The next #LTHEChat in Wednesday 18^th April 8-9PM (GMT) will be based on questions from Nicole Brown @ncjbrown and Jennifer Leigh @drschniff “Ableism in academia – where are chronically ill, disabled and neurodiverse staff and students?”

In recent months there has been a shift towards more awareness of precarious working conditions, gender issues and racial injustice within society as a whole, and within academia, in particular. And while these developments are fantastic to observe, there remain many instances where the needs of students and staff are marginalised or forgotten, especially where the needs may not necessarily be visible but related to chronic illnesses, invisible disabilities and neurodiversity.

Over the last few months, articles and position papers in Disability and Society, the Times Higher Education and The Guardian have highlighted how within academia certain ways of working and learning are expected and that disabilities, neurodiversity and chronic illnesses are often not catered for.

In this tweetchat, we would like to explore our internalised expectations of workings in academia, consider how ableism (discrimination in favour of able-bodied/minded) intersects with gender, race, class, age and sexuality, and discuss what needs to be done to allow for a more diverse and inclusive environment for all.

Nicole Brown @ncjbrown

Nicole is a Lecturer in Education and Academic Head of Learning and Teaching in the Department of Culture, Communication and Media at UCL Institute of Education. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Her research interests lie with advancing learning and teaching and ways of improving knowledge generation, mainly through creative methods. Underpinned by her interpretation of human communication relying on the metaphorical understanding of the world, her PhD research on academic identity uses participatory approaches and creative methods to data collection and analysis to capture what is otherwise difficult to express.

Jennifer Leigh @drschniff

Jennifer is a Lecturer in Higher Education and Academic Practice at the Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Kent. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Her research stems from a background in movement, and focuses on embodiment, reflexivity, identity and creative research methods. Her doctoral work was a phenomenological study of how children perceived, reflected on and expressed their embodiment through movement. She won the Society for Research into Higher Education’s prize for Newer Researchers in 2016.

The Wakelet for this weeks chat can be found here.