My Activism isn’t a Choice
A couple months ago, I was invited to a workshop about boundary drawing in scientific disciplines more generally, though with a focus on Women’s, Gender and Feminist Studies in particular. The invitation to me was specifically on how I navigate my gender (nonbinary) and disability in my academic practice. A version of this text had been submitted as a contextual abstract to the workshop organisers. I’m publishing it now here so that others may reflect on what it means if ‘activism’ (or whatever access labour is labeled as such) is not a choice, but rather a necessity to be able to survive in the academy at all.
The shaping of our socio-technical environment is predominantly the privilege of a comparatively homogeneous group of people, mainly white, mainly western, mainly within an age range of 20–40 years old, mainly cis-male.; with not just amusing, annoying or irritating, but also deadly consequences for anyone else. Associated academic research is similarly reduced to these perspectives; particularly in a German speaking context. I do not fit that bill.
At least not entirely; I am white, grew up within a western context and my scholarly education is similarly firmly rooted in continental epistemologies. Those parts of my self allow said majority to find points of commonality. However, I’m disabled and I’m trans; and the academy others me as deviant along both of these lines. I continuously cross boundaries by simply being in an academic space and pointing out the ways it systematically tries to exclude me and my peers. It makes no sense to most people that someone with a so-called learning disability could hold a PhD. Try being nonbinary in a field that is, fundamentally, built on binary notions, materially and epistemologically. I do not fit their bill.
Even though the professional research organisation with which I’m mainly associated (ACM SIGCHI) is very progressive, it seems fundamentally unprepared for my presence. I’m the only nonbinary person with a PhD I know of within the field (though, gladly, that is about to change). I’m in a process of shedding my masking strategies just to be made painfully aware of how little people care about catering to neurodiversity. I’m researching technological design for neurodivergent people and keep on being reminded how low my colleagues’ regard is for my peers and myself, how they dehumanise our beings. “But we don’t mean people like you, we mean the really disabled.” — “Oh, I fit that bill. I just learned plausible deniability.”
What I do can be called critical participatory research where I focus on marginalised perspectives, particularly around notions of gender and disability. Though, even when I conduct literature reviews, write essays or do more theoretical work, my work is always seen as activist. Dispassionate research is what we expect and value, passionate research is activism. Yet, I find myself with status, with a research position from which I speak. And what else to do with than starting to push within existing structures, to push the boundaries to make space; not just because this increases the relevance of the knowledge we produce but because it is the just thing to do. What if not transgressing those boundaries will yield more equitable processes in the creation of our socio-technical environment? What good are we for as researchers, if we uphold artificial and exclusive boundaries? Activism can be the right choice; but having that choice constitutes a privilege. Activism is inevitable for me, because my mere presence is troubling. I will need to change the bill.