About

I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Higher Education and Organizational Change in the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. My work explores multiple forms of access labor in higher education, specifically the work and knowledge that go into creating (in)accessible campus environments for disabled students. My research interests include how different communities on-campus understand and engage in access labor, how universities create norms and systems around access, and how racism and ableism mediate the experiences of students, staff, and faculty with access labor.

My current project uses critical access studies and critical disability studies to examine how institutional commitments to meaningful access are interpreted outside the classroom. Specifically, I use interviews with students and staff to understand 1) the types of access labor staff across Academic and Student Affairs engage in and 2) the understandings of disability and access that shape their approaches to access labor. I use web content analysis to observe access labor in practice, focusing on how offices construct access notes and create code for alternate text. I hope to better understand what shapes the everyday work of access on-campus, as well as identify places of tension and possibility in actualizing cultures of holistic access within co-curricular spaces on-campus.

I understand access as a way to cultivate community. This way of understanding and asking questions about access is shaped by the theorizing of disability justice activists (#AccessIsLove) as well as my experiences as a disability services professional at rural and urban institutions. As a Black scholar with mental illness, I am constantly reminded of the ways disabled folks of color are erased within disability research and postsecondary resources. I use my research to challenge this erasure and deepen conversations about accessible practice, pedagogy, and policy in higher education.

You can often find me walking around Central Massachusetts: I am usually the one with a bun, wearing all black. I will be excited if there is pie or biscuits nearby. My bookshelves are a mixture of academic books (e.g., Making Gullah), fiction (e.g., Freshwater), and diverse children's literature (e.g., Mirandy and Brother Wind). I have a M.A. in International Education from New York University and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.