Article 17: Motherscholars with Disabilities: Surmounting Structural Adversity During COVID-19

Barriers for those with disabilities have existed before the COVID-19 outbreak, despite efforts to create equitable working environments and accessible accommodations. During the pandemic, however, existing barriers to equitable workplaces and accessibility support have been exacerbated for one of the largest, overlooked minority populations, with 1 in 4 people having some form of disability (CDC 2020). While the individual lives of people with disabilities are greatly impacted in their personal and professional environments, these issues exist on a systemic basis. The Social Model of Disability (SMD) posits that there are social and environmental structures that are oppressive to those who have disabilities (Samaha 2007). Examples of barriers that individuals with disabilities face can be physical and environmental (e.g., lack of building access for wheelchair users), organizational (e.g., legislation), information-accessible (e.g., lack of closed captioning and/or American Sign Language (ASL) for someone with hearing loss), or attitudinal (e.g., discrimination). When the COVID-19 pandemic caused universities to shut down and swiftly switch to new teaching modalities, academics with disabilities were met with new challenges that they had not encountered before, such as, but not limited to: missing or faulty captioning in virtual meetings (McKee, Moran, and Zazove 2020), limited visualization of facial expressions with opaque mask-wearing (Saunders, Jackson, and Visram, 2020), and inadequate screening for those with previous mental health issues (Pfefferbaum and North 2020). Even when these options are made available, the burden is often placed on the individual with a disability by, for example, jumping through administrative hoops or paying out of pocket for services that should be existent in the first place.