned when I was not attempting to talk like other kids my age, but they were assured that some kids took longer than others to communicate. When I was 2½ years old, they knew something was wrong. As they called for me from behind, I did not respond; but my eyes lit up with a wide grin when they came into view.
Can you hear me, can you hear me running?
Can you hear me running, can you hear me calling you?– Mike and the Mechanics “Silent Running”
I had moderate-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss. I had had severe asthma for the first few years of my life that was resistant to treatment. A few times during my frequent hospital stays, my fevers spiked to 106-107˚ F and I was placed on top of bags of ice to save my life. It was thought that the recurrent fevers had damaged my hearing, and my parents were encouraged to fit me with hearing aids to amplify what I could hear.
Me mind on fire
Me soul on fire, feeling hot, hot, hot – Buster Poindexter “Hot, Hot, Hot”
If I could describe the early years of my home in one word, it would be music. There was nary a weekend when the record player wasn’t spinning the likes of Black Sabbath, Foreigner, Jethro Tull, The Cars, Jimi Hendrix, and hundreds of other bands. Then in 1981, something happened that transformed my life completely – MTV. With my new hearing aids, I soaked in the wondrous sounds from the stereo system, and the music from MTV ‘music videos’. At such a young age, the videos rarely ever made sense and my partial hearing loss meant I never understood the lyrics, but that was never an obstacle to my appreciation of music. I heard the wide-ranging melodies of 80s (rock to new wave to pop); this was combined with watching the artistry of the videos painting worlds I had never seen, the expressive emotions on the singers’ faces, and the translation of stories that brought the characters’ lives into pure sound. It did not matter if I could not understand the words, the music spoke to me more than words ever could.
I hear the drums echoing tonight
But she hears only whispers of some quiet conversation – Toto “Africa”
My memories of those times are not as sharp now (almost four decades ago). I still have the feeling of wonderment of all the videos that I voraciously devoured – Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”, Elton John’s “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues”, Tina Turner’s “Private Dancer”, The Police “Wrapped Around Your Finger”, and others. I am very aware of the intoxicating bias of nostalgia, but it truly felt like a blissful, creative time. I loved watching the videos at a loud volume and bopping along to songs, such as Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”. Looking back, my mother must have been exasperated at some of the songs I became obsessed with, particularly those in which I was able to make out a few lyrics. I distinctly remember singing the chorus “multiple” times from that one-hit wonder song by Madness:
Our house, in the middle of our street
Our house, in the middle of our street
Our house, in the middle of our street
Our house, in the middle of our…- Madness “Our House”
My love of 80s music paralleled my love of 80s movies and TV. I loved several science-themed movies that had the 80s-style poetic license in full effect, such as “Weird Science”, “My Science Project”, and “The Last Starfighter”, among others. My first exposure to the idea of college was the movie “Real Genius”, which showed extremely bright young people working on laser technology — which blew my still-developing mind. It would be many years before I could go to college, but I was already looking forward to skating on ice-covered dorm hallways, learning science, and building exciting inventions.
Gimme a new sensation
In a place that has no name
Something tells me I'll never be the same…- The Comsat Angels “I’m Falling”
As an adolescent, I experienced the usual share of high and low points, along with the difficulties of being a hard-of-hearing/deaf person in hearing schools. Nevertheless, I excelled in academics and began a love affair with genetics during Advanced Placement Biology in high school. All it took was my teacher Mr. Force (that was really his name!) introducing me to the Punnett Square, and I fell head over heels. I knew then that I wanted to major in Biology to become a geneticist. After graduation and a break for a couple of years, I went to graduate school to specialize in developmental genetics and become a professor of biology. The academic career path was the only one I knew at the time to do the science that I loved so dearly.
One night after working out, everything sounded off-pitch with my hearing aids on. I thought there was something wrong with them and I planned to have them checked out. Later, I woke up in the middle of the night with a splitting headache and thunderous ringing and feedback in my ears. I barely slept that night.
And I can't get it out of my head
No, I can't get it out of my head
Now my old world is gone for dead
'Cause I can't get it out of my head…- Electric Light Orchestra “I Can’t Get It Out Of My Head”
My way of understanding was shattered. Everything came to an absolute standstill. I lost count of the number of medical appointments that followed, and time slowed to a crawl. My mom accompanied me to one of my appointments and the doctor said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with your son”. My mom, always optimistic and full of life, became instantly deflated. I will forever remember the singular sensation in that moment of hearing the doctor’s uncertainty. It is like goose bumps, only it felt like a slow but steady wash of fluid electrocuting me. I remember the feeling of crackling, like lightning striking a strong tree and destroying it into a million shards of glowing embers. I was faced with the prospect that this was serious and potentially irreversible. Then came a creeping fear that music may forever be out of my reach from that point on. One of the most joyous parts of my life was gone. In its place, was a constant onslaught of throbbing, droning tinnitus, screeching, and roaring to an audience of one inside my head. With no relief in sight, I was no longer compatible with my body, and I was abandoned.
So it’s all come back round to breaking apart again
Breaking apart like I’m made up of glass again
Making it up behind my back again
Holding my breath for the fear of sleep again
Holding it up behind my head again
Cut in deep to the heart of the bone again
Round and round and round
And it’s coming apart again
Over and over and over- The Cure “Disintegration”
When all this happened, I was well into the fourth year of grad school. Prior to this sudden hearing loss and tinnitus, I had developed significant anxiety over my dissertation research. Grad school is often extremely stressful, and I had multiple experiments in progress at any one time. After that fateful night, I tried to go straight back to doing research and notified my mentor and lab mates that my hearing was messed up. I tried to keep up with my experiments, desperate for distraction from the severe tinnitus I was experiencing, but I started falling behind. The weekly meetings with my mentor and my camaraderie with my lab mates were strained, through no fault of their own. How do we support someone going through such a catastrophic event? How can we find new ways to communicate when the old method no longer works? Is it the right thing to do to let them be, or should we give help that is unsolicited? These are hard questions when someone is going through any significant loss and there are no right answers.
I attended lab meetings and tried my best to follow with the speech reading skills I had always used in conjunction with my hearing. At best, it was passable; at worst, I missed everything completely. I still had teaching assistantship work to carry out and carried around a dry-erase board and marker for communication. This system was fine for asking a question but was woefully inadequate for conversation. It was very isolating, and I did not know how much longer I could go on like this. I did not know sign language and even if I did, there was no one else to sign with. If I did manage to complete grad school and receive a PhD, it would take me longer than 5 years, further endangering my chances at success in academia. After working so hard and sacrificing so much to prove to the world and myself that I could make it as a hard-of-hearing person, everything seemed insurmountable.
In a little while
I'll be gone
The moment's already passed
Yeah, it's gone
And I'm not here
This isn't happening
I'm not here
I'm not here
-Radiohead "How to Disappear Completely"
I still cannot adequately describe my headspace during these events. Words failed me then, as they do now. In the movie Sound of Metal, Ruben experienced his loss by the simple fading of the crowd and the encroaching of the low, throbbing drone. My experience was more complicated than that. It would be a long time before I came across a song that stitched my disparate and fragmented memories with threads of undulating low end, trebly screeches, pulsing frequencies, and distant, indecipherable voices from the point of no return. This is not a song as most people understand them to be. This piece has traces of accidental musical notes underneath a burgeoning discord. The lyrics are crushed beyond recognition. Thanks to the kindness of Andrew Grant/The Vomit Arsonist, I have created a video of his song “no one can help you”, with the lyrics in the description (link to “No one can help you” video). Whether you wish to experience this or not, you have the choice that I never had.
Dr. Stephen Klusza is a developmental geneticist who received both his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Biological Sciences at Florida State University and performed research in fruit fly epigenetics as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As an Assistant Professor of Biology at Clayton State University in Morrow, GA, Dr. Klusza is interested in creating accessible and equitable low/no-cost educational resources and research opportunities to increase accessibility in education for all students. He also serves as the current Chair of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee for the Genomics Education Partnership and advocates for disability representation in STEM and academia. @codebiologist
Deaf and hard of hearing professionals who use hearing technologies sometimes find ourselves in challenging situations. Whether at conferences, in daily work environments, or in other professional settings, we encounter frequent misunderstandings about our hearing abilities. At times, hearing colleagues mistakenly believe that we understand everything that is said so long as we have heard it. We might need to advocate extra strongly for ourselves when a conference organizer declines to provide American Sign Language interpreters, CART services, FM systems or other accommodations because we have access to sound. Colleagues who see us every day might assume that we have access to information when we do not: that we understood an oral exchange simply because we heard it.
Family members of deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) people sometimes ask me questions like this one: “My deaf child seemed not to hear when I asked if she finished her math homework, but she understood when I said, ‘Dinner is ready!’ Why did she hear one but not the other?”
Like many DHH people, I have experienced hearing without understanding. As an audiologist and cochlear implant user, I know to expect this from myself. But awkward situations do occur sometimes. I might find out that a neighbor spoke to me in the hallway and now believes that I’m rude because I didn’t answer. Or a friend thinks that I don’t care about their problem because they mentioned it while I wasn’t looking and I didn’t catch all of what was said. Or a family member is confused because I understood, “What movie do you want to watch?” but missed, “Could you do the laundry tonight?”
Explaining, “I heard it, but I didn’t understand it,” can be a challenge. Most people, including our hearing friends and families, have never had to think about the differences between hearing and understanding. What are those differences, anyway? To answer that question, we need to consider the following:
Hearing devices do not provide “normal” hearing. Hearing aids, cochlear implants, and other devices are great technologies. Many DHH people use them for access to sound, but they do not provide “normal” hearing. DHH people have more access to sound with hearing devices than we have without them, but these technologies do not work like eyeglasses that correct to 20/20 vision.
Hearing is not just about the ear. We hear with our brains, not just our ears. Hearing aids and cochlear implants do not repair damage to the tiny nerve cells in the inner ear, the bones in the middle ear, and other parts of the ear’s anatomy that may be affected. Because of this, DHH people who listen through hearing devices do not necessarily receive the same sound input to the brain as hearing people.
Hearing that sound is happening is not the same as processing sound. Determining where a sound is, how far away it is, what kind of sound it is, and whether it is different from other sounds: all of these are possible because of auditory processing in the brain. When a hearing person is listening, they have access to subtle auditory cues. These are variations in sounds that we need for differentiating one sound from another. They play an important role in auditory processing. Even with hearing devices, most DHH people will miss some of these cues. In some situations, these cues are missing for hearing people too. Have you ever struggled to understand someone speaking through a megaphone, intercom system, or out-of-tune radio? Hearing a spoken message does not necessarily mean that all of its information was accessible.
What might happen if a DHH person heard the message, but some of the information in it was not accessible? A few examples:
Misunderstanding words and sentences: the DHH person heard, “The samurai” instead of “The sand is dry.”
Misunderstanding the tone of the message: the speaker was excited, but the DHH person heard their tone of voice as angry.
Difficulty hearing in background noise: the speaker’s voice seemed distorted by the noises in a restaurant or at a party, and the DHH person did not hear the words clearly.
Perceiving a sound as far away when it is nearby: the speaker was near the DHH person in the hallway, but the sound of their voice seemed farther away. The DHH person did not know that the speaker wanted their attention.
Perceiving two similar but different sounds as the same: the DHH person consistently hears /m/ and /n/ as the same, so words like “moo” and “new” also sound the same.
Listening for understanding requires cognitive effort. Auditory processing isn’t the only thing that the brain does with sound. Language processing is a whole other topic for another day (and spoken language is not the only kind of language!). For now: making sense of sounds and understanding their meanings within a spoken language requires effort and energy from our brains. That effort is greater for DHH people who use hearing devices because the auditory input that we receive is not the same as hearing people receive. Noise in the background means that even more cognitive effort is required for listening. When a person has to use more cognitive resources to listen, their ability to comprehend and remember auditory information decreases.
Think of it like the gas tank in a car: when the road is clear and you’re driving at a steady speed with no delays, you will use less gasoline than you would when driving the same distance in a rush hour traffic jam. For most hearing people, daily listening involves clear roads and steady speeds with a few pockets of occasional traffic. The day ends, and a new day begins with a full tank of gas. But for DHH people, there are fewer clear roads. The day is full of traffic jams and roadblocks like background noise, lack of access to visual cues, and complex listening situations where auditory information is missed. The day ends, but our gas tanks never get refilled completely. Our hearing coworkers and classmates might be ready for a nap by the end of a long day while we were exhausted and in need of a listening break (and maybe a nap too!) by noon.
Why did the DHH person in your life hear what you said just now but didn’t seem to hear you five minutes ago? Maybe they heard you talking five minutes ago but didn’t know that you were talking tothem. Maybe because they thought you were talking to someone else, they opted to save some of their listening energy for later. Maybe they heard what you said five minutes ago but another sound was happening at the same time and their brain prioritized that sound instead. Maybe the speech sounds of what you said five minutes ago were more challenging to understand than the speech sounds of what you said just now. Maybe the DHH person is exhausted from a long day of nonstop auditory input, and what you said five minutes ago required more listening effort than what you said just now. Or maybe you spoke more softly five minutes ago and they didn’t hear you at all. There are many possible reasons that a DHH person might not have understood a spoken message.
Dr. Sparks holds a clinical Doctorate in Audiology (Au.D.) from Gallaudet University. She is the founder of Audiology Outside the Box, an audiologic counseling and aural (re)habilitation-focused telepractice. She also works part time at another clinic, providing cochlear implant, hearing aid, and diagnostic testing services. Currently, she is studying at Gallaudet for a Ph.D. in Hearing, Speech, and Language Sciences. Her clinical and research interests include pediatrics, vestibular assessment and rehabilitation, cochlear implants, the audiologist’s role in counseling and self-advocacy skill development, and audiology services provided in American Sign Language. Her Ph.D. dissertation research will focus on vestibular dysfunction and its impact on deaf/HoH children.
The new year brings a fresh start to our lives; it’s a natural time to reflect on the year past and make plans for the coming year. In what is becoming a The Mind Hears New Year tradition (see posts from 2019 and 2020), we have updated our list of recommendations for making your workplace accessible. The listing now includes best practices for remote meetings, a format that dominated our professional interactions in 2020 and will play a role in ‘normal’ operations going forward. While many presume that remote work increases accessibility for deaf/HoH, this is not always the case (see post on suddenly remote teaching and post on accommodating a pandemic). You can view and download the full list of recommendations for making your in-person and remote workplaces accessible for your deaf and hard of hearing colleagues at this link. Here we outline the best approach for increasing workplace accessibility and provide links to blog posts that explore particular aspects in detail.
Universally design your workplace: Our spaces become more inclusive for all when we improve access for any subgroup of our community. Consequently, by increasing the accessibility of our workplaces for our deaf and hard of hearing colleagues, we create a better workplace for everyone (see post on the impact of the Mind Hears). This includes hearing folks who have auditory processing disorder, use English as their second language, or are acquiring hearing loss during their careers. Chances are that someone in your department has hearing loss, whether they’ve disclosed this or not, and will benefit from your efforts to make your workplace more accessible (see post on Where are the deaf/HoH academics). This is why you should universally design your workplace now and not wait until someone who is struggling asks you to make modifications.
Sharing the work: With a google search you can find several resources on workplace accessibility for deaf/HoH employees, such as the Hearing Loss Association of America’s (HLAA) very useful employment toolkit. One drawback of these resources is that nearly all of the suggestions are framed as actions for the deaf/HoH employee. While deaf and hard of hearing academics need to be strong self-advocates and take steps to improve their accommodations, our hearing colleagues can help us tremendously by sharing the work and not expecting us to bear all of the burden of creating accessible workplaces. Speech reading conversations, planning accommodations and making sure that technology/accommodations function is never-ending and exhausting work that we do above and beyond our teaching, research, and service (see post on making an impact at high stakes conferences, post on conquering faculty meetings, and post on teaching very large classes). Your understanding and your help changing our workplaces can make a huge difference to us. For example, if a speaker doesn’t repeat a question, ask them to repeat, even if you heard the question just fine. The people who didn’t hear the question are already stressed and fatigued from working hard to listen, so why expect them to do the added work of ensuring speakers repeat questions (see post on listening fatigue and post on the mental gymnastics of hearing device use)? Repeating the question benefits everyone. The changes you make today can also help your workplace align with equal opportunity requirements for best hiring practices (see The Mind Hears blog posts about applying for jobs when deaf/HoH here and here).
One size doesn’t fit all: If a participant requests accommodation for a presentation or meeting, follow up with them and be prepared to iterate to a solution that works. It may be signed interpreters (see post on working with sign interpreters and post on networking with deaf colleagues who use interpreters), oral interpreters, CART (see post on Captions and Craptions), or FM systems (see post on Using FM systems at conferences). It could be rearranging the room or modifying the way that the meeting is run. Keep in mind that what works for one deaf/HoH person may not work for another person with similar deafness. What works for someone in one situation may not work at all for that same person in another situation, even if the situations seem similar to you. The best solution will probably not be the first approach that you try nor may it be the quickest or cheapest approach; it will be the one that allows your deaf and hard-of-hearing colleagues to participate fully and contribute to the discussion. Reaching the goal of achieving an academic workplace accessible to deaf/HoH academics is a journey.
Want to be a better ally and make your workplace accessible for your deaf and hard of hearing colleagues?Follow this linkto read our list of recommendations. We welcome your comments and suggestions either to this post or directly within the document at this link.
This is a repost of post published on 11 March 2018 by Dr. Arrianna Planey on her blog. You can see the original post at this link and her gorgeous blog at this link.
As I work on my dissertation, one question arises over and over: whether my disability status as a researcher matters, and how much.
I vacillate between foregrounding my experience as someone with disabilities and downplaying my disability status. That choice depends on the context. If my credibility as a researcher is in question, I’d rather people not focus on my social status, because the “ideal” academic researcher is still white, non-disabled, and well-off. The “view from nowhere” is the “ideal” academic’s gaze.
But I am compelled to foreground my experience as a Black woman who is also deafblind when I talk about why I choose to research health care accessibility and help-seeking among disabled adults in the U.S.- especially people with sensory and mobility-related disabilities. My interest in this research is driven by my own experience- the foregone care, the delayed diagnoses, and systemic barriers that undergird those outcomes.
Moreover, it is necessary to contextualize those systemic barriers with the fact that many disabled adults remain “dependents” due to a confluence of policies that simultaneously penalize benefits recipients for not having enough of a work history and penalize those who have too many assets. For further context, the recent push for Medicaid “work requirements” in states across the US (even states with Democrat governors), means that disabled people potentially face worsening access to health care- a particularly pernicious circumstance given that their access to Medicaid may be predicated on having a diagnosis that affirms their disabled status, which presumes access to health care. I mention this because disability status is not necessarily the same as one’s medical status- estimates of disability prevalence based on diagnosis by definition undercount by excluding people who do not have access or have not procured a diagnosis that corroborates their disability status.
For this reason, my project looks at both health care providers- their location decisions, their clinical practice- AND patients as I study health care access as a process. In the U.S. health care providers play a key gatekeeper role in the medico-legal complex that comprises the social safety net.
For this reason, my project looks at both health care providers- their location decisions, their clinical practice- AND patients as I study health care access as a process. In the U.S. health care providers play a key gatekeeper role in the medico-legal complex that comprises the social safety net.
…
More specifically to the field of Geography and the subfield of health geography, the question of the researcher’s subject and social position is important methodologically. Currently, much of the debate over emergent qualitative methodologies- e.g. ‘mobile methods’- presumes that the researcher is able-bodied. Within the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller & Urry, 2006), the ‘walking interview’ is a popular method for capturing participants’ experiences of place. However, much of the literature on the ‘walking interview’ provides methodological guidelines and considerations that assume that (1) walking is the normative mode of mobility, (2) that the researcher can balance managing the recording equipment with conducting the interview (no fine motor skill constraints or no need to use a cane or operate their wheelchair), and (3) they assume a power imbalance between the researcher and participant on the basis of disability status (Sheller & Urry, 2006; Finlay & Bowman, 2016; Hein, Evans & Jones, 2008).
Parent (2016) makes an important intervention in this literature, providing her experience as a researcher who uses a wheelchair as she uses mobile methods in her work. She found that her status as a disabled person was overlooked by even disabled research participants, with whom she initially corresponded via email. One blind participant suggested meeting at a coffee shop, assuming that the researcher was able-bodied. The coffee shop was not wheelchair accessible, and the author’s disability status became the initial subject of conversation, rather than the respondent’s sense of place in their activity space. Later in that same interaction, the author made a comment to the tune of “This is going so smoothly!” to which the blind participant replied
“Yes, it’s true. It seems to be going well, but you know, I can never say that to myself. I always have to take one step at a time. Too often I thought it was going well, and then I hit my head on something. Even when you think it’s going well, you can go one step at the time and think ‘OK, this is good. My foot and my face didn’t hit anything. I am fine.”
(Parent 2016, 528)
This foregrounds the importance of intersubjectivity, a concept taken for granted in the broader literature on ‘mobile methods,’ which emphasizes “moving together” without considering that each person in an interaction may have a different form of mobility that structures the interaction itself (Novoa, 2015). For example, in the above example, the interview was punctuated with the researcher’s verbal descriptions of the path to enable the blind participant to navigate the space safely. They had to “move together” through spaces that were not designed with them in mind.
Moreover, a human geography tradition that centers disability as a variation in human experience is one that moves from thinking of space in in terms of what is empirically measurable, or that which ‘contains’ the social toward a relational and dynamic understanding of space that is constituted by social relations (which are ever shifting). Casey (2001) sums it up nicely in the term ‘co-ingredience’- “There is no place without the self and there is no self without place” (pp 684). The social scientific methods that best apprehend these dynamics in space are what Sayer (1992) terms to be “intensive” methods, which tease out the working of processes among a small number of cases with greater attention to context and applicable social theories that may inform their interpretation. They must begin with an understanding of social structures as conditions of possibility (context-dependence). These methods may be coupled with quantitative data collection and analysis, such as qualitative GIS and travel diaries. However, we must return to “moving together” with a greater attentiveness to intersubjectivity- between disabled and non-disabled people, between disabled people (because disabilities are heterogeneous*), among networks of people within a neighborhood, and between caregivers and care recipients.
* Said heterogeneity among disabilities (lived experiences with disabilities, as well as comparative types and degrees of “limitations” across social spaces designed for and by non-disabled people) is overlooked or ignored in law and policy regarding “accessibility” for disabled people in public spaces.
References:
Chouinard, V and Grant, A. (1995). On Being Not Even Anywhere Near ‘The Project’: Ways of Putting Ourselves in the Picture. Antipode. 27. 137-16
Finlay, J.M. and Bowman, J.A. (2016). Geographies on the move: a practical and theoretical approach to the mobile interview. Professional Geographer 69(2), 263-274.
Hein, J.R., Evans, J. and Jones, P. (2008). Mobile methodologies: theory, technology and practice. Geography Compass 2(5): 1266-1285.
Merriman, P. (2014). Rethinking mobile methods. Mobilities 9:2, 167-187.
Novoa, A. (2015). Mobile ethnography: emergence, techniques and its importance to geography. Human Geographies 9:1, DOI:10.5719/hgeo.2015.91.7
Parent, L. (2016). The wheeling interview: mobile methods and disability. Mobilities 11(4), 521-532.
Sayer, A. (1992). Method in Social Science: A Realist Approach. 2nd ed. Routledge: London and New York
Sheller, M. and Urry, J. (2006). The new mobilities paradigm. Environment and Planning A 38, 207-226
Biography: My name is Arrianna Marie Planey, and I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management in the Gillings School of Global Public Health at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. I am a health/medical geographer with expertise in measuring and conceptualizing health care access, health and healthcare equity, and spatial epidemiology. My research and teaching focuses include the application of spatial analytic/statistical/epidemiologic methods to study interactions between health(care) policies, healthcare access and utilization and underlying, population-level health inequities, and identify points of intervention at structural- and system-levels. At the core of my research agenda is equity in access and outcomes, with attention to the intersections of race, class, gender, and disability status. I earned my PhD in Geography from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, after earning my Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees at the University of Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley respectively
Graduate students, postdocs, and other academics applying for jobs face a hypercompetitive job market, limited geographic options, and a potentially withering assessment of their research productivity, teaching abilities, and overall potential. If you are deaf or hard of hearing, add to this scenario the weighty decision of when you should reveal your deafness during the job application process. In the United States employers are prohibited from discriminating against job applicants based on disability. However, not all countries offer this protection, and even in the U.S. many of us worry that unconscious, or even conscious, bias can often taint the work of search committees.
So what is a deaf/HoH job applicant to do? Do you reveal your deafness in your CV? Once you are offered an interview? When you are on site for an interview or visit? Do you reveal it to the search committee chair? To the human resources department? Do you request accommodations when invited for an interview, or do you wing it? Answers to these questions may vary depending on your degree of hearing loss, the ethos of the institution or position you are applying to, and your personal style. Answers may even vary depending on whether you are applying for a job today or several years ago, and your perception of the societal climate at the time.
The Mind Hearswould like to learn from academics who have navigated (or are navigating) the job search phase about the choices they have made, what they wish they had done differently, and what they have found particularly effective. Please help us out by answering this short survey (5-10 minutes) about your experiences. The survey will be available until July 18, 2019:
We would like to collate this collective knowledge and experiences into a compendium of anonymized comments to be posted at the end of summer as a blog post. By sharing the strategies we have tried, we hope to create a resource that can serve as a guide for all of us, and particularly for the upcoming generation of students and postdocs.
The Mind Hears 