Wednesday, June 8, 2016

Diversity and Disability - The Case of Pomona College

I have a new Storify on disability and diversity at Pomona college. Pomona passed a new "diversity and inclusion" initiative for tenure and promotion, which has received a lot of press. Disability has not, to my knowledge, been mentioned.

I'm interested in the general lack of overlap between diversity initiatives and disability services. I think it stems from a few different factors.

1) Lots of people don't see disability as a form of diversity
2) More importantly, though, disability comes with a whole mandatory legal apparatus that places it, administratively, in a "student services" context (and under a Dean of Students). Diversity initiatives often operate as their own administrative tier, looking at students - staff - faculty, and not within the student framework.

I'm not sure about this though and hope to do more research over the next year (post book).

Finally, I'm interested in the iconography. How does one represented disability in pictures? I think it means visible disability, rather than invisible, which is of course its own set of problems.

More to come!

Read the storify here.

Follow the tweet below for the thread on Twitter.