21 Writing About Disabled Students in the Silhouette: A Reflection 9 Years Later – Aïssa

Almost a decade ago, I wrote an article for the Silhouette on accessibility at McMaster. I remember hearing about an upcoming Accessibility Forum on campus, and I felt this was something I hadn’t seen covered in The Sil at the time and an important event to hear more about. In hindsight, there are only a handful of articles I wrote during that year that have stuck with me, and this was one of them.

I think retrospectives and reflections are useful, in one way, to see how far ‘we’ have come, but in another way, to see how much things stay the same, the status quo being easier than meaningful social inclusion. For me it has been important to  recognize what generations of disabled students have tried to do, that disability inclusion is not ‘new’, and to understand what has come before.  This piece is a reflection on my own writing process almost ten years ago and an invitation to consider how things at McMaster for disabled students have changed or haven’t changed.

I am very grateful for the time and sometimes very painful insights that disabled students shared with me in order to write the article. I recall spending a significant amount of time trying to do more research, find more interviewees, and include more perspectives, because I wanted to do the issue of accessibility (or inaccessibility) justice. However, because the Silhouette is a weekly publication and the piece was tied to the Accessibility Forum, the constraints of timeliness certainly limited the depth and breadth of research I could do. Upon re-reading the article now, I truly believe I did want to ‘get it right’ as I felt in solidarity with students in the article who rejected disability being portrayed in homogenous categories. In some of the anti-racism work I support now, I see parallels in the way that policies and processes oversimplify people’s lived experiences – listening to the loudest voices, but not appreciating that racialized or disabled persons, are already a hugely diverse group of people. Instead, I often see focus on generalized or binary definitions of lived experience, and I remember in writing this piece, wanting to interview as many people as possible to try to avoid these simplifications and present a fuller picture.

The disabled students I interviewed shared personal stories with me of exclusion (overt and covert), structural ableism, and attitudinal biases. These stories frankly deserve more space than a 1300 word article, and I wish I had been able to include even more of these quotes. Legislative compliance aside, it seemed clear to me after I wrote the article, it is these disabled students – then and now – who have the solutions, the pragmatic insights and the innovation to make campus more accessible.

Looking back at this, re-reading after ten years, brought conflicted feelings about this article. Was I the right person to write it? Did I capture at least some experiences fairly and accurately that were entrusted to me by students with disabilities? There was more, particularly on the Mad Students Society, I had wanted to include, but this content was cut down due to Silhouette standards for layout and word count.

If you, readers of this zine, could retroactively be in the editing room and have your red editor’s pen at hand, you tell me – what would you make of this article in 2021?