Chapter 2: The Retrofit
(This is the third of a series of posts related to a reading group on Jay Dolmage’s Academic Ableism.)
(image description: a photograph of a set of stairs leading up to the wooden external doors of a Gothic building covered with ivy; the color of the photograph has been dampened so that it comes close to resembling a black and white image)
Whereas steep steps are a metaphor for exclusionary spaces and structures, the ‘retrofit’, such as the ramp added after the fact, represent attempts to make exclusionary space more inclusive. While retrofits are important in that they are steps toward better access, two important facts are often lost in the praise lavished on them:
- retrofits are only needed because exclusion was already inshrined in an environment, community, practice, or structure
- focusing on the progress of individual retrofits can mask that the underlying ideology is still one of ableist exclusion
Dolmage puts it this way:
Retrofits like ramps ‘fix’ space, but retrofits also have a chronicity–a timing and a log–that renders them highly temporary yet also relatively unimportant.
(Academic Abliesm, 70)
Dolmage’s discussion in this chapter shows how many of the accommodations students can get at university, despite their benefit as steps towards a less ableist university, are nevertheless problematic. They function as ramps for individual classes or assignments, revealing by their very presence that the university is still structurally exclusionary.
When the accommodations that students with disabilities have access to, over and over again, are intended to simply temporarily even the playing field for them in a single class or activity, it is clear that these retrofits are not designed for people to live and thrive with a disability, but rather to temporarily make the disability go away. The aspiration here is not to empower students to achieve with disability, but to achieve around disability or against it, or in spite of it.
(Academic Ableism, 70; emphasis added)
Much of our reading group’s discussion of chapter 2 focused on this point. The work to get the accommodations is put on the student (for getting the diagnosis, for paying for the needed testing, for taking the accommodations memo to faculty and talking to them about it) that it is supposed to help. Students, who have less social power in academic settings, bear the responsibility for their own accommodations. There is a social capital risk for students to both inform about and enforce their access. Students are (rightly, in my mind) concerned faculty’s first impression of them will be changed by their first interaction between about accommodations. Students have to disclose personal information. And all of this happens not only once, but for every class the student takes at the university and wants to have their accommodations in. Students experience what Annika Konrad calls ‘access fatigue‘ in the very attempt to get them access they should have had from the start.
Often times, students don’t even know what their accommodation options are. Universities need to do a better job of talking with students about what their accommodation options are, but also about the relative costs and benefits of them. Students who get extended time on an exam almost always have to take the exam in a different location, thus depriving them of the opportunity to ask clarifying questions of the instructor that students in the classroom have.
Our group discussed how it would be good to have not only a full list of possible accommodations for students, but resources like ‘helpful tips for communicating with your professors’. We talked about trying to put together a series of short videos that could help give students a range of information that would make accommodations go better.
But even if that’s done, accommodations are still ancillary to exclusion.
The demand [inherent in accommodations] is that that one body be adapted to a curriculum (or structure or terrain) that is otherwise unwelcoming, inaccessible, inhospitable to that body and mind.
(Academic Ableism, 72)
Many accommodations would be needed in the first place if we did better designing–our buildings, our pedagogy, our social environments–better from the start.
We are encouraged, by the logic of the retrofit, to only change slightly for one student at one time, not to alter our teaching for all students in more permanent ways.
(Academic Ableism, 79.)
What is needed, in contrast, is to rewrite these spaces as a whole. It is to this issue that we’ll turn when discussing universal design.