Scenes of Access in Student and Academic Affairs

My dissertation examines practices of access labor and the forms of knowledge that shape access labor within Academic and Student Affairs. I am particularly interested in how the recent emergence of disability cultural centers on-campus is reshaping approaches to access within the university. To that end, I use individual interviews with staff to understand how they have learned about what accessible practices are – or what it means to “be accessible.” I analyze these alongside interviews with disabled students to compare staff and student experiences with, and understandings of, access in Student and Academic Affairs spaces. I am also conducting a content analysis of the ways access is represented on office websites, zooming in on accessible content creation as one form of access labor happening within Student and Academic Affairs. This analysis examines how access notes and the alternate text behind images, coded within HTML as alt attributes, reflect certain understandings of access (e.g., access as compliance, access as culture, access as technical knowledge).

My analysis draws from critical access studies to consider how these material practices of access, as described by participants and observed on websites, are rooted in underlying ways of knowing about disability that have been shaped through a variety of elements (e.g., experiences with disability, participation in disabled communities, friendship, training, digital resources, art, activism). I use situational analysis to map these various elements that staff and students describe as shaping how access labor happens in Student and Academic Affairs offices. This scholarship expands the limited scholarship on access labor outside of the classroom and advocates for greater engagement with access across all aspects of campus life.

Disability, Race, and Self-Advocacy

This qualitative project explored the perspectives and experiences of disabled graduate students of color with self-advocacy. Student self-advocacy is framed by researchers and educators as a necessary, but often underdeveloped, skillset for disabled students. However, the definitions of self-advocacy that these stakeholders operationalize are frequently power-evasive: they do not address how intersecting forms of oppression shape students’ experiences with self-advocacy. By contrast, students identified how racism shaped all aspects of self-advocacy and spoke of learning, over time, to rely on practices of refusal, as a protective form of self-advocacy that is largely absent within prominent models of self-advocacy from the academic literature. Students’ shared how institutions demanded vulnerability, sharing detailed disability information to justify basic access to their courses, but then resisted or refused to remedy access barriers. While the literature frames students who do not disclose as lacking a core skill or requiring coaching, students described the refusal to continue engaging in this toxic dynamic as intentional, carefully thought-out, and personally empowering.

Karpicz, J. R. (2020). “Just My Being Here is Self-Advocacy”: Exploring the Experiences of Disabled Graduate Students of Color with Self-Advocacy. Journal Committed to Social Change on Race and Ethnicity, 6(1), 137-163.

What’s the Purpose of That?

Building with the understanding that disability studies is not just a theoretical lens, but a methodology (Enabling Whom? Critical Disability Studies Now by Julie Avril Minich), this project examines how exposure to disability studies curricula influences the pedagogical approaches of two Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) in introductory disability studies courses. Through interviews and participant observations, this study found that GTAs used disability studies to critique how students were socialized around the ideal of ‘the good student,’ who is abled, productive, and never requires accommodation. Both worked to disrupt these norms through affirmation and flexibility in their teaching practices.

Equity and Computing

As a Research Analyst with Momentum, a research team led by Dr. Linda Sax, I have co-led the qualitative portion of a mixed-methods, multi-institutional study on efforts to advance racial and gender diversity in undergraduate computing. Our team uses individual interviews with a range of stakeholders, including faculty, staff, administrators, and student leaders, gathered over several years, to analyze how participants make sense of the external, institutional, and cultural factors shaping departmental diversity efforts. We are currently in the analysis and dissemination phase of this project.

Catalpa

Outside of my work on the university, I am also working on a project that draws on nature walks and oral histories with my mother to explore the personal and intergenerational legacies of rural Black girlhood. This work draws in scholarship on Black feminist geographies of place, Black girlhood studies, and narrative inheritance to understand how rural space creates particular relationalities among nature and self for Black girls. This project picks up on the deeper themes in my work related to relationality, belonging, and how we cultivate a sense of place. It also offers me a space to engage creatively with methods, including photography and autoethnography.