The mad manifesto

The “mad manifesto” project is a multidisciplinary mediated investigation into the circumstances by which mad (mentally ill, neurodivergent) or disabled (disclosed, undisclosed) students faced far more precarious circumstances with inadequate support models while attending North American universities during the pandemic teaching era (2020-2023).
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\nUsing a combination of “emergency remote teaching” archival materials such as national student datasets, universal design for learning (UDL) training models, digital classroom teaching experiments, university budgetary releases, educational technology coursewares, and lived experience expertise, this dissertation carefully retells the story of “accessibility” as it transpired in disabling classroom containers trapped within intentionally underprepared crisis superstructures. Using rhetorical models derived from critical disability studies, mad studies, social work practice, and health humanities, it then suggests radically collaborative UDL teaching practices that may better pre-empt the dynamic needs of dis/abled students whose needs remain direly underserviced. 
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\nThe manifesto leaves the reader with discrete calls to action that foster more critical performances of intersectionally inclusive UDL classrooms for North American mad students, which it calls “mad-positive” facilitation techniques:
\n1.\tSeek to untie the bond that regards the digital divide and access as synonyms.
\n2.\tUDL practice requires an environment shift that prioritizes change potential.
\n3.\tAdvocate against the usage of UDL as a for-all keystone of accessibility.
\n4.\tRefuse or reduce the use of technologies whose primary mandate is dataveillance.
\n5.\tRemind students and allies that university space is a non-neutral affective container.
\n6.\tOperationalize the tracking of student suicides on your home campus.
\n7.\tSeek out physical & affectual ways that your campus is harming social capital potential.
\n8.\tRevise policies and practices that are ability-adjacent imaginings of access.
\n9.\tEliminate sanist and neuroscientific languaging from how you speak about students.
\n10.\tVigilantly interrogate how “normal” and “belong” are socially constructed.
\n11.\tTreat lived experience expertise as a gift, not a resource to mine and to spend.
\n12.\tCreate non-psychiatric routes of receiving accommodation requests in your classroom.
\n13.\tSeek out uncomfortable stories of mad exclusion and consider carceral logic’s role in it.
\n14.\tCenter madness in inclusive methodologies designed to explicitly resist carceral logics.
\n15.\tCreate counteraffectual classrooms that anticipate and interrupt kairotic spatial power.
\n16.\tStrive to refuse comfort and immediate intelligibility as mandatory classroom presences.
\n17.\tCreate pathways that empower cozy space understandings of classroom practice.
\n18.\tVector students wherever possible as dynamic ability constellations in assessment.

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