"Like Alice through the Looking Glass": II: The Struggle for Accommodation Continues

This article provides an autoethnographic account of the more recent phase of my ongoing struggles, as a disabled female faculty member at a Canadian university, for my legal rights to reasonable accommodation and freedom from discrimination on the basis of disability. It is a sequel to an article dealing with the early years of my struggles for accommodation, published in this journal [vol. 24, nos. 3/4 (1995/96)]. It focuses on the many social barriers to accommodation, inclusion and equality of rights that I encountered in an academic workplace. These included devaluations of my contributions in the workplace, social and spatial exclusion from events in my academic unit, prolonged systemic salary discrimination. resistance to developing a reasonable accommodation plan and even hostility and punishment for being vocal on accommodation issues and, ultimately, taking legal action against the University. This article not only sheds light on some of the challenges facing disabled women who struggle for accommodation in academic workplaces but also encourages others to share their experiences of struggling for fair and reasonable accommodation. Introduction It was in 1993, three years after being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, that I first began to write about my struggles for accommodation as a disabled female professor in a Canadian academic workplace. I did so out of a sense of outrage and disbelief that an institution of higher learning and research, instead of setting a positive example on this crucial human rights issue, seemed to operate in ways that, perversely, made my job immeasurably more difficult to do than I could have ever imagined as an able-bodied female scholar. This is saying something, since even before becoming ill my job had been made difficult enough by marginalizing behaviours on the part of some colleagues. I was not only the only female professor in my department at the time but was also working in newer areas of human geography (radical and feminist) which were not well understood or valued by some colleagues. I was also outspoken rather than being the quiet and deferential woman at least some of my male colleagues preferred. It was at the urging of a colleague at another University that I decided to share the story of my struggle for accommodation in an academic workplace with others. The early years of my struggles are recounted in the 1996 article entitled Like Through the Looking Glass: Accommodation in Academia published in this journal. Although I had referred in passing to certain aspects of those struggles elsewhere it was in the Alice article that I found, for the first time, the courage to begin to write openly about the enormous personal and professional toll that these struggles for accommodation had taken. The decision to write the first Alice article was not an easy one. Not only was I making an intensely personal and traumatic set of experiences public but I was also conscious of the very real possibility of backlash from administrators and others who might have preferred that women such as myself remained silent. It was a risky decision and one that in some ways made me vulnerable to further discrimination. And it is fair to say that I have been punished at times in my workplace for not remaining silent. If anything, however, efforts to intimidate me into silence have only made me even more aware of how important it is that disabled women speak out about their lives in academic and other workplaces. Intolerance toward women with illnesses and impairments compounds and deepens the other disadvantages women face in academic and other settings. The end result is that women already struggling to deal with serious physical and psychological challenges, such as limited mobility and chronic pain, are forced to contend with a multiplicity of daunting barriers to doing their jobs; barriers arising from socio-spatial practices of devaluation, marginalization and exclusion. …

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