♪ Opening theme music ♪
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.
♪ Theme music ♪
Today, ArtsAbly is in conversation with Elizabeth McLain, an assistant professor
of Musicology and Director of Disability Studies at Virginia Tech.
You can find the resources mentioned by Elizabeth McLain during this episode
on ArtsAbly's website in the blog section.
Welcome to this new episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation.
Today, I am with Elizabeth McLain, who is Assistant Professor
of Musicology and Director of Disability Studies at Virginia Tech.
Welcome, Elizabeth.
Thanks. Thank you for having me.
Thank you for taking the time in your busy schedule.
I know you are very, very busy.
Yeah, thanks for working around that.
I really need to work on my schedule.
It's a bit much.
I always like to know a little bit more about my guests.
I wanted to know a bit about your background, who you are,
what made you start in music, things like that,
How I got started in music.
I grew up in a family where music was very important,
but it wasn't anyone's day job.
So all of my family members played brass instruments, and they did it just for fun,
but I was the first one to want to go to music school and pursue that.
I was working on a degree in trumpet performance
when more of my disabilities manifested.
I'm autistic, but didn't really get a formal diagnosis until my 20s.
I also have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which causes all of my joints to dislocate
when they want to, among other fun things.
When I was in undergrad,
I think my second into my third year,
my ribs started dislocating while I was playing trumpet, especially
when I was playing piccolo trumpet, which requires just a lot more force.
It was very confusing for doctors.
They didn't immediately catch that that's what was happening, and it still took,
I mean, almost another decade to know why it was happening.
In fact, if I hadn't gotten the autism diagnosis, I don't know
if I would have gotten the diagnosis for Ehlers-Danlos syndromes.
And these two things seem to both correlate with each other.
If you have one, you're more likely to have the other,
but also the other way around.
So on top of just asthma and other things that were putting pressure
on my lungs and on my rib cage, very clearly this became
not a viable career path, let me put it that way.
I explored orchestral conducting for a while, which I liked
and I think I was pretty good at.
But after going on some auditions, I realized that the path
to get there was just odd.
It was very much based on personal charisma, and there's a lot
of obstacles to navigate.
I was used to the sexism from being a trumpet player
where women are still a minority.
But it really did not seem like a viable path in terms of,
Oh, if I put the work into it, I will end up being able to make a living off of it.
It was a lot more confusing than that, and especially with my health falling apart,
I didn't know if I could count on it.
I met a professor, his name is Michael Saffle,
at Virginia Tech, where I did my undergrad.
And he just needed a research assistant to work on a book about Liszt
and some letters between Liszt and D'Agoult.
And I could step in and help with my background in French.
And that's when I learned that I was musicologist.
It just seemed to fit.
A lot of the skills that I had, whether it was learning different languages or
I had been also working on a bachelor's in history the whole way along
and things like that, everything fell into place.
So then I did my graduate work at the University of Michigan,
where as I acquired more of mobility disability side to my chronic health
disabilities and really got the name for why my brain was so different and why
I was struggling, got that autism diagnosis
I became involved in disability organizing first at the local level,
things that needed to get done at the University of Michigan,
and bringing the knowledge I had and the knowledge I was gaining every day
to the the School of Music, Theater and Dance.
I don't want to forget Theater and Dance just because I'm not talented in either.
But the School of Music, Theater and Dance at the University of Michigan,
Musicology Department.
It was a gradual thing.
I was doing a lot more on the activism side than getting into pedagogy.
It took many years before I realized that disability was infiltrating my research.
I came to Virginia Tech in 2019 to be an instructor full-time
while I was finishing up my dissertation.
That timing will probably bring a lot of bells for folks because then the pandemic
hit and everything became a lot trickier.
But I finished up and defended my dissertation
and graduated in August of 2022.
I defended my dissertation, I think
it was less than a week before I had major surgery
to have a spinal fusion, and I had to do all of my revisions and all of the submission
and paperwork and stuff in the first week that I was out of the hospital for that.
So it's a bit of a blur, but it's very nice to have it done.
I'm very grateful to Mark Clague and everybody else at Michigan
that helped me cross the finish line.
So yeah, this year I started as my new role, as you mentioned,
Assistant Professor of Musicology in the School of Performing Arts
in the College of Architecture, Arts and Design here at Virginia Tech.
But then I'm also Director of Disability Studies in the Academy of
Transdisciplinary Studies in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences.
That's a lot to say.
I did it without notes this time, so I'm very proud of myself.
Yeah, that's a bit of how I got from where I was to here, I guess.
Yeah, and which explains the busy schedule.
Yes.
I'm straddling two colleges, two units, two completely different lives.
Frankly, learning about disability studies as I go, I didn't have access
to being able to take classes in disability studies.
And that's not unusual.
A lot of professors of disability studies have to add this knowledge on
after they're done with their coursework.
So I do my best to read one chapter, one article in the realm
of disability studies, but also disability activism and arts and all
of that, disability culture every day.
And I fail a lot of times, but I do succeed a lot of times.
I'm hoping eventually - my lived experience is at one level, and I'm
hoping the academic knowledge to talk about it, they'll meet soon.
That's my hope.
But you're also the co-chair of the Music and Disability Study Group
at the American Musicology Society?
I was until recently.
I did step down last year, which was a year early, and
that's why it looks like I still am.
I stepped on a year early because my co-chair, James Deaville, and I
had talked about the need for the co-chairs to overlap
so that we don't lose two at the same time.
Because I had such a busy schedule and so many research projects going,
I offered to be the one to step down first.
But I'm really proud of the work that we did there.
It was wonderful to be able to step down and walk away and know that
everything I wanted for the group
was going to manifest with or without me.
We'd made several gains, but I could just see the that we're on and I think
bringing new energy in has been really helpful in continuing that.
This group is really fantastic.
It's really a good group of people
who really are activists in their field,
try to make things happen, you including.
I'm really happy to have been able to work with this group also and with
different people from this group.
I think you can be really proud of what you've accomplished in that.
Yeah, my big goals for the group, I love seeing that they're happening
even when I'm on the sidelines.
Making sure that we're collaborating with people from different fields,
centering the experience of disabled artists, which may sound like
a no-brainer, but when you're in this work, it's very common for stuff to slide
into music studies of disability.
We're talking about disabled composers or disabled performers performers
or whatever, but we're not really applying a disability studies lens.
And a lot of times, maybe the people studying it aren't themselves disabled
or aren't in community or don't have that background.
And there's a lot of great work that falls into that category
that I use every day, and I love.
It's fantastic work.
But I wanted to make sure we were growing this segment of music studies
surrounding disability that really was bringing disability studies to the table and
trying to find ways in which our academic work could have a real-world impact.
So, yeah, it's been really cool to watch the group do that.
I go on record all the time, so I'm not afraid of doing it here,
that I'm very disappointed in the lack of access in our society,
in the American Musicological Society.
I think we've actually taken some steps backward
when it comes to access in recent years.
And that's the one thing that I'm nervous about.
It's not the future of the group.
It's whether people like me can continue to be a part
of this society, whether this society will continue to serve us or let us serve them even,
or if one day we end up either needing to strike off on our own
or find another organization like the Society for American Music or RAMPD
or something like that that we can take this fantastic work to.
Yeah. And recently, there has been conversation about someone we know that who is part
of a group and who had to step down from presenting because there were a lot
of access needs that were not met.
And so it's sad.
Especially when you see a smaller society like the Society for Music Theory
offering a significant amount of their programming online, not just for
people who have gone through this onerous accommodation process, but for everyone.
I love the curb-cut effect, and it's an example of that, where disabled people
needed to be able to access the society remotely for presenting and for attending.
But doing that also benefited parents of young children who couldn't travel,
people who are in employment situations where they're not getting any funding
for traveling or they can't get their teaching covered.
It ends up helping a wide range of people, including people who are part
of our society but can no longer travel to the US with visa restrictions
or all sorts of things like that.
The fact that, again, a smaller society like SMT has been able to accomplish it,
I feel like that should be an example for AMS.
Although when it comes to curb cuts, I'm…
This is completely off topic, but I'm having a lot of frustrating feelings.
When we're taping this, it is a week after the US election.
I was thinking about the fact that when we talk about disability and access,
this idea of curb cuts as a metaphor, the fact that when you give disabled people
access, many people benefit from it.
Coming from when we've had to retrofit sidewalks to have that little cut
in the curb so you can go up there in a wheelchair,
well, that's also going to help people pushing around grocery carts
or strolers or just all sorts of folks.
The thing that makes me furious about curb cuts is when disabled people fight
for them alone, and then they benefit everyone, and then disabled people
have to fight to keep them because we're always in danger of losing our access.
It's Anita Cameron who reminds minds everyone.
You have to fight for your rights and then fight to keep them.
You can't let off the pressure.
But then on top of that, there are times when it feels like in the United States,
we're gearing up for a lot more fights.
We're gearing up to try to keep Medicaid.
We're gearing up to try to keep access to our health care,
a lot of things that have been threatened.
And it's been infuriating to see people I know who benefited
from the work disabled activists did, from disability legislation.
I mean everything from caps on Insulin to the Americans with Disabilities Act
to infrastructure changes like curb cuts.
And not only are they not in the fight with us, but they try to tell us
everything's going to be okay because they've never had to fight for
this thing that they take for granted. So I don't know.
When I think about curb cuts, I think about the fact that that should produce
more solidarity with disabled people.
And instead, too often it's interpreted as, Okay, we can give you
this cookie because it will also benefit benefit other people.
I don't know if that makes sense.
Yeah, it makes sense.
Yeah, I've been perseverating on it a little bit.
But in a way, we are both part of an organization called the RAMPD
that you mentioned briefly, and RAMPD is doing
that work inside the music community.
I wanted to know a little bit about your arrival to RAMPD
and your work with people in RAMPD.
Yeah, I came into RAMPD.
I was not in the founding cohort, but I think fairly quickly,
definitely within the first year.
It was Gaelynn Lea, who's one of the cofounders of RAMPD, as you know,
who really encouraged me to join.
It's a little interesting.
Unlike you, I'm not currently performing as a musician.
At first, I thought, Well, this isn't quite for me.
I'm happy to support it, but it's really only for artists.
It really hasn't been the case, though.
I've had the good fortune at Virginia Tech.
My colleague Ashley Shew and I, and some other folks here
and at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte,
received a grant from the Mellon Foundation for what we're
calling a Disability Community Technology Center that's really trying to bring
disability culture and arts and folks that talk about
disability justice to Appalachia.
Working with RAMPD, it's been fantastic to then be able
to connect with artists and start building these residency programs, which
have been delayed significantly because we've lacked accessible infrastructure
when it comes to venues, especially.
We had to put things on hold and then try to get venue problems
fixed and raise funds for that and then find alternate venues.
Now we're gearing back up.
But it's been really nice developing that project in partnership
with all of the folks at RAMPD who are doing this work.
I've been able to serve mostly on the membership committee.
I think I was on PR for a hot minute and then jumped over to membership
or engagement is what we call it.
But a lot of the stuff we're dealing with is membership, and then some of them planning.
I had the opportunity to speak to the National Independent Venue Federation
a while back, I think almost a year ago now, about trying to improve
accessibility for their venues and ways that you can do it, even on a low budget.
I was able to go to the White House with some folks from RAMPD.
There have been a lot of terrific opportunities.
So much of it is just community building.
I'm hoping that in the coming years, we can build up even more on the side
of people who are behind the line,
academics, industry professionals,
because I think right now there's a lot of burden on artists to run everything.
That can be really tricky because they have tour schedules and their lives
are just a little less predictable than those of us who are fortunate
to have more or less a 9:00 to 5:00.
I'd like to get a lot more of us represented there.
Yes. And there is a new musicologist also right now who is also a performer,
but it's nice to see that We are more and more to consider, Okay,
let's join that and try to work on the connections and the community.
Absolutely.
I think a lot of folks end up feeling like they're alone.
We're also pushed to speak on things
as experts that we're not 100% experts in.
This is something I've only been thinking about a lot in the past year.
How often disabled folks go from diagnosis or realizing they're disabled
or identifying as disabled to having to speak for the community and being treated
as an expert on accessibility.
And then all of the education you might lack while you're trying to do that,
like you just kind of...
Now I'm thinking about the fact that there are a ton of us.
We can specialize.
We can share opportunities around.
We don't have to carry that alone because that pressure to be the ambassador
for disabled musicians or disability in the arts or to say that,
Yes, I can solve all of your accessibility in the arts.
I mean, that's how questions, that's how we get burn out.
Whereas RAMPD is increasingly, I think, and I hope,
helping us see that no one of us has to be an expert on everything.
We can work together, we can move together, where we can build
the world that we want to see together.
Yes.
Recently, Lachi has organized a meeting to explain to pro members
what is the social model of disability,
what are - What is a possibility of
talking about people with disabilities?
What are things that we hear in our society all the time
and that bother us, but why?
It was a one-hour conversation.
She presented things and then she launched the conversation.
It was very nice to have that because, one, it's important.
Two, some people who just joined the community and say, Okay, so I'm now
part of the big family of musicians or performers with disabilities.
Now what?
Exactly. Just being disabled or being autistic doesn't mean that you know anything.
I've been autistic my whole life.
It took me a long time to really understand that.
But even after getting a diagnosis, it's like, Okay, Go on your way.
And of course, the person who diagnosed me, it was a horrible process.
He just told me to go on the Autism Speaks website.
That was the only resource he gave me.
That was the only follow-up.
And I was moving to France for a research year.
To compound it further, I also ended up with an emergency surgery
in Roanoke, Virginia, when I was visiting my brother.
It was a nightmare time.
But I'm just in France by myself, trying to do my archival work
and function in a different language.
And...
Oh, yeah, you're also autistic. What on earth does that mean?
It wasn't until I came back from France, and I joined a support group that
I think it was supposed to be very much led by someone at our counseling center
at the University of Michigan.
But the autistics just took over every single week.
She was so sweet. She's wonderful.
She'd come in and she'd have a plan agenda, and she'd distribute poker chips
that had a specific meaning.
So we had some nonverbal communication.
And then we would just do whatever we wanted to do every week.
And she let us.
She did let us guide it.
So it turned more into, She has a plan if we don't have one,
and then we just took off.
But anyway, that's where I met a friend of mine named Luke Kudryashov, who's now
at the University of Minnesota as an accessibility specialist.
And Luke really brought me in and helped me understand
how to survive as an autistic adult and what I was experiencing
and connect me with community.
I think when people are trying to learn more about disability,
if you're on social media or you're looking at going to a presentation,
there are some questions you have to ask yourself.
All disabled people can speak about their own experience.
That is true.
But the minute we go beyond our own experience, you do have
to wonder what our credentials are.
And it's not just professional training.
I could get a psychology degree, but that doesn't actually mean
that I know much about mental health-related disabilities.
The thing that I'm really interested in is who is in community with other people?
Because either I'm speaking about my autistic experience
or I am able to start pointing towards, You should read this person.
This person says this.
This is how it's different from what I hear to be autistic.
And there are some great people who are Indigenous and autistic.
I learned so much from them on social media.
Folks who are Black and autistic.
Autistic parents of autistic kids are some of my favorites in the universe
because they just understand things much more holistically than the rest of us.
So yeah, checking out and seeing, is this person in community with other people?
Are they reading and referencing other stuff?
It's funny because in one sense... Okay, yeah.
Common sense. Of course, we know to do that.
But on the other, we almost never do.
It's really tricky.
But yeah, that being in community part of RAMPD is really important.
I think the fact that we're continuing to educate each other
and learn about these things, yeah, that can only help.
For sure.
Well, we talked a little bit about that, but what is it for you,
what does it mean for you to be in an environment that promotes accessibility
in the arts or disability culture?
The most important thing for me is if disabled people are in charge.
I think I used to be a lot more forgiving about this, but now
that is almost my bare minimum.
My armor is up, and I almost assume that I'm not going to be included.
If I see disabled people not just with a seat at the table,
but a position of power.
Because a seat at the table without power or agency is tokenism,
as Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha tells us, in care work.
I hope I didn't butcher that.
I love them, so I apologize if I did.
But that idea is definitely in there.
Accessibility for me is not just being able to get into a space, it's being able
to have agency and power in that space and being able to transform it.
So are they advertising in advance what access they do have?
And are they providing a way for you to ask about other access you need?
I think that's really important to me.
Disability culture is something that...
I have a class called Disability Culture and the Arts that I teach every year.
It's very, very important to me.
When I say disability culture, it's important to know it's not a monolith.
You're trying to talk about an aggregate knowing that every individual within it
probably doesn't fit whatever definition you come up with, and that we have
subcultures based on types of disability, but also on how disability intersects with
things like race and gender, because
although ableism, and sexism, and racism, transphobia,
all of are interlocking and interdependent systems of oppression.
They all reinforce each other.
They all shape your experiences.
The way I experience ableism as a white autistic woman is going to be
different than a black trans autistic woman, for example.
But disability culture, to me, it's about the things that we care about.
It's about how we understand ourselves.
In some sense, it's the language that we use.
I think increasingly values associated with disability justice
are playing a bigger and bigger role in how we understand disability culture.
Not that everyone's informed on the topic, but a lot of things that are articulated
in the principles of disability justice, like interdependence
and intersectionality.
A lot of these things come out of that culture that we've created.
It tends to be a culture that prioritizes care and that understands
the value value of everyone, no matter what they can and can't contribute.
It's still a culture that's problematic and exclusionary because it exists
in the framework of other cultures.
But I think it's often at its best,
it's a space of trust where you don't feel any shame
for having needs and where people will help you get those needs met.
I think a lot about fictional characters when I teach my students, in part
because I don't want to call out real living human beings if I don't have to.
I'm going to have to update my references, though, because they're already getting too old.
But I think about in Parks and Rec, the character of Ron Swanson, who was
cutting down a tree and making a he knew and paddling in himself,
he still spent this tiny amount of money, like less than $50 a year buying clothes
because he couldn't make clothes.
He was still driving on roads other people had paved,
even if he did sometimes step in
and fix the potholes for folks.
We all have needs, and it's fairly
arbitrary which ones are acceptable
and unacceptable on a social level, which ones get met and which ones don't.
I think about the number of life skills that a lot of my friends
with intellectual disabilities have and skills that oftentimes
my non-disabled friends, especially my friends who are men, might not have.
We expect people with intellectual disabilities to be able
to cook and clean and take care of their own homes. But
grown non-disabled men, that for some reason is not the same expectation all the time.
I think disability culture is also about exposing that and about challenging that.
Yeah.
Yes. So, you mentioned you're
teaching a class about disability culture,
but you're also doing other projects.
Can you talk about some of your projects or at least one that
counts right now that you're doing?
Yeah. I'll mention one briefly, and then a lot more detail about another.
We're in the middle of putting together
an alt text music notation working group.
This is going to be really focused on European-American Western art music style
notation at first, just because that's the source material and the team
that I've been able to put together.
I I had to pause everything while I bring my graduate student worker
up to speed, getting accessibility certifications to help us
make sure all the PDFs are accessible.
But we're trying to devise a way to help
blind folks access music notation
apart from just Braille or just transcribing Braille, because there's some limitations with
the current most popular systems of Braille music notation.
So that's one thing that if you're interested in and you have time
and energy to put into it, would love to hear from you.
You can email me directly. I'm easy to find.
One of my projects, though, that's quite different and has surprised me because
was basically a footnote in a grant application, and now is
causing me to write a lot of other grant applications, is called Open the Gates Gaming
This is a project that grew out of a very local need.
Here in Southwest Virginia, during the pandemic, we had a lot of disabled folks
who wanted to play Dungeons & Dragons.
Dungeons & Dragons is the most popular tabletop role-playing game in the world.
It's not even close.
It's a little embarrassing how much of the market share they have.
But it exploded in popularity during the pandemic, again, thanks to being shown
on television, like with Stranger Things on Netflix, or
the fact that you could play it on Zoom, so you didn't have to be in the same room to play.
And there were all these digital tools being created like D&D Beyond
and stuff like that that helped people play it online and helped get players going.
But it's also a system that has a huge cognitive load.
It's, unfortunately, a subculture that historically has been quite exclusive.
I know as a woman, I didn't get into this hobby for a long time because
if I had to go to a gaming store and play with strange men,
I was often just subjected to a lot of sexism or shady behavior, and I wasn't included.
I think people of color have experienced much worse here.
But it also has a lot of progressive,
radically inclusive potential.
There's no reason that we can't all play together.
It's a game that develops a lot of empathy because you're creating a character
and stepping into their shoes for hours, but sometimes years, if not decades.
There are games that have been going on for decades,
which is wild to think about.
The local disability community wanted to play, and they didn't just want us
to create a separate set of roles so they could play by themselves
or to play different games because there are other games like D&D
that are much more cognitively accessible.
Kids on Bikes is wonderful.
There's a lot of great systems out there, but they wanted to play this one, and
they wanted to play it with everybody.
They didn't want a segregated table. They wanted an integrated table.
We started developing cognitive access tools to help bridge that gap,
initially with a decision guide because after you sit around a table
and after the world is explained to you,
the person running the game will look at you and say, What do you want to do?
And you can do anything.
You can say that you want to jump off of a cliff.
You can say that you want to open a pottery studio.
You can try to seduce a goblin.
Anything you can try to do in this game.
But that by itself can actually become an obstacle.
So our decision guide was just prompting players.
Here are questions you can ask or things you can think about
to help focus them in.
We also created spell cards because the magic system is really complicated.
So we created easier reference spell cards in larger print that had information
presented in a standardized way.
And we made a class selector, a tool that helps you build your character
because building the character is often enough to scare people off.
It's a huge, complex process with books that have hundreds of pages.
So we tried to simplify that and make it storytelling from the beginning.
It was so exciting for people that the demand for what
we were doing skyrocketed.
And once we started trying to implement these three tools,
we realized we needed other stuff.
Now we're making videos that explain concepts in
social media length, 90 seconds or less.
Here's what the concept is, and here's an example of people actually
playing with that concept.
They're multiple actors at a table with the dice, with all the things.
We also have a sample adventure now, so you'll be able
to watch an entire session, so you know what to expect before you go
if you really want to do this.
We have ability cards, and we also have character sheets.
Our group eventually coalesced a couple of years ago around
this name, Open the Gates Gaming, because there's another side of it
that is creating more inclusive stories.
It's not just this fantasy realm built around around what European cis-het,
able-bodied white men would want.
We're trying to open up other stories, like other realms of storytelling, other possibilities
around disability and race and gender and sexual orientation.
An idea for us is that play is a human right, and yet
it's something that's denied to a lot of people.
We believe that everyone is a storyteller, but not everyone is having the chance
to tell their stories, that systems need to be flexible to be accessible.
We're pulling that all together to then create these open access tools.
We are in the last stages of prototype development.
We'll be doing play testing in early 2025, and everyone that comes and play tests with us
gets free custom dice that have our logo on them.
They're very cute.
But this will all be open access.
We have a website, openthegatesgaming.org.
If you mess up and say, openthegatesgaming.com, it will redirect you.
So just minimal pressure there.
And we're on social media, although we're just slowly building those channels.
So we'll be releasing stuff as it's ready.
Currently, it's all 2014 rules because that's the set we can work with
where the free rules are published and on a Creative Commons license,
and we won't upset anybody at Hasbro or Wizards of the Ghost.
But it's been a really cool project because I've been able
to see that cognitive accessibility crosses so many barriers.
I mean, one of our most popular demographics now is parents,
people who don't get a lot of I am off in a way to just
be separate from the kids and do something fun.
So they don't want to spend the whole night just learning some rules.
They want to get in and play.
But we're also seeing a rise in a need for this, even from experienced players
after COVID, because long COVID often has a lot of neurological manifestations.
So we've got things for experienced players and new players, and we have
a commitment that it is always going to be open access, free for everyone to use.
Our team...
Everyone in our team has a reason why they would not have been able to
get past the gatekeeping, but we've all been able to leverage some aspect
of our privilege enough to get inside.
So now we're trying to kick Open the Gates from the inside to let everybody in.
Wow, it's a fascinating project.
Yeah, it's a lot.
It's not where I thought I was going to be.
I never thought I was going to be doing this, but it's really, really cool.
We will share all these links on ArtsAbly so that people can have a look.
It's great.
I also read somewhere that if we want to challenge you with another game,
which is the Star Wars game, if we fight with you, we will lose.
Is that right?
Probably. I don't know.
I mean, there are some people that get really into the mechanics of the ships
that will lose me for a second.
But I have been a deeply devoted Star Wars fan from my earliest memories.
I love Star Wars.
In fact, the very first tabletop role-playing game
I played was a Star Wars one.
It was the Fantasy Flight Edge of the Empire.
Yeah, Star Wars is the best.
And I am one of those people... I love The Last Jedi.
This is going to get you hate, but that's engagement, right?
The Last Jedi is one of the best Star Wars movies ever made,
and I think people are going to get there.
You got to remember, people hated Empire Strakes back when
and now it's universally held up as one of, if not the best.
I think The Last Jedi is the same way.
People were disappointed because they had ideas of what it should be,
and it wasn't those things.
But I love Star Wars and this age of Star Wars storytelling we're getting in.
That's far more inclusive, far more people's stories.
It's not just Joseph Campbell's monolith anymore.
Yeah, it's a really exciting time.
Fortunately, we learn a lot from the Andor show.
That's all I'm going to say a week after the election.
Sorry, I didn't get that.
The Andor show, it's from the early days of the Rebellion.
It's got some of the best acting, writing, directing.
Even if you don't know anything about Star Wars, it's on Disney+,
but Andor is a good one to watch.
It's intense, though.
It's the most intense of any of them.
It's the only one I don't have my niece's nephew's watch right now.
But whoever, somebody behind the scenes did their work
on what resistance movements are like.
As somebody who wrote a dissertation set in 1930s France and was following
some people's stories into the '40s, it's intense.
Well, I have a last question for you.
Apart from George Lucas, who were
the people who really motivated you
to work in your field right now?
If you had some people to think of who really counted in your career,
who would it be and why?
I think there's a lot of folks that I could name here.
The big caveat is this is what's popping in my head in this moment.
And if I don't mention you, it's just because my brain
is not great on the spot sometimes.
I think about the fact that I would not have the job I have
or be doing what I'm doing if it wasn't for Andrew Dell’Antonio.
I know he's been on your show before.
He tends to undersell the role that he has in our community because it's
one that's a little hard to put on CVs.
But when I first started needing to use a cane all the time,
I've got my cane today.
Normally, I've got a rollator or crutches, whatever my body wants to do that day.
But when I first needed to use a cane and I realized that I couldn't
hide my disabilities anymore, I experienced a lot of ableism in graduate school.
I'm still processing that.
There are news articles about some of my professors in graduate school.
I'll leave it there.
But I experienced a lot.
When I realized I couldn't hide it anymore,
then the question came up of, What do you want to say?
As an autistic person, I have a hard time lying or even telling half-truths.
It's all or nothing with me, usually.
But I also didn't know what the implications would be.
I reached out to Andrew Dell’Antonio because I noticed that he was
also friends with Amy Sequenzia, who's an incredibly important
non-speaking autistic person.
Amy's work is so, so important.
I cannot emphasize that enough.
But I thought that was odd.
I'm like, There's a musicologist here.
What is going on?
I reached out to Andrew, and he met up with me.
I think it was AMS in Rochester.
I was on medical leave, but I was with family in upstate New York, so I went.
And not only did he introduce me to a network of neurodivergent academics,
so not just autistics, but also people with ADHD, other things,
many of whom are not out publicly or They're out about other identities,
so they can't take the hit for being out about everything.
Me being out as an autistic person is rough.
I don't want people to ever come out because they think that they should.
You don't owe anyone anything.
Your safety and well-being is the most important.
I can be out because I'm a white, cis-het woman.
That's why I can be out. I had some privilege to leverage.
But anyway, Andrew introduced me to a lot of people who told me the truth.
I learned the good, the bad, the ugly.
I was pretty prepared, I will say, when I made the decision to be open
about this and to do this work.
Because to me, it's also really important that if you're doing disability work,
you don't need to share everything about yourself, but you do need to share
your relationship to the community, because that's an important way
for us to understand and evaluate what you're saying.
It's just a really important piece of the puzzle.
Andrew helped me think through all of those things
for a very long period of time.
And without him, I either wouldn't have been out and working in disability,
or I might have done it very wrong.
It might have been more dangerous. I wouldn't have been prepared.
I wouldn't have felt like I had a network.
And to this day, he's still just an incredibly essential part
of my support system, and I'm very, very grateful for him.
And his work also helps me understand what I wanted to do
with pedagogy in the classroom.
He's been very encouraging of a lot of my adventures.
I did make him play D&D at least once.
He played when he was a kid, but I brought it back.
I think that it's hard to underestimate how important that was.
I think about everyone who has been or is in Disability Culture
at the University of Michigan.
This is an organization that, kind of like RAMPD,
I wasn't in it at the very beginning, but I was there very near the beginning.
There are so many folks at DC@U-M, Luke Kudryashov,
Jeffrey Edelstein, Ashley Wiseman,
Solomon Furious Worlds, best name ever.
Just so many people that I met through that organization
and working together who taught me.
The first time I learned what disability justice was, it was from them.
The first time I learned to be comfortable explaining my access needs or what
access intimacy was, it was them, and their fantastic Halloween parties.
That was really, really important.
Even today, folks like Ashley Shew, for example, here at Virginia Tech,
I don't know that I would have lasted without her.
I had long phone call with her this morning, and I'm sure
we'll be texting all day.
She is marvelous, and I owe her a lot.
I think I wouldn't have gotten involved with RAMPD, if not for Gaelynn Lea.
The first time I called her, I was so star struck.
I was trying to book her for an event.
It's adorable to think about because now
she's one of my first calls after the election.
Now it feels like we're comrades in arms, but back then I was terrified of her.
Yeah, there's so many folks.
And I love that I've gotten to a point where - My Open the Gates Gaming team,
I joked to one of my student workers who is neurodivergent that
every one of my team is neurodivergent.
They just don't all know it yet.
And then it became a game of trying to spot who knew it.
That's probably a bit of an exaggeration.
But the fact that I have so many people who are different than me, but just
believe me if I need something, and then they're there for it,
that think about my access needs in advance.
I remember the first time I walked into a room and they turned off the lights
that sometimes set off my migraine, and I didn't even know that they knew that.
Just all the little things, like the fact that I have
chosen family that will be there.
It's just remarkable.
Yeah.
I should stop naming people because I'm only going to miss more and more of them.
Well, thank you so much for this time together.
It was a great conversation.
I'm sure we're going to see each other in another - one project or another.
I hope so.
I'm so excited that you're doing this because I think ArtsAbly is really
helping connect people and fill this gap that everybody has talked about,
but nobody's done something about.
I'm really glad that you're doing it.
Thank you for the opportunity and your persistence.
Even as my schedule just kept saying no, I'm glad that you kept saying yes,
so we can make it work.
Thank you.
Yeah, have a great day and talk soon.
Awesome. Thank you. Bye.
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