Episode 22: Episode 21: Disability, Activism, and Qualitative Research

In this podcast, Emily Nusbaum interviews Alice Wong, disability rights activist and founder of the Disability Visibility project. Their conversation Alice describes the relationship of research to her activism, her experience in the academy, and key questions that scholars should consider when embarking on research with marginalized communities. Below is a transcript of this talk.

Alice 0:25

All right,

Emily 0:27

my name is Emily Nussbaum, and I'm here with Alice Wong talking with her this evening for the Qualitative Research SIG of AERA. And I am super thrilled to be interviewing Alice for this episode. Alice is the director of the Disability Visibility Project, a thought leader known everywhere in Disability Justice and access issues and author of the recently published acclaimed book Disability Visibility. So Alice, thank you so much for talking with me.

Alice 1:11

Thank you for having me, Emily. You know, I also want to say that we have been friends for a long time, and I just don't want it to be a conversation with you.

Emily 1:24

Yeah, me too. So, since this is for a group focused on qualitative inquiry, I reached out to you thinking about your work through various forms of social media and the Disability Visibility Project and ways that the qualitative research community can start to think more expansively about what counts as qualitative research, and that kind of thing. But I think if I'm correct, and clarify, of course, that you began a more academic career in sociology. So I wondered if you could just give us kind of that background of how you started thinking about research and what that background was, and then we can talk more about the shift you made to the super important and impactful work that you're doing now? Well,

Alice 2:31

Just a long story short...I really...my initial career goals, my vision was to be an academia, I love to Sociology, every semester, I stroke fast, and, you know, I feel like sociology gave me the lens to really see the world and analyze the world. Especially, you know, toward the event of disability, you know, beyond, you know, to create a better model. So, you know, I went to undergrad I majored in sociology, you know, I keep in touch with a bunch of professors. It is a sociology department at Indiana University, in Indianapolis. I can't remember who it was who gave me my first experience as you know a research assistant at, you know, to tell you the truth, I am so grateful for their support and their belief or in me to be their student really activated it, you know, I saw a lot of gaps in the literature. You know, just gaps in research, just, you know, where are the disabled people? You know, there's you know,

Emily 4:10

like, in terms of only talks about talk about gaps and disabled people in terms of voice and in terms of like representation outside kind of more deficit based perspectives. Yeah.

Alice 4:28

Health care very simple. You know, there's a lot of work guys out there equalities it's so such a structure of medicine but you know, also maybe I've been thinking about like, well what about you know, disability and there's a, you know a lot of work on devious and stigma, you know, Eving Goffman, it was it was earlist people. Goffman and Foucault as well, just really If you think about what are the disabled perspectives, disable scholarship, advance these kinds of ideas, extend these ideas. It wasn't until, you know, that's really where I started studying about disability studies, work of Erving K. Yes, his work. People of the UK, so despite all of her

Emily 5:37

social model,

Alice 5:41

those were trying to like, wow, like, there are these, you know, there are people doing this work. And, you know, I thought this to be my contribution, I think, to a person particular, that's really was kind of a model of what I wanted to do. To date, Barbara Waxman.

Emily 6:04

Yeah, I just need to share if you(continued)