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  • Caselist.RoundClass[70]
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Caselist.RoundClass[70]

EntryDate

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1		-2017-02-15 01:11:38.284
	1	+2017-02-15 01:11:38.0

Caselist.CitesClass[65]

Cites

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	1	+Public colleges and universities should institute policies requiring teachers to make classroom accommodations to students with disabilities.
	2	+- Examples include trigger warnings, content warnings, and surveys at the beginning of class, class activities that require certain types of discussion.
	3	+- Responsibility will be placed on administrators, teachers and disabled students to craft standards for appropriate discourse and class topics.
	4	+- There will be no authenticity test for what constitutes disability.
	5	+- Public colleges and universities will make all other areas on campus a free speech zone except classrooms. Carter 15
	6	+
	7	+Carter, Angela M. "Teaching with Trauma: Trigger Warnings, Feminism, and Disability Pedagogy." Disability Studies Quarterly 35.2 (2015).
	8	+
	9	+In the most basic sense, accommodations are not about "safety," but about access to opportunity for a more livable life. When disability is denied because it is not understood or seen, or when access is denied because it is inconvenient or complicated, humanity is denied. While it is certainly possible to recognize trauma as a mental disability and still be hesitant toward trigger warnings as an accommodation practice,14 the content and tenor of that conversation would be far removed from the outright hostility and rejection that has reverberated most widely. When presented as an access measure, it becomes evident that trigger warnings do not provide a way to "opt out" of anything, nor do they offer protection from the realities of the world. Trigger warnings provide a way to "opt in" by lessening the power of the shock and the unexpectedness, and granting the traumatized individual agency to attend to the affect and effects of their trauma. Traumatized individuals know that trigger warnings will not save us. Such warnings simply allow us to do the work we need to do so that we can participate in the conversation or activity. They allow us to enter the conversation, just like automatic doors allow people who use wheelchairs to more easily enter a building.¶ A Feminist Disability Studies Praxis¶ While the recent consideration of trauma in higher education has remained practically fixated on trigger warnings, it is important to note that such precautions are certainly not the only tool available for addressing trauma in the classroom.15 Along with the aforementioned misconceptions structuring the debate, this preoccupation on trigger warnings works more to highlight the ablest structures of the academy than to address the needs of students. A college classroom, or campus, that adequately accounts for the material realities of diverse bodyminds is almost inconceivable within an institution built on awarding individual merit over acknowledging structural privileges and inequalities.16 Thus, the engagement in this "debate" has remained on a literal level, often overlooking the deeper needs and desires behind the appeals. If educators acknowledge that students are doing the best they can, with what they have been taught, to ask for what they need, then the focus of this debate would shift beyond the literal request for trigger warnings, toward understanding the underlying experiences producing those requests. When this is done, it becomes apparent that these students are essentially asking for three reasonable things (discussed below), and that the issues at hand are bigger than the specifics of this debate. I argue that what this debate calls for is not another institutionalized measure of disability management, but rather a collaborative, integrated approach to teaching about disability and ableism all together: a feminist disability studies pedagogy.¶ First, students are asking to be recognized as whole persons. They are asking that educators recognize their full humanity in the classroom, including recognition of emotions, struggles, and lived experiences. Students are reminding educators that the material being taught has real affects and effects on bodyminds. Second, they are asking for a language that recognizes their full humanity and helps attend to the very real embodied affect of pain and suffering. Moreover, by petitioning institutions, students are attempting to enact systemic change. They are asking that educators model and instruct how to critically engage with difficult, and potentially harmful, conversation without enacting harm on another. If instructors are not able to do this, students are simply asking that the instructor acknowledge their own limitations and not put the bodyminds of the vulnerable among them at risk. In her book Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self, Susan Brison notes that our society lacks a vocabulary and the interpersonal skills necessary to truly comprehend and respond to trauma: "It is a symptom of our society's widespread emotional illiteracy that prevents most people from conveying any feeling that can't be expressed in a Hallmark card" (12). Appeals for trigger warnings are, in essence, appeals to include instruction and language on emotional literacy within the curriculum.¶ Finally, in these petitions for trigger warning students are telling educators that a key component of their educational experience is being ignored. Following bell hooks and other feminist pedagogues, I see the call for trigger warnings as students demanding what hooks terms an "Engaged Pedagogy," one "that does not offer them information without addressing the connection between what they are learning and their overall life experience" (hooks 19). While the stance that educators are not therapists is certainly valid, Price reminds us that it is the ethical responsibility of educators to respond to the emotional experiences that happen in the classroom (52). Instructors are not trained in counseling or crisis management; to pretend otherwise would be to do a disservice to students in need. However, it takes very little to acknowledge that learning is not isolated to cognitive processing, but also includes the often-unconscious assessment of new information through emotional, sociocultural, and psychosomatic ways of knowing. Indeed, teaching too is not isolated in cognitive processing, and routinely includes ways of knowledge that extend beyond the intellectual.¶ Pedagogically speaking, this recognition can manifest in any number of ways. It asks that instructors teach with the embodiment of affect, rather than against it. For example, if during a classroom activity or discussion it becomes apparent that students are struggling with feelings of anger or frustration, the instructor could pause the conversation and ask students to write for five minutes about the emotions they are feeling in that moment. Then, when the discussion resumes, the instructor can guide students through analyzing how emotions influence the ability to consider new ideas, and engage with one another in informative and/or mindful ways. If in another instance, students seem sluggish and unresponsive, the instructor could pause the class discussion or lecture and instruct the students to get up and stretch, shake, dance, or move around the room for a set amount of time. Through relatively simple pedagogical practices such as these, educators not only acknowledge the full humanity of the students in class, but also help students come to recognize learning as a process that involves all aspects of the bodymind. To this end, I seek a pedagogical paradigm shift — an interweaving of feminist and disability praxis located in what Knoll terms a "feminist disability studies pedagogy" (FDSP) (131) and what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson described in her call to integrate disability and feminist theory:¶ One way to think about feminist theory is to say that it investigates how culture saturates the particularities of bodies with meanings and probes the consequences of those meanings. Feminist theory is a collaborative, interdisciplinary inquiry and self-conscious cultural critique that interrogates how subjects are multiply interpellated: in other words, how the representational systems of gender, race, ethnicity, ability, sexuality, and class mutually produce, inflect, and contradict one another. These systems intersect to produce and sustain ascribed, achieved, and acquired identities, both those that claim us and those that we claim for ourselves. A feminist disability theory introduces the ability/disability system as a category of analysis into this diverse and diffuse enterprise. It aims to extend current notions of cultural diversity and to more fully integrate the academy and the larger world it helps shape. (3, emphasis added)¶ Feminist disability studies pedagogy puts the work of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and other feminist disability theorists17 into practice by blending the ways dis/ability intersects with other vectors of power and oppression to inform how we teach and learn. Within disability pedagogy, the principles of Universal Design18 provide important guidelines toward creating an accessible classroom and encouraging educators to see our students in their full bodymind. However, as Knoll rightfully asserts, working exclusively toward the implementation of Universal Design or accommodations would "leave gaping holes in access to academia and courses, by not seeing and addressing the intersecting dilemmas of privilege and oppression within the disability experience" (124). Critical disability pedagogy incorporates feminist principles that reach beyond inclusion and toward shifting the pervasive and intersecting forces of inequality. When the debate on trigger warnings is situated within FDSP, the question shifts from should instructors provide trigger warnings to how might educators provide adequate acknowledgement of trauma in the classroom. Providing trigger warnings is one way to do this, but is not the only way, or even the most effective.19 Similarly, various kinds of acknowledgements could be given before in-class readings, videos, discussions, or activities. These could take the form of a trigger warning, a content note, or brief descriptions. Instructors might make note of the most common kinds of triggering material (rape/sexual assault, extreme violence, suicide/murder, and self-harm). Or, at the beginning of the term, instructors may ask that students anonymously submit any potentially triggering topics they may have. As educators, there is no way to predict what may trigger one student or another, but we can provide the space needed for the bodyminds in the room to share their truths.22 Rather than place the responsibility of student's affective responses on the instructor, these measures would serve to remind students of their own power, and agency over their bodyminds. Instructors would make note of potentially triggering material, not to "protect" their students, but to allow their students to prepare in whatever way is necessary for participation.¶ Lastly, instructors using FDSP would not require a letter of accommodation, as registration with disability services often requires reliance on the medical model of disability. This often precludes our most marginalized students from gaining the access they need, as people of color, poor people, and queer people are less likely to have the financial resources necessary to obtain the required diagnosis and documentation. Moreover, educators and students who desire a community of learners would not seek institutionalized policies that require trigger warnings. Educators invested in access would take heed from the limitations of the ADA, and know that legislation and mandates cannot force anyone, especially those in power, into consciousness.23 Instead, work would be done to increase awareness and education about disabilities and emotional literacy. Structural changes would be made in regard to the importance of pedagogy and student evaluations in faculty development, training, and retention. Rather than giving the university resources to reprimand, work would be done to give faculty and students the resources to make change together.¶ Faculty, students, and administrators should indeed debate the merits and limitations of trigger warnings as a pedagogical practice, and seriously consider the potential positive and negative effects of institutionalizing such a policy. This work is part of what it means to be an educator, and one-way students can take ownership of their own educational experience. With this, it is also the job of educators to teach students how to understand, respond, and engage with the full complexity of the world and our humanity. This work must include ways of attending to the affects and effects of trauma and violence, the politics of emotions, and the embodied manifestations of power and oppression. It is telling that critiques of trigger warnings accuse the supporters of enacting neoliberal ideologies of individualizing harm (e.g., Halberstam), yet when faculty position themselves against trigger warnings because of justifiable fears of increased work load, expanded emotional labor, or risks of retribution, they create a false binary between one group experiencing institutional exploitation and another. The needs of faculty and staff need not be positioned against the needs of students. Imagine if, instead of refusing student initiatives, faculty and students stood in solidarity to demand and create the kind of community it takes to truly provide education as a practice of freedom.¶ When approached through FDSP, the significance of the trigger warning debate shifts. An accurate understanding of trauma and triggers situates trauma in the context of disability, not discomfort, and it illustrates the persistent misconceptions surrounding disability and mental illness. Similarly, examining the seeming conflict between feminist and disability pedagogy over trigger warnings demonstrates the still present misconstruction of access and accommodation, neither of which are about "safety." Finally, these new perspectives allow educators to finally see the underlying needs students identify when they make such requests. When guided by FDSP, this debate ceases to be one. The conversation shifts from whether educators should incorporate trigger warnings into pedagogical practices, to why trauma itself must be understood as an imperative social justice issue within the classrooms.
	10	+
	11	+The counterplan competes – cx proves that they make all of campus a free speech zone, we determine the administration puts restrictions on what can be said in classrooms. These restrictions are up to the teacher’s discretion, but the school requires they make limits on what is said and how information is presented.
	12	+
	13	+The counterplan re-conceptualizes trauma and disability. Status quo laws treat disability as an individual problem, which turns the case. Carter 15
	14	+
	15	+Carter, Angela M. "Teaching with Trauma: Trigger Warnings, Feminism, and Disability Pedagogy." Disability Studies Quarterly 35.2 (2015).
	16	+
	17	+Those in opposition to trigger warnings in classroom reinforce the individual model of disability, suggesting that the traumatized or triggered individual seek help on their own from the proper medical establishments. It is the responsibility of the traumatized to deal with their excessive bodymind, not the society that produces and then pathologizes it as such. Those in support of trigger warnings attempt to locate the problem within the climate of higher education and its ableist infrastructure. However, while recognizing the numerous social barriers for traumatized individual is certainly important, the experiences and embodiments of trauma must also be reconceptualized culturally as both relational and political. Just as all disability is constituted through the (false and oversimplified) binary of disabled or abled, embodiments of trauma are also constituted through the unmarked binary of traumatized or un-traumatized. We know whose affects and responses are "inappropriate" or "disregulated" because we have socially determined what a proper and regulated affective response looks like. Thus, individuals who live with the affect of trauma are socially constructed as an Other, and like other disabilities, trauma is "experienced in and through relationships" with the un-traumatized norm (Kafer 8).¶ Furthermore, trauma must also be understood as unequivocally political. As with all disabilities, living with trauma means negotiating life in a world established by and for bodyminds that do not experience the affect of trauma. The sociopolitical inequalities surrounding race, class, gender, and citizenship undoubtedly shape the unequal access to healthcare and other resources needed to live with and/or through trauma. In fact, the ability to be recognized as a person living with trauma is in many ways a political privilege.13 Furthermore, while traumatic experiences can certainly be accidental, the vast majority of potentially traumatizing experiences are rooted in systems of power and oppression. The forces of racism/white supremacy, colonization, and global capitalism continuously instigate enumerable violences worldwide. As legal scholar Dean Spade argues, it is often the administrative systems themselves that traumatize and disable us the most by "distributing life chances and promoting certain ways of life at the expense of others, all while operating under legal regimes that declare universal equality" (103). Indeed, it is not by accident that the organizing that originated trigger warnings arose alongside a feminism proclaiming, "the personal is political" (Smith). By depathologizing trauma, and approaching it through Kafer's political/relational model, trauma stands along with other disabilities "as a potential site for a collective reimagining" (9). In this debate on trigger warnings in the classroom, situating trauma within this framework of disability allows educators and students to collectively reimagine what education can look like.
	18	+
	19	+
	20	+Doesn’t chill speech – Logan 16
	21	+
	22	+Rae, Logan Comm department Syracuse. "Re-focusing the debate on trigger warnings: Privilege, trauma, and disability in the classroom." First Amendment Studies 50.2 (2016): 95-102.
	23	+
	24	+At the Eastern Communication Convention panel that served as impetus for this essay, I was surprised that only one professor spoke decisively in favor of trigger warnings. The other participants’ presentations, I thought, conflated trigger warnings with notions of “political correctness,” “coddled millennials,” and a “threat to academic freedom.”¶ While academic freedom is an important value, the connection to trigger warnings lacks clear explanation. Richard Vatz argues that faculty avoid teaching controversial material when students who perceive themselves as victims are present. Rather than charging trigger warnings with blame in this situation, we might more appropriately view the threat to academic freedom stemming from administrators refusing to support their faculty who receive challenges from students. (Lockhart makes that point in her essay.) A trigger warning does not prevent instructors from showing certain texts, it merely flags potentially traumatic material within those texts.¶ The American Association of University Professors has also spoken out against trigger warnings, claiming that their use “infantilizes” students. Yes, some students may have experienced traumas relevant to a planned discussion topic, but these would be “exceptional rare? individual experiences,” whereas trigger warnings are sent to the entire class. Worse yet, the AAUP asserts, the warnings “might elicit a response from students they otherwise would not have had.”1212. “On Trigger Warnings,” American Association of University Professors, August 2014. https://www.aaup.org/report/trigger-warnings¶ View all notes¶ It seems that the AAUP is doing the infantilizing here. Simply hearing a warning will create the trauma? The assertion assumes that students are unable to figure out whether a trigger warning pertains to their own life experience. Trigger warnings and similar pedagogical practices are about disability access. They are about recognizing all that your students bring to the classroom and considering that not everyone has the privilege to learn uninterrupted.¶ In my experience, I have used and benefitted from trigger warnings. While it is difficult for me to see why scholars and commentators are against the use of trigger warnings, I do sympathize with many of their concerns. The stress of not knowing what to put a trigger warning on is also something that I struggle with whenever I get in front of a class. However, that does not mean we should not try. Like any other good pedagogical practice, this will take work. It will take trying and failing, it will take talking to colleagues, being open with your students, and calling upon your own support systems to figure out how to best help your students. Our students are worth that much.
	25	+
	26	+Status quo laws push disabled bodies out the academy – our counterplan is about accessibility, not safety, which is necessary to rectifying imbalances in the status quo. Carter 15
	27	+
	28	+Carter, Angela M. "Teaching with Trauma: Trigger Warnings, Feminism, and Disability Pedagogy." Disability Studies Quarterly 35.2 (2015).
	29	+
	30	+The second misconception fueling this debate is the relationship between "safety" and disability accommodation. Those in opposition to trigger warnings argue that the classroom cannot, and should not, be a "safe space" where comfort and protection are "a higher priority than intellectual engagement" (AAUP). Indeed, feminist scholars have long argued that the concept of "safety" is always already fraught. Those in favor of trigger warnings argue that a student's ability to learn is highly compromised if they are re-traumatized, and therefore this is simply a matter of accommodation (Johnson). However, many of these same supporters also list issues of power and oppression as possible triggers, replicating the conflation of accommodation with comfort. When both opponents and supporters of trigger warnings routinely conflate access with safety, they illustrate a prevailing and fundamental lack of awareness about disability, access, and accommodation in higher education.¶ Feminist educators have written extensively about safety in the classroom and the necessity of discomfort as part of learning. Most notably, in Teaching to Transgress bell hooks describes how "safety" was used by people with privilege to silence the voices of "those of us on the margins" who spoke about social justice and changing the academy:¶ Indeed, exposing certain truths and biases in the classroom often created chaos and confusion. The idea that the classroom should always be a "safe," harmonious place was challenged. It was hard for individuals to fully grasp the idea that recognition of difference might also require of us a willingness to see the classroom change, to allow for shifts in relations between students (30).¶ Following hooks, Berenice Malka Fisher describes how attempts to ensure safety in a feminist classroom also risk denying difference and suppressing pedagogically valuable conflict (139). For both hooks and Fisher, calls for "safety" in the classroom must be critically evaluated and resisted as a means of maintaining the status quo and further marginalizing and silencing students who are presenting knowledges that challenge the norm. Fisher's work provides further specific ways to address the multiple and intertwining notions of safety in the classroom that also recognize "the asymmetries of privilege and the differential vulnerabilities that flow from them" (emphasis original, 150). In other words, one's social privilege determines the kind of relative safety that might be felt at any given place and time, as well as the kinds of risks and vulnerabilities one might feel "safe" enough to endure.¶ Opponents of trigger warnings are quick to employ this feminist reasoning and argue that such warnings censor difficult topics and even create an atmosphere where dissidence will be silenced from fear of institutional reprimand (AAUP). However, the swift retreat to this argument illustrates inattentiveness to disability as a vector of oppression and the ways in which ableism, power, and privilege are being denied. In her reflection above, hooks notes that it was the individuals with privilege and social capital who clung to a sense of safety as a way to resist change when voices from the margins began speaking their truths in the classroom. In this instance, those with power turned to "safety" as an attempt to uphold the status quo. Now, with trigger warnings, those with power are again turning to "safety" as an attempt to uphold the status quo. However, rather than turning to "safety" as a means to their own comfort, those with power and the social privilege of an able-bodymind are using a critique of safety as a means of upholding the status quote and resisting the change being called for by marginalized voices. Put another way, this time it is the students from the margins — those living with the affects of trauma or mental disabilities, rather than those with social privilege — that are accused of clinging to safety as a means of avoiding the rigors of an intellectually challenging education (AAUP).¶ While great strides have been made in regard to inclusion and accommodation in higher education, students with mental disabilities continue to face serious barriers. Margaret Price argues there is a "popular conception that unsound minds have no place in the classroom" and that the academy is driven "to protect academic discourse as a 'rational' realm, a place where emotion does not intrude (except within carefully proscribed boundaries), where 'crazy' students are quickly referred out of the classroom to the school counseling center" (33). Unfortunately, once pushed out of the classroom, students with mental disabilities rarely find their way back. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that students with mental disabilities are more likely to drop out of college than any of their peers, with dropout rates at 56.1 for those with "mental illness" and at 23.6 for those with "serious emotional disturbance" (NCES). In their study on higher education and psychiatric disabilities, Collins and Mowbray report an even more disheartening number, noting 86 of students with psychiatric disabilities leave before they complete their degree. They show that the leading issue facing students with mental disabilities is the struggle to receive the institutional accommodation and support. Respondents reported a number of barriers keeping them from accessing disability services, including fear of disclosing (24), lack of knowledge about the services available (19), fear of stigmatization (19), and that the accommodations/support they need were not available (16) (Collins and Mowbray 308).¶ Given these findings, it is imperative that the debate on trigger warnings focus on the inherent questions of access. However, because of the misuse of "triggered" to reference anything that makes someone uncomfortable, disagreements about the classroom as a "safe space" often divert the conversation away from any real discussion of pedagogy and access in higher education. In his 2012 research, Mark Salzer found that students with mental illness were more likely to withdraw because of the impact of "perceived sigma and discrimination" than because of personal struggles with the symptoms or stresses related to their disability (Salzer 1). Because such students are "often viewed as disruptive, lacking academic skill, prone to violence" they are often socially isolated and left alone to question "how welcome they are on campus" (2). These findings suggest that simply providing information about mental illness and "chiding the audience to treat individuals with mental illness" by noting the available resources, is not an effective approach to decreasing the rate of withdraw for disabled students (6). The false conflations of access with "safety" allow accommodations to be dismissed, and only serve to further marginalize mentally disabled students by telling them they are in fact not welcome because their needs disrupt the processes of learning their peers deserve.
	31	+
	32	+Ableism makes oppression inevitable—it naturalizes social inferiority as biological difference. Siebers 09
	33	+
	34	+Siebers, University of Michigan, Professor of Literary and Cultural Criticism, Tobin, “The Aesthetics of Human Disqualification”, Oct 28, 2009, Lecture, Google Books. CC
	35	+
	36	+Oppression is the systematic victimization of one group by another. It is a form of intergroup violence. That oppression involves “groups,” and not “individuals,” means that it concerns identities, and this means, furthermore, that oppression always focuses on how the body appears, both on how it appears as a public and physical presence and on its specific and various appearances. Oppression is justified most often by the attribution of natural inferiority—what some call “in-built” or “biological” inferiority. Natural inferiority is always somatic, focusing on the mental and physical features of the group, and it figures as disability. The prototype of biological inferiority is disability. The representation of inferiority always comes back to the appearance of the body and the way the body makes other bodies feel. This is why the study of oppression requires an understanding of aesthetics—not only because oppression uses aesthetic judgments for its violence but also because the signposts of how oppression works are visible in the history of art, where aesthetic judgments about the creation and appreciation of bodies are openly discussed. One additional thought must be noted before I treat some analytic examples from the historical record. First, despite my statement that disability now serves as the master trope of human disqualification, it is not a matter of reducing other minority identities to disability identity. Rather, it is a matter of understanding the work done by disability in oppressive systems. In disability oppression, the physical and mental properties of the body are socially constructed as disqualifying defects, but this specific type of social construction happens to be integral at the present moment to the symbolic requirements of oppression in general. In every oppressive system of our day, I want to claim, the oppressed identity is represented in some way as disabled, and although it is hard to understand, the same process obtains when disability is the oppressed identity. “Racism” disqualifies on the basis of race, providing justification for the inferiority of certain skin colors, bloodlines, and physical features. “Sexism” disqualifies on the basis of sex/gender as a direct representation of mental and physical inferiority. “Classism” disqualifies on the basis of family lineage and socioeconomic power as proof of inferior genealogical status. “Ableism” disqualifies on the basis of mental and physical differences, first selecting and then stigmatizing them as disabilities. The oppressive system occults in each case the fact that the disqualified identity is socially constructed, a mere convention, representing signs of incompetence, weakness, or inferiority as undeniable facts of nature. As racism, sexism, and classism fall away slowly as justifications for human inferiority—and the critiques of these prejudices prove powerful examples of how to fight oppression—the prejudice against disability remains in full force, providing seemingly credible reasons for the belief in human inferiority and the oppressive systems built upon it. This usage will continue, I expect, until we reach a historical moment when we know as much about the social construction of disability as we now know about the social construction of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Disability represents at this moment in time the final frontier of justifiable human inferiority.

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	1	+2017-02-15 01:11:41.774

Judge

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	1	+Panel

Opponent

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	1	+La Canada AZ

ParentRound

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	1	+70

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	1	+Quarters

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	1	+Harvard Westlake Engel Neg

Title

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	1	+JAN-FEB - CP - Disability Safe Spaces

Tournament

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	1	+Stanford