Actualités

Call for panelists: Disability, mental health, and education in the post-COVID-19 university

American Association of Geographers Annual General Meeting, 2021

Virtual Panel Session

Members of the Global Economies and Everyday Lives (GEELS) research lab at Queen’s University, Canada are looking for panelists to join our session on disability, mental health, and the academy in the backdrop of COVID-19. If you are interested in participating, please send the following information to Shannon Clarke at 18sac15@queensu.ca  by Friday, November 27th:

• Your name and institution

• Your AAG Annual General Meeting registrant PIN

• A 2-3 sentence summary of what you want to discuss

Abstract:

The new socio-spatial realties of COVID-19 and subsequent demands to ‘carry on’, weigh heavily on scholars already marginalized in the academy’s spaces and structures of knowledge production. Isolation, financial hardship, lack of accessible resources for remote work/learning, and the propensity to tie individual worth to productivity, are all issues that are beginning to amplify feelings of exclusion and mental distress among scholars who live with disability, chronic illness, or neurodiversity. As universities scramble to devise new policies to restore the disruption to “campus life,” it is important to consider the ways in which the pre-COVID campus was already an isolating place. This panel will consider how the academy reproduces ableist spaces; the scholars that emerge from and are molded by these spaces; and the types of research that are (im)possible here.  We invite scholars to discuss how our new COVID-19 reality is transforming our academic spaces and how emerging standards of knowledge production (e.g. technologies to maintain academic integrity) are creating new ableist barriers and reinforcing old ones. This conversation is more important than ever given emerging knowledge of the long-term health effects of this virus.

Shannon Clarke and Beverley Mullings on behalf of GEELs