What's Not On Paper

Like a lot of people on this side of the world this week, I have been thinking about and writing about changes. With eclipses, and daytime darkness, necessarily comes the thought process of what disruption looks like in the different systems we are part of in the different aspects of our lives. These thoughts, coupled with more wonderful conversations with people I know in different ways and from different roles I have had at institutions, or through accessibility advocacy, has me particularly thinking about the difference between what is said on paper, what things like LinkedIn profiles, and titles, and resumes say about a person, and what is not on paper. So that is what I want to reflect on with you a bit this week. This is a longer post and I hope you will stay with me to the end.

A connected concept to this idea of what is on paper is how higher education really strives to promote the importance of lived experience and representation, but it does not yet have a real way of expressing or framing what that lived experience is like on paper, or alternatively (and in fact more importantly I feel) the need to remember that lived experience cannot all fit on the paper, nor should it. 

Something is really lost in the process of trying to translate ones' lived experience or positionality to something two dimensional as a screen or a piece of paper. When we say education really needs to value the whole selves that we all bring to spaces, the holistic need for this in fact embodies planes that go beyond the siloed nature of department, institution, association. I am sitting here thinking about how very much kingdom, phylum, species everything still is, while there are seemingly attempts (on paper) to disrupt these organizational ways of thinking and well established orders.

In one of my conversations this week we talked about titles and how titles tend to provide some sort of ordering in the system, and yet those titles can say very little about the actual work that a person has done and continues to do. Those who do community and grassroots organizing, who advocate for socio-cultural supports at many levels, know that a title will get you very little. It is like the conversation about the difference between being an ally and being an accomplice. The proof is in the work; the work is the work.

Out of institutional educational spaces, where the work is urgent, the work appears and is done in many different ways, often in the shadows, it is much harder to PowerPoint itemize list what was done. I have been really thinking honestly, how can you even try to itemize list, supporting someone finding emergency housing, getting someone food vouchers, being present for someone who is in crisis and needs someone to hold space. You can't, and you shouldn't because that is not what the work is about, that is not what holding space is about. This isn't gold star sticker time, this is about supporting lives in ways that are needed and meaningful.

And yet, we are continually put in situations where folk want to see the coffee spoon life measured in itemized lists because somehow if you don't or cannot or won't list things, then that lived experience is less valid than what can readily fit under a responsibility list under a title. How do we disrupt the thought process that a title necessarily makes a person that thing, as opposed to the things that make a person who they are. We have things so backwards sometimes. The incredible amount of people who work in different community areas, who do critical disability work not just in theory but in everyday practice, don't have titles. They have care and ethics, that is who they are. 

It was in conversations with a few people this week that I was again reminded that you will sometimes never know, what a word, a phrase, an action (how ever small it seemed to you) can mean to others. There is no real way of quantifying that, and again nor should it be, it just is. This isn't like one of those old school McDonald's signs, "1 billion customers served". Being committed to disrupting those systems and patterns that necessitate a marketing sign like that, is the point. The work is incalculable, it happens in the margins, in the shadows, in the sentences, in the bagged lunches, in the $5 bills, in the protests, on the signs, on the streets, in the souls. 

My conversations this week reminded me so much about what is not on paper and what could never be on paper. That inclusive pedagogy and inclusive design is iterative and is necessarily supported by ethical citation practices. I am the (as of yet non-culminating) culmination of the thought and the people and the care that has come before me. I acknowledge this and I am grateful for this every day. I remind those I speak with on Zoom, on Teams, on campus, on the street, that they are the folk who make me who I am, who inspire me to do what I do, or try to do things differently or another way, because it matters and they matter.

I could create a long Santa Claus-esque type list of all of the people who have ever touched my thought and soul, and I try to do this when I am writing something for publication, or when I record my podcasts, or when I facilitate a workshop or webinar. All of those people are the reasons why I do what I do, and will continue to do what I do. And I will say their names, and I will write them out and reference them so that others know who they are, and seek them out to find their work. Work that may not be in any library, but is nonetheless present in a smile someone gives, a much needed laugh during a hard day, a piece of art drawn on a wall, a stomach filled with nourishing soup, or a warm blanket giving comfort. Our whole selves can never live on paper, can never just be the title given to us by the systems, to classify, to organize. Because it is what's not on paper that will always be more meaningful, it is the moments of acknowledgment in classrooms, in conversations, memories of connections, and seeing how your own work has gone on to inform and inspire others. That lives on beyond any paper, screen, or system- that is the stuff of hearts and souls.