What is needed is neurodiversity: Emotional labour and neuroqueerness in the age of the Accord
Frey Parkes & Susan Hopkins, UniSQ College (Pathways), University of Southern Queensland
The Australian Universities Accord Final Report noted the shocking underrepresentation of First Nations, regional and remote, and socioeconomically disadvantaged students. However, using “faulty data”, the Report found that people with a disability already “appear[ed] to exceed this group’s expected enrolment share of 8.4%” (p. 114) and recommended only “maintain[ing]” current participation rates (p. 21), failing also to appreciate the diverse, compounding and intersectional challenges encountered by learners and teachers living with a disability.
Particularly, the Accord failed to recognise that university culture itself can be profoundly disabling for neurodiverse students and teachers. While everyone agrees that neurodiverse people should have the same rights to access, opportunity and support as any other learners or teachers, in practice this is not always the reality.
One issue is the federal government’s defunding of key programs. Another is that low expectations and limiting stereotypes are still alive and well in both academia and the wider community. The authors of the Accord have been criticised for their low expectations of disabled students, but we think that a neurodiversity focus shines an illuminating light on the problems of the typical university education experience overall.
Neurodiversity and the hidden curriculum
In reality, many neurodiverse students and teachers struggle with the hidden curriculum of academia in a lived environment where sensory-friendly spaces (in rarified ivory towers) are rarely found. Increasingly, teachers are not just expected but required to be gregarious and popular with students and staff alike if they wish to advance their careers. They are also expected to just assume or pick up unspoken understandings about the right way to do the ‘people skills’ of teaching and research collaboration, because many academic, socio-cultural and emotional ‘rules’ are never made transparent.
Another part of the problem for students and staff is that, where ‘support’ is available, it is often located in standalone counselling services, which focus on the individual and can feel isolating or stigmatising to access. This approach can reinforce a medicalised, individualistic idea of disability and how it can be ‘accommodated’, without considering the social and institutional factors that create a disabling environment.
How neuroqueerness helps
Neuroqueerness, drawing on critical feminism, race studies, disability studies and queer studies, has us ask: who benefits from the model where those who are different have to marginalise themselves just to access the resources and support that, under concepts of liberalism, are a human right? From there, we ask, how can we do university differently, teach differently, and care differently?
Even the way ‘care’ is offered, especially in pathways or enabling education where we work, can be a hidden trap, when compounded by gender stereotypes and increased expectations of emotional labour. Female academics with autism, for example, may be doubly disadvantaged by the expectation that they should be tirelessly empathetic, caring and sociable under pressure. Indeed, the idealised enabling educator is a kind of hyperfeminised, relentlessly positive and indefatigable carer. Staff who fail to live up to this unspoken ideal may find judgements are made, not just about their ability and performance, but about their very character.
Despite research demonstrating that autistic teachers are committed to making a real and meaningful difference in their students’ lives, these teachers can often be sidelined in the competitive “snakes and ladders” of academic life. Being neuroqueer reminds us that it is not only autistic people who ‘have the problem’, but rather all participants who may experience difficulties because of their differences.
Learning from diverse staff
In reality, what is needed is embedded holistic support within a wider, more inclusive, non-competitive culture. Seeking support in the first place can feel frightening when so much emphasis is placed on being the self-directed student or the research rock star academic, instead of belonging as a member of a relationship-rich community with shared interests and goals. Enabling pedagogy and Universal Design in the classroom can help.
Moreover, our diverse students from non-traditional backgrounds should have the opportunity to learn from the lived experiences and examples of diverse staff from non-traditional backgrounds (including neurodiverse staff from working class backgrounds).
In the process, students and staff might learn that there are equally legitimate and diverse ways to work, communicate and manage our time, aside from the neurotypical, standardised ‘ideal’.
What is needed now?
Through our own journeys battling adversity, we aim to show up for our students to model the multiple, non-linear pathways to ‘student success’. Moreover, we aim to make transparent many of the hidden ‘feeling rules’ of academic culture so neurodiverse students and staff are not inadvertently made to feel that they are breaking these unstated, gendered, classed ‘polite’ norms of communication, collaboration and interaction. These old, unspoken rules are still transmitted and enforced in university settings despite all the ‘care-washing’.
However, really reforming higher education means changing culture and the lived experience for students throughout their time at university and beyond, not just setting new targets for participation. We call for the veil to be lifted on what is typical, so that neurodiverse teachers and students can take off the masks they’ve been required to wear for too long.
July marks Disability Pride month – in education, we have the chance to be proud all year if we start making changes now.
Attached image attribution: Three Black and disabled folx for Disabled And Here by Chona Kasinger CC 4.0
Alt Text for attached image: Torso level photo of three Black and disabled folx (a non-binary person holding a cane, a non-binary person in a power wheelchair, and a femme on a folding chair) raising their fists on the sidewalk in front of a white wall.”
Dr Frey Parkes is a neuroqueer academic at the University of Southern Queensland and co-convenor of the UniSQ Staff Disability Network. They are a pathways educator with almost fifteen years of teaching experience in higher education.
Dr Susan Hopkins is a member of the UniSQ Staff Disability Network and a UniSQ College pathways educator from a working class background with over twenty years of experience working with students from low socio-economic, diverse and non-traditional backgrounds.