I’ve been thinking a lot about how people communicate plans for higher education reopenings and how acknowledgement of at-risk populations almost always follows (or well likely follow) as clarifying point following some normate/able pronouncement (1/x)

It’s a logical writing move and one that gives the impression that all the right “things” are being said and all populations are being rightly accounted for.

But, why not make that move first? Why not center not the self-centered ,the normate, but the at-risk? (2/x)

I teach students in FYC that they can, to some extent, propose how they want their readers to read and engage their texts. We can propose that disability and being at-risk populations be made a priority in these decisions and communications. (3/x)

“We” means both campus communities and leaders who write these communications. But these leaders have to embody and possess the right values; an empty performance isn’t going to work. And most of them don’t possess these values to a strong enough degree for “mattering.” (4/x)

Higher education privileges the normate, the able, the “well.” Higher education privileges the individual. Higher education privileges collectives and “influence blocs” of normate, able-bodied, well individuals, or who perceive themselves as such. (5/x)

This is why advocating by/for those with disabilities and/or are at-risk is always a fight against a normative hegemonic. The choice to place those people second, as the addendum, in decisions and communications reflects the values of the institutions and of their leaders. (6/x)

So the move to say “we must also consider those at-risk” (paraphrase) after first establishing the normative as central to the matters at hand defines to what degree the at-risk have been and are being considered, and it’s never with the most consideration. (7/x)

I’m not saying anything new. I just find the idea that “all the right things being said” versus “how” those things are being said is demonstrative of so much that limits common thinking abt writing/rhetoric and of higher education’s attachment to an able-bodied normative (8/x).

And to think I wasn’t once clear what disabilities studies, writing, and rhetoric had to do with one another. (9/9)