High-profile shootings and student suicides have made mental health issues on college campuses a major national issue. College students are usually the focus of this conversation, while little attention beyond anecdotal accounts has been paid to faculty with mental health issues. In response to this lack of broad-scale research, a first-of-its-kind cross-institutional survey of faculty with mental disabilities was conducted. Respondents self-identified as faculty with mental disabilities, mental illness or mental-health histories. Results from 267 respondents indicated that nearly 70% had no or limited familiarity with accommodations, and even fewer used them (87%). A majority of respondents (62%) disclosed to at least one person on campus, primarily colleagues (50%) and department chairs (21%). Respondents felt most supported by spouses/significant others (75% very or extremely supported) and friends (51%) rather than colleagues (29%) and supervisors (25%). In our discussion of these findings, we offer suggestions for practice that will improve environments, rather than focusing on case-by-case "fixes" for those who disclose. We also suggest directions for further research into this topic, which is frequently mentioned (in both scholarly and popular publications) but rarely investigated systematically or on a wide scale.
In this article, written in a combination of collaborative and singular voices, we tell the stories of shaping an interdependent crip methodology while conducting a qualitative interview study with 33 disabled faculty members. Our central argument is that disability crips methodology. In other words, centering disability from the beginning of a research project, and committing to collective access, reveal specific ways that disability changes the assumptions and outcomes that ordinarily characterize-or are assumed to characterize-research situations. To illuminate those specific ways, we focus on three dimensions of qualitative research that emerged as particularly important to our interdependent methodology: time, gaze, and emotion. We've stressed reliability and significance. We've omitted the first person in (some of) our reports. We've toed (some of) the lines. KeywordsIn saying this, we don't mean we're complicit with ableist or otherwise reductive methodologies; on the contrary, we have learned a great deal about the creativity and grace required for activities such as conducting statistical analyses. But we have been steering away from speaking through first-person stories, because the audiences we've been working to persuade tend to listen to different kinds of language, a different understanding of how data signify.Ironically, at the same time that we've been arguing for the broad significance and (to a degree) generalizability of our work, we've been diving deep into individuals' stories. At this moment (summer 2016), we are in the final stages of data-gathering for an interview study with disabled faculty. With 33 interviews complete, we are saturated in stories. And we're bursting with our own stories, too, because we've learned that two disabled researchers conducting a collaborative interview study with disabled faculty is anything but simple. In other words, when disability is assumed to be an important part of the qualitative interview situation (rather than something external that "enters" the situation and then must be accommodated or compensated for), the interview's normative framework is both exposed and challenged. Crucially, our choices as researchers are not simply an effort to make the interview Price & Kerschbaum, "Stories of Methodology" CJDS 5.3 (October 2016) 21 space more "inclusive" by retrofitting previous interview methodologies. Rather, they compose a process of cripping the interview space itself-restructuring it and reconsidering the power dynamics that give rise to its normative structure.Our methodology draws upon grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006;Strauss and Corbin, 1994), narrative analysis (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000;Wolf, 1992), and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003;Gee, 2012), as well as the disability-studies researchers who have preceded us. Bringing together these approaches gave us some structure to work with. For example, we began as most grounded-theory projects do, with an open-coding process, through which themes emerged as we repeatedly revie...
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