Annabel Crowley, SOAS/UAL UK.
Annabel Crowley is a higher education professional with a decade of experience in supporting and facilitating access to Further and Higher Education for disabled students.
Her current role focuses on strategic Equality, Diversity and Inclusion/Organisational Development interventions to policies, processes and institutional culture in the area of staff access and inclusion. She is also co-chair of UAL’s Group for the Equality of Minority Staff (GEMS), a staff network representing employees and workers of colour.
In previous roles, she has managed projects for disabled people-led organisations in London, with a focus on self-advocacy, campaigning and consultation with local authorities.
Her research interests are in critical pedagogy and inclusive learning and teaching practices.
Her current research is design-based, aiming to build spaces for cultures of neurodivergence to flourish. I also teach in arts HE, specialising in inclusive practice.
Writing this piece has been a challenge because I have long struggled to talk about what I do for a living.
Currently, my long answer is “I’m a specialist in facilitating access and inclusion for disabled employees” and my short answer is “I work in disability and mental health”.
The stock response I receive goes something like, “Wow, that must be SO rewarding!”
These conversations frustrate me because they tend to pivot around oppressive assumptions that I do this work because I am a do-good-er for humanity. That disabled people are objects of sympathy or pity. I rarely encounter assumptions that I am skilled in doing this work. That I am skilled in doing it because I am disabled and have been (and continue to be) on the other side of the very same support I provide to others. That I started my training in childhood, caring for one of my parents, before starting my professional career.
This is skilled work that should go beyond compassion or empathy or doing good. This is work to which I have dedicated most of my life because I want to get better at it and to be present and visible in this field as a disabled person.
The language of disability is another challenge. There are so many words in this field that are crucial to my practice and to my existence that I rarely use outside of work or beyond my friends and loved ones. I often find this language inadequate to describe what’s really happening, even though it is in common use in my field.
An ‘adjustment’, for example, implies that overall our environments are good enough and that they require only minor or ‘reasonable’ adjustment to truly welcome and enable a person who would otherwise be disabled. ‘Adjustment’ places the burden on disabled people to know how to navigate complex processes or even to know what is ‘reasonable’ as defined by the Equality Act 2010. The word ‘reasonable’ is hugely loaded in itself – it has a legal definition, but its opposite, unreasonable, implies that disabled people’s requirements for access and inclusion can go beyond the limits of acceptability. The conditions we truly need to thrive can be (and often are) unacceptable. We can be (and often are) unacceptable.
Underpinning and woven through all of this is what I know from the hundreds of people I have worked with. There are complex and intersecting factors that make our experiences of disability vary so widely. Ethnic minorities are at higher risk of developing mental ill-health, perhaps linked to the trauma of racism on global, societal and local levels. Mental health services are immensely difficult to access in the age of austerity in the UK.
Those of us who are ‘lucky’ enough to access them still experience discrimination in those services and – especially amongst people racialised as Black – remain statistically more likely to be detained under the Mental Health Act. People who are LGBTQ+, and particularly trans people, are more likely to experience inequality of healthcare provision.
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This is the kind of sensitive knowledge I must carry with me in every conversation I have about disability. I think now of all the conversations I have had in my work. Those that I hold in my mind alone, having promised not to share the details further. Those in which I have negotiated next steps, working with individuals to understand what they are willing to disclose in order to access further support or resources. Those in which I have mainly listened because acting as a witness to someone was what they needed at a time when they felt helpless and isolated. A core part of my work has always been acting as a supportive mirror, reflecting an individual’s experience back to them as though to say, ‘What you are telling me is real.’
To me, these conversations should form the basic level of support we offer to disabled people at work. I have needed these conversations, so I am reminded that being treated as a nuisance in a given environment does not actually make me a nuisance.
I work towards the day when I can design environments myself, free(r) from the bureaucratic limitations of institutions and beyond the inadequate boundaries of legal compliance. This desire is at the core of my current research – the desire to imagine spaces where we can express ourselves, bear witness to ourselves, and really harness our beauty and creativity in the endless forms they can take. Until then, I will probably be tired but still committed to giving what I can because if I and others like me are not here, then who will be?