Opinion How does a disabled professor teach?

A university professor is supposed to teach and contribute to knowledge through her writings. In the neoliberal framework, this demand has translated into a heavy academic workload, continuous demand, the challenge to “publish or perish” and get h-index citations. These parameters are such that not only disabled professors, but also professors from other marginal communities feel that the academic game is rigged against them. More importantly, the idea of scientific rigour too is defined in such a way that knowledge emanating from the experiences of our disabled embodiments is often not considered worthy of being given the status of valid knowledge.

A disabled professor is uniquely positioned to disrupt the narrative of ableism in the classroom through her presence and pedagogy, shaped by her lived experiences. She can militate against the dominant ways of knowing and knowledge formations by introducing disability as a critical category of knowledge inquiry. For example, a disabled professor teaching constitutional law may, through her teachings, question the liberal consensus about the Constitution as an inclusive document. She may see the Constitution as an ableist document of a social contract in which the question of disability and the figure of the disabled are almost erased. A disabled professor of international law may interrogate the Israel-Palestine conflict from the prism of the production of mass disability of an entire population through settler colonialism and its imperial wars. Our “crip reading” and our embodied knowledge has the potential to unsettle the dominant readings of every discipline. The plurality that we bring fills the gaps in knowledge or challenges the mainstream ideas of dominant knowledge and presents a more inclusive way of knowledge formation.

However, our presence is often seen merely as “tick boxes” of inclusion. Sara Ahmad says that the tick-box approach of inclusion allows institutions to show that they are following procedures without really committing to inclusion. A disabled professor is expected to de-body her teachings and writings to produce and impart “neutral” and “objective” knowledge. Further, an almost complete lack of faith in the ability of disabled academicians often results in stereotypical questions being asked during interviews: “How would you control your classes as a ‘blind person’? How will you work on the blackboard?” Seldom do interviews begin with a question about domain knowledge. A disabled professor, if the university has employed one, is mostly consulted on the question of accessibility to perform the tick boxing of inclusion, and her agency as a knowledge producer is either erased or ignored.

Teachers’ Day should be an occasion to think and ponder about academicians from marginal sections as well, who may not have the privileges of the able bodied body, and yet can meaningfully contribute to teaching and research through their unique ways of knowing from their marginal positions. Ableist parameters of academia are suffocating. They are blocking the democratisation of knowledge, and hence, they must be rejected.

Tiwari is an Assistant Professor (Law) at The West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata. Jain is a Professor of Law at National Law School of India University, Bengaluru