Research Agenda

Stories have power.

Stories can enlighten and inform. They carry meaning and cultural values. In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell (1991) describes stories as “songs of imagination” that can teach us  about [our] own life” (p. 14). Stories can also oppress and dehumanize. “Stories are surely not innocent: they always have a message”, writes Harvard professor Jerome Bruner (2002, p. 5) in Making Stories. Hegemonic narratives are societal-level stories that have the power to shape individual experiences through the construction and perpetuation of dominant ideals of what it means to be normal, appropriate, and acceptable (Davis, 2017; Lea & Corrigan, 2014). In the Western world, hegemonic narratives have been integral in the social construction of Disability as well as the related narratives of Pauperism and Social Deviance (Baynton, 2001; Foucault, 1965; Longmore & Umansky, 2001). Historically, disability - and, by extension, disabled folx - has been positioned in legal documents, state and federal-level policy, historiography, and in public discourse as the source of pauperism, sexual promiscuity, criminalism, and social deviance (Baynton, 2001; Longmore & Umansky, 2001). Academic institutions are shaped by the communities in which they are situated, and, thus, are subject to the same narratives which are integral in the shaping of the academic context, institutional policy, and practice. As part of my ongoing work as a neurodivergent (ND), critical, qualitative scholar, I use story-telling, autoethnography, and narrative inquiry in partnership with other neurodivergent students, staff, and faculty to trouble these dominant narratives and co-construct counternarratives about what disability means in the college context.

While narratives can harm and oppress, they can also heal and push back against oppressive systems. For members of the disability community, stories can create moments of shared understanding, connection, and solidarity. As a research tool, story-telling offers a methodology through which students, staff, and faculty with disabilities can illuminate their unique struggles and joys while navigating academia and engage in the process of healing collective trauma (Castrodale & Zingaro, 2015; Ellingson, 2021; McMaster & Whitburn, 2019; Rasch, 2022). My current dissertation research focus has been on applying story-telling as a methodology to better understand the meaning-making and disability identity development processes of neurodivergent (ND) college students as they navigate a large, research-intensive institution located in the Midwest. Neurodiversity as a concept arose from the Disability Rights Movement along with the emergence of disability studies (Longmore & Umansky, 2001). It was developed as a self-definition in direct opposition to historical disability narratives which stemmed from the medicalization of disability (Blume, 1998; Sinclair, 1993; Singer, 2017, 2023). Despite the term’s wide adoption and use in online communities, popular media, and academia, research regarding how students understand and make meaning of neurodiversity and apply it to make sense of their own experiences while in college remains limited. Through the use of narrative-informed inquiry, I am working with current undergraduate students who identify as neurodivergent to co-construct stories of what it means to be neurodivergent and how the concept has shaped their own meaning-making process while in college. My goal is to uplift the experiences and journeys of the students I am working with to inform the development of a sense of belonging and disability identity development model that is more reflective of the unique experiences of neurodivergent college students.

My current research trajectory is a continuation of a career spent working with other practitioner-scholars to humanize higher education. For the last seven years, much of my scholarship and advocacy efforts have been focused on informing institution-level policy and practice as colleges and universities work to attend to the needs of a growing number of hungry and homeless college students on their campuses. In 2017, I joined with my colleague Dr. Carol Glasser to conduct the first campus-wide study assessing food and housing insecurity among the Minnesota State University, Mankato undergraduate student population. Among the key-findings from the study were that 64% of survey respondents encountered some level of food insecurity, with 22% encountering the most extreme form of food insecurity in which they were actively skipping meals and reducing their food intake because they could not afford to eat. Dr. Glasser and I along with a group of undergraduate student researchers produced an institutional report of the study, which we presented to faculty and staff as well as to the university executive leadership committee. In 2020, I joined with Dr. Katie Broton and Dr. Elmira Jangjou as founding members of the Food Insecurity Research & Education (FIRE) team at the University of Iowa, where I continue to serve as a Graduate Researcher. During the Covid 19 pandemic, Dr. Jangjou and I conducted a study using existing pantry survey data and qualitative interviews to better understand how undergraduate students were navigating the decision to utilize an on-campus pantry located at a large, research-intensive, public institution. Dr. Jangjou, Dr. Broton, and I presented our initial findings at the 2023 AERA annual meeting in Chicago, and are currently working on publication.

My hope for my continued scholarship is to humanize learning while troubling and working to deconstruct the interrelated systems of whiteness, classism, colonialism, ableism, sexism, and heteronormativity that continue to pervade US education and beyond. I intend to take the opportunity provided by a postdoctoral position to broaden my research on the meaning-making processes and emerging self-definitions of neurodivergent college students by drawing from the experiences of individuals across multiple geographic and institutional contexts. This will help further my goal of developing a neurodiversity-specific model of disability identity development that can be applied to the practice and advance the development of neurodiversity as a subfield of disability studies. I am also currently working with Dr. Carol Glasser to improve upon and revise our original 2017 food insecurity survey and include additional demographic variables that reflect the neurodiversity spectrum. Through these efforts, I will continue to build upon my understanding of how the interrelated narratives of Pauperism and Disability continue to shape the experiences of neurodivergent folx. Further, as a scholar who is neurodivergent and working to further the study of the experiences of neurodivergent folx, my work will directly address the call and need for the inclusion of disabled voices in research and the historiography produced about our lives and experiences (Brown, 2018; Longmore & Umansky, 2001). The reproduction of epistemic silence and violence cannot continue if the goal of disability studies is to truly engage in the production of equitable and transformative research. 

Nihil de nobis, sine nobis: nothing about us without us.