MARGINALISATION AND ABLEISM FOR STAFF IN HIGHER EDUCATION
MARGINALISATION AND ABLEISM FOR STAFF IN HIGHER EDUCATION DR NEIL HARRISON REES CENTRE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD 3 RD DECEMBER 2020 neil. harrison@education. ox. ac. uk @Dr. Neil. Harrison @Rees. Centre www. education. ox. ac. uk/rees-centre
LIVING WITH THE ENEMY Invisible Autoimmune Unpredictable Cognitive and affective Thankfully painless Broccoli doesn’t help…!
MARGINALISATION IN EDUCATION Surprisingly little work to date on marginalisation in education Tends to focus on single social groups Engages with a wide array of levers – active, tacit or indifferent Questions about whether one needs to feel marginalised or to be recognised as such by society at large (Messiou, 2012) Marginalisation presupposes a group identity and a ‘perfect’ other (Mowat, 2015) ‘A sense that one does not belong and, in so doing, to feel that one is neither a valued member of a community and able to make a valuable contribution within that community nor able to access the range of services and/or opportunities open to
DIMENSIONS OF MARGINALISATION Marginalisation by society Marginalisation by systems Active or tacit stigmatisation or discrimination within wider society Dissonance with prevailing bureaucratic or technocratic systems Marginalisation in time/space Compromised ability to access traditionallyconfigured learning times and spaces Marginalisation by relevance Economic systems that make higher education less applicable to lived lives Source: Harrison and Atherton (forthcoming) Synthesised from twelve accounts of marginalised student communities in higher education Attempt to theorise the macro- practices that lead to educational marginalisation Potentially useful for understanding marginalisation of university staff too…?
MARGINALISATION BY SOCIETY The most obvious form of marginalisation – through active or passive forms of discrimination Staff should have protection through the Equality Act 2010, but still subject to microaggressions Insinuations of inadequacy from peers, managers, collaborators and students Internalised ableism => self-doubt and imposter syndrome => anxiety and underachievement ‘A lecturer at my university once told me to my face I had no business being there because I was partially sighted. […] He tried to ruin my future because he simply didn’t like disabled people’ (Finesilver et al. – Chapter 8) ‘In an ableist society such as academia, this kind of sensitivity and empathy is often foregone – not necessarily because of malicious intent, but because of lack of understanding and awareness’ (Brown – Chapter 3)
MARGINALISATION BY SYSTEMS Growth of bureaucratic and technocratic systems to manage expanding higher education Systems are built around the majority – minority groups bolted-in later (if at all) Disclosure – risks, definitional conflicts, workarounds and special pleading Lack of accountability – ‘it’s the system, not the people’ => institutional ableism Own experiences… ‘Stigma was an aspect of this consideration [to disclose], but often more pressing was the idea that alternative features of identity would become deprioritised in the eyes of other people’ (Martin – Chapter 5) ‘Disabled academics experience forms of gaslighting [by] convincing them to believe that disability adjustments have been put in place, when in reality they have not’ (Campbell – Chapter 12)
MARGINALISATION BY TIME/SPACE Higher education still heavily bound by constraints of locations, buildings, transport, timetables and assessments Assumption that staff can (and will) fit seamlessly into these constraints Interplay and exchangeability between time and space Disability and unpredictability Own experiences… ‘I know that I can’t rest and recover and recuperate ready for tomorrow, instead I have to sit and write and think and be creative because this manuscript is due in’ (Leigh and Brown – Chapter 10) ‘Our campus is on a hill and I’m timetabled to get from one side to the other in five minutes. I can’t do this in my wheelchair. […] It’s a failure of timetabling and estates planning which leaves me frustrated and exhausted’ (Martin – Chapter 5)
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS Strong parallels between the marginalisation of student groups and the marginalisation of disabled academic staff Action needed across the three dimensions outlined here – e. g. Better awareness training for staff Greater clarity around disclosure – processes, risks and benefits Root-and-branch rethink of accessible learning spaces and times An onward question: are there other dimensions of marginalisation that are specific to disabled academics?
REFERENCES Harrison, N. and G. Atherton (forthcoming – 2021) Marginalised communities in higher education: disadvantage, mobility and indigeneity. Abingdon: Routledge. Messiou, K. (2012) Confronting marginalisation in education: a framework for promoting inclusion. London: Routledge. Mowat, J. (2015) Towards a new conceptualisation of marginalisation, European Educational Research Journal 14(5): 454 -476.
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