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Hello and welcome to this episode of "ArtsAbly in Conversation."
My name is Diane Kolin.
This series presents artists, academics, and project leaders who dedicate their
time and energy to a better accessibility for people with disabilities in the arts.
You can find more of these conversations on our website, artsably.com
which is spelled A-R-T-S-A-B-L-Y dot com.
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Today, ArtsAbly is in conversation with Dr. Tekla Babyak,
independent scholar with a PhD in musicology from Cornell University
and disability activist.
She fights for the fuller participation
of independent scholars in academic activities with a special interest
in disability accommodation needs for authors.
You can find the links and resources mentioned by Tekla Babyak during
the interview on ArtsAbly's website in the blog section.
I am today with Tekla Babyak and Tekla is an independent musicologist
with a PhD in musicology from Cornell University.
She's also a disability activist and she does
a very interesting and necessary advocacy for - advocacy work
for disabled scholars and also for independent scholars.
Thank you for being here today, Tekla.
Thank you so much, Diane, for interviewing me and for this extremely
important work that you're doing with ArtsAbly.
Thank you.
So your work has been very
strong in terms of advocacy for disabled scholars and independent scholars.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
Yeah. A big part of my work is advocating
for anxiety disorders to be more fully accommodated in academia because my main
MS symptom is a disabling fear of criticism caused by neurological damage.
To advocate for this awareness, I publicly self advocate for my own access needs.
When I give conference presentations,
I make an announcement, or if I'm not feeling particularly brave
that day, I ask the session chair to make an announcement,
requesting extra sensitivity and even compliments from the audience.
And this is not only to put myself at ease, but also as activism to normalize
the idea of anxiety in professional spaces.
And you are very active in various groups in academia, right?
I am. It's important for me to bring
my disability centered, unaffiliated perspective into various groups.
I am the secretary for the American Musicological Society Music and Disability Study Group,
and it's a great honor to serve alongside my brilliant colleagues there.
I'm also on the accessibility committee
for the Society for Music theory, and I am a delegate assembly member
representing disability in the profession for the Modern Language Association.
So I have all these various affiliations
through those groups that keep me visible as a disabled, independent scholar.
Very good. It is important because these groups represent a diversity of -
of individuals with their perspectives and with their access needs.
So it is very important what you're doing.
Thank you.
I wondered if you could talk about what brought you to musicology.
I started music as a piano player as a young child, and it gradually developed
into more of an interest in the historical context and the analysis of music.
And that's what led me to pursue an undergraduate degree in music
and ultimately a graduate degree in musicology at Cornell.
And it's really been the sort of philosophical,
historical, theoretical underpinning of music that has
been this ongoing source of enchantment for me.
And you work mostly, if I'm right, in the 19th century area, right?
Yeah, I do.
I call myself a canon crip because I'm a disabled person. Crip as a kind of term
of reclaiming, who works mainly on the european musical canon.
And I'm especially interested
in Beethoven, Brahms, and Liszt. As I know you are yourself, Diane.
I am, yes.
Thank you.
And I would love to know more about these
works that you've been doing about Beethoven and Brahms, for example, and Liszt.
Can you give us some examples of articles that you've published?
I recently published an article
in the journal 19th century Music titled Living forever on earth,
philosophies of temporal eternity in Beethoven's opus 110 and 132.
And I'm discussing how those pieces have
a kind of alternating structure in various movements where they switch between
expressions of despair and expressions of hope and recovery.
So it's perhaps representing this desire to continually keep on recovering
and renewing oneself, as if the body could potentially live
eternally on earth in this fantasy that's being proposed by the music.
That's my very philosophical, interpretive reading.
Perhaps not everybody would agree.
And this is in what journal?
19th Century Music, right?
Yeah, that's the name of the journal, and it's the latest issue, fall 2023.
So go ahead and download it.
By reading and citing my work,
you will all be contributing to disability inclusion.
I will probably publish
on ArtsAbly's website, links to these articles
because I think that's going very well with the discussion today.
And also, I'm pretty sure that
those who are watching or listening to this podcast would love to read your work.
Wonderful. Thank you so much.
I really appreciate being able to uplift
my contributions as a disabled independent scholar.
So speaking of being a disabled independent scholar,
when you are proposing an article or a book chapter to an editor
or to a journal, I know you are trying to get these
journals to improve their access needs for scholars with disabilities.
Can you talk about this work? Yeah.
Thank you so much for that great question.
I personally have access needs for submitting my work.
I need the editors and reviewers to be extra supportive and mindful of my
MS related anxiety disorder, so I self advocate for those needs.
Whenever I submit my work, I often refuse to submit until I get
a firm promise from the editor that they will honor my access needs,
and my advocacy goes beyond just my own personal needs.
I'm advocating for scholarly journals to offer disability accommodation forms
where authors could indicate their access needs and make requests as part of their
submission, which would reduce some of the stress and labor around
figuring out who to contact and always trying to navigate access in the scholarly
publishing system, which currently is not really set up for disabled authors.
So you already replied a little bit,
but I wanted to dig more into the concept of accessibility and access needs
in artistic fields because in scholarly journals we all have this common issue.
But accessibility in the arts is something
that is rarely talked about, and I wonder if you have a say on that topic.
Thank you. That is such an important topic,
and I really love the work that ArtsAbly is doing for that.
I'll speak only to the issue of anxiety disorders,
because that's where I have the most lived experience as a disabled person.
It seems that the whole system is very
inaccessible for performers with anxiety disorders.
There's often no guarantee that the audience is going to applaud very much.
There might be reviewers in the audience,
music critics who would write negative reviews.
People might not come up to you afterwards to congratulate you.
There's an enormous amount of stress
in playing a gig when you have a disabling anxiety disorder.
I think for enhanced accessibility, and this is very much a utopian dream,
that might not be realistic, but it would be wonderful to maybe be able
to get promises from the reviewers that they won't write anything negative,
and to make a request to the audience, even to have maybe some arts
administrators make requests to the audience through email asking them
to applaud extra hard for such and such a performer because of their disabling
anxiety disorder or asking the audience members to please come backstage if they
are able to, to congratulate the performer afterwards.
I think that kind of infrastructure would
really support disabled performers much more robustly for anxiety disorders.
That's very important, I think,
for people who are administrating or managing artistic
institution or organizations who are willing to improve their rules or
who are willing to welcome performers with disabilities, they don't necessarily know.
So until we are approaching them and we
are talking with them and saying, I would suggest this or this or this.
So actually, it would be interesting
to work on a suggestion list for these theaters.
I'm just thinking out loud right now.
I love that idea.
Yeah, definitely.
Because as you say, it's not always about resistance to disability needs.
Sometimes it's just that the administrators don't know,
and I think that we need to be hopeful about the potential for educating them.
Totally. Yeah.
So thank you for that great idea.
I would love to contribute the anxiety ideas to the suggestion list.
I will keep that in mind. [Laugh.]
I have a question about what you're doing right now.
Are you working on a particular project?
Do you have anything to spotlight that you
would like the people who are listening to this podcast to know?
Thanks for this opportunity to plug my project.
My current obsession is something that I call invitational pedagogy.
It's the idea of inviting disabled
independent scholars to give guest lectures.
The job market is so inaccessible for many disabled candidates,
it seems this is the only way to get disabled speakers in the classroom,
kind of through the back door for now as invited guest lecturers,
and they could be paid through the department honorarium funds.
And this could hopefully open the front door
to disability centered hiring practices once the groundwork has been
established through having a series of disabled guest speakers.
And do you have plans on future
conferences that you are intending to present these ideas?
I will be presenting these ideas
at the international conference for 19th century Studies in the UK.
I don't know yet if I'm going to go in person.
It depends on whether I get a travel grant, but if not, then it'll be on Zoom
and I'll be discussing the importance of bringing in disabled guest speakers.
And at some point I would love to create
some kind of database where disabled independent scholars could sign up
and then faculty members could use that as a resource when deciding whom to invite.
And this is a conference that we as auditors can watch online too?
I think so, but there is a registration fee of something like 100 pounds,
so I wouldn't necessarily want to pressure anybody to register to hear my talk.
I do have some similar kinds of ideas
in my humanities commons deposits on my website.
Very good. So I will link the website too.
Thank you. Thank you.
That's really helpful to have the links.
I would like to talk about inspirations.
So if you had one person,
one artist with disability, or one person active in the fields
of intersection between disability and the arts, who inspired you, who would that be?
I know it's a bit of a cliche, but it would be Beethoven.
And it's not only because of his deafness,
it's also because of his string quartet in a minor, Opus 132,
one of the pieces in my article
where its third movement alternates between two sections.
One says Holy Song of thanks from a convalescent to the Godhead.
The other section says feeling new strength.
And the sections keep switching back and forth, so the music is embracing
these fluctuations in health as part of the human experience.
It's a very affirmative idea of disability.
You get sick, but then you might get better, and then you might get sick again.
It's not linear and we could love it and appreciate that process.
Very good.
I'm very glad that Beethoven is your inspiration source.
I tend to believe that it's a bit of mine, too. [Laughs.]
That's wonderful to hear.
I felt a little bit self conscious about not having anybody alive today when
there's so many of my colleagues who are doing amazing work.
But here I am going back to the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
I'm sure everybody is fine with that.
[Laughs.]
Thank you so much.
Any last words for the auditors of how to -
how to dig more into these topics that you are speaking of?
I would encourage everybody to maintain
open communication about disability as much as you're comfortable doing so.
If you have access needs,
share those with others to the extent that you feel comfortable and safe doing it.
Ask others about what their access needs might be,
and through this kind of disability centered communication,
we can build accessible spaces for each other.
Thank you so much, Tekla,
for this conversation, and I wish you all the best for all your projects.
Thank you so much, Diane, for these wonderful questions
and for the inspirational work that you are doing with ArtsAbly.
I look forward to continuing to follow this incredible company.
Thank you.
Take care.
You too. Bye.
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