7 Materializing Access in the Dematerialized Space of Higher Education Online Classrooms

Situating the Virtual Classroom at TMU

When reflecting on the material relationships that cross digital space in our online class, we begin from the position that space cannot be detached from its place-based and land-based relationships. As Wayne K. Yang, writing as “la paperson,” reminds us, “universities do not exist in some abstract academic place. They are built on land, and especially in the North American context, upon occupied Indigenous lands” (2017, p. 26). Even though virtual space is often imagined as ubiquitously located, being both everywhere and nowhere, the digital classroom and the actions carried out in the course take place somewhere. As Stommel and Morris note in Chapter 3, “the idea of space when you’re talking about digital space is complicated. Where does it live? Where does the course live? … It isn’t just a geographic location; the web is people.” To imagine the virtualization of our class as disconnected from its land-based relations as a course offered out of TMU is troubling.

As Nespor (2000, pp. 546–547) argued, the “anonymization of place and settings has both (a) ontological effects, in helping decouple events from specific locations and facilitating their use in certain kinds of theoretical claims, and (b) political implications, in distancing the participants and events described from a public sphere shared with researchers and readers.” Although her critique of placelessness was about social science research, we contend that these critiques resonate with discounting place in theorizing virtual classrooms. As people learning, teaching, and living on settler-occupied land, we live in relation to settler colonialism through the land and the power relationships that govern how it is imagined, who belongs on it, how to and who can use it, who gets to enter it. The where of this class offered out of TMU is the Williams Treaty territory, land protected by the Dish with One Spoon Wampum agreement and the traditional territories of the Anishinaabeg, Chippewa, Haudenosaunee, and Wendat Peoples and more recently the Mississaugas of the Credit.

In their writing on the significance of acknowledging researchers’ and research projects’ relationships with land and place in social science research, Tuck and McKenzie (2015, p. 789), citing Rachel Fendler (2013), wrote that ethnographic practices of place making require a double task of understanding how participants signify space through their practices and needing to account for that significance in the ethnography itself since “research creates the space of inquiry, to study it.” We find it important to attend to how our teaching-as-research creates the literal space of inquiry: the virtual classroom and the digital platforms that we use to support students in the debate assignment. We argue that claiming placelessness in the virtual classroom and its activities (the debates) disconnects both from key forces that shape them. This is problematic because it would not only contribute to the illusion of “freedom” and “neutrality” already associated with virtual space but also erase the course’s place-based connections that influence the debate topics as they align with current disability-related issues enacted in Canadian society.²

When the virtual classroom is imagined as placeless, the university’s entrenched history of ableism is effectively rendered invisible (Dolmage, 2017). For example, TMU spatially and materially monumentalizes Egerton Ryerson, a figure in Ontario’s history of education instrumental in constructing “the problem child” (Knight, 2019) through the exclusion of those who did not fit his idea of “universal education” based on colonial, racist, ableist, and misogynistic interpretations of bodies fit for mass education. This monumentalization recirculates his perception of who constitutes a student fit for “normal” education. From its literally elevated position on Gould Street, his figure, till 2021, and all that it stands for loomed over all who traversed the campus. In elevating and celebrating his figure, his ideas about education permeate the campus space as those that TMU deems worthy of celebrating. By reflecting on the land-based and spatial relations of the course, we can connect our classroom’s relationship with land through these logics of eugenics that have been used to frame bodies in settler society as inherently undesirable and excludable. Taking Reid and Shanouda’s insightful point in Chapter 1 that teaching difficult knowledge necessitates a “care-informed pedagogy” to activate fully a safer classroom space, we argue that attending to the L/land-based relationships of the university classroom allows us to care meaningfully about how our students and our own relationships with colonialism and settler colonialism can affect their learning experience of difficult knowledge such as eugenics as well as how being in a university classroom might feel for them.

In materializing the course’s relationships, we are also reminded of Styres and co-authors’ (2013) writing about the significance of attending to the difference in using non-capitalized “land” and capitalized “Land” in Toward a Pedagogy of Land: The Urban Context:

We have chosen to capitalize Land when we are referring to it as a proper name indicating a primary relationship rather than when used in a more general sense. For us, land (the more general term) refers to landscapes as a fixed geographical and physical space that includes earth, rocks, and waterways; whereas, “Land” (the proper name) extends beyond a material fixed space. Land is a spiritually infused place grounded in interconnected and interdependent relationships, cultural positioning, and is highly contextualized. (pp. 300–301)

As non-Indigenous disabled people teaching at TMU, located on land currently occupied by a settler society and Indigenous sovereign nations, we contend that both of these meanings of L/land are present in our encounters living, creating, rethinking, and desiring access even though digital space is usually framed as landless and placeless. There is simultaneously no land (non-capitalized) beneath us as we teach and land when we think about where our bodies are located as we teach as well as the location of the university from which the course is offered. And this L/land is both physical space and interconnected, interdependent, and highly contextualized. Access in higher education, digital or otherwise, is often discussed in a way that abstracts it from land, Land, and place through the university’s framing of disabled people’s access as a problem to be negotiated between the individual (students, faculty, or staff) and the institution. We are reminded that access takes place some where with some body. Here it is useful to take up a critical access approach, one that understands access as “an interpretative between bodies rather than an objective quality” (Hamraie, 2018, p. 456). Questions about who gets access to university classes are also questions about whose bodies are permitted into or excluded from the land through the settler relationships between the institution and the land on which it rests. These relationships organize some bodies and minds into those that fit ableist/sanist/audist/neurotypical expectations of students, faculty, and staff and render others as unexpected. For example, the entry of disabled students is dependent on framing their needs as “extra” through registration at the academic success office, as “retrofits,” as Dolmage imagines in the foreword. Their registration is dependent on biocertification (Samuels, 2014) providing invasive (and often expensive) third-party evidence of their identity as “disabled” in order to be validated institutionally. This normalizes the expectation that disabled students will always be excluded until made into an “includable type” when the university provides them with the support necessary to fit its ableist expectations (Titchkosky, 2011, p. 87). In an activist lecture in 2018 organized by the School of Disability Studies at TMU by Jay Dolmage and Nicole Ineese-Nash titled “Legacies of Ableism and Colonialism in Higher Education: Where Do We Go from Here?”, Ineese-Nash reminds us of the coloniality behind designing and naturalizing barriers to access in higher education spaces by noting that “colonial education perpetuates disability for those who do not fit the prototype of normative students. In this way it’s a colonial process that seeks to impose hierarchies on human subjects.” Having the power to determine who accesses a university’s spaces when the university is built upon stolen land reinforces its power as a colonial institution that currently exists in a settler-colonial society in which its relationship with land is predominantly proprietary. The university can control who is granted access, denied access, or framed as removable when one does not fit the owner’s desires.

Situating Our Embodied and Placed Selves

As mentioned above, access takes place somewhere with some body. Virtual spaces often are rendered not only as immaterial and detached from L/land but also as bodiless. We therefore find it imperative to reflect on our own embodied experiences and their place- and L/land-based relational politics in the virtual classroom.

Fiona writes to you from a city located on the Rouge River Tract currently named Markham. Originally part of the territory of the Mississauga Peoples, it was displaced through the Gunshot Treaty, which preceded the Williams Treaty of 1923. Fiona has relationships with land outside her settler relationship with this land through her birth-based citizenship in a territory called Hong Kong, in dispute regarding its national status following a century plus of British colonial occupation and then Chinese reunification. Her national and land relationships are not cohesive stories.

Esther lives and works on the same land as the university itself. Her father, a white settler, immigrated to Toronto in the early 1950s, while still a teenager, from postwar Italy. Both of her parents lived for many generations in and around Ceprano in the province of Lazio in central Italy. Just south of Rome, Ceprano has thrived on the banks of the River Lire, governed by secular, regent, religious, and imperial rule. In Italy, the family’s historical and farming connection to the land is long and narrated relatively smoothly, without interruption, an effect of the stability of a European imperial power. Her family’s migration to Canada gestured toward a traumatic generational disruption in relation to the land brought about by war and military occupation—a relationship shared by many of the first-generation settlers who are students in our classes.

We tell the story of our relationships with the L/land as they thread through our worldviews, pedagogy, and analysis of access.

Materializing the DST 501 Digital Classroom as a Social Space

In this section, we reflect on the spatial relationships of the classroom in order to offer a different complexity than naming its relationship with L/land. We contend that the spatial relationships of our online class are simultaneously important with our L/land and embodied relationships. As part of the class, the debates took place within the already-made space of the university and the in-the-making space of the DST 501 fall 2018 classroom. Here we are reminded of Lefebvre’s (1991, p. 73) concept of social space: “Being the outcome of past actions, social space is what permits fresh actions to occur, while suggesting others and prohibiting yet others.” Three concepts work together to produce a social space. First is spatial practice, the space as it was built. Second is representational space, the space as conceptualized or imagined according to those who perceive it rather than experience it. And third is the space of inhabitants and users as it is lived, imagined, and, most importantly, experienced. This layer considers the spatial practices, the everyday routines and experiences, of people living within the spaces as constantly contributing to the creation and reimagining of the spaces.

Analyzing the first layer allows us to read the physical locations where our class took place before its digitalization. Disability studies scholar Jay Dolmage examines the metaphor of steep steps in his analysis of the eugenic foundations of the contemporary university. He notes that steep steps are material elements of the entrances of many buildings on the university’s campus; they also announce that “access to the university is a movement upwards—only the truly fit survive this climb” (2017, p. 44). Although the online space of the university might claim to remove these steps, the ableism of the academy remains. The steep steps are not removed online for those students who work shifts, have caring responsibilities, live in rural and remote communities, cannot afford to live in Toronto, or are disabled. Access for disabled teachers, teaching assistants, and other facilitators of digital education space is also rarely examined (Brown & Leigh, 2018). Online classes transform the pedagogical space by inviting new voices, experiences, dreams, and bodies into the classroom, but these classes might contain those students in ways complicit with the ableist, settler-colonial, eugenicist, and capitalistic desires of Western higher education institutions (Dolmage, 2017; la paperson, 2017; Lee, 2017).

When reflecting on the second spatial layer, we are struck by the contradictory meanings between disability activist desires for the course and TMU’s neo-liberal desires. For the university as a higher education institution, the classroom represents a transactionary space where disability knowledge is converted into fungible property that can be temporarily traded between the university and those who occupy the role of “student.” However, we also need to consider how the plans of the School of Disability Studies contribute to the classroom. From a departmental level, the course is designed to introduce students to tools for thinking about disability in a way that centres the experiences and knowledge of disabled/mad/Deaf/sick people and interrogates how society frames disability and disabled people as problems before they continue learning more complex disability frameworks in more advanced courses. It seems that plans for this classroom denote contradictory meanings of academic ableism and disability justice. The class, though informed by the efforts of disabled activists of the late 1990s, was planned by TMU for the purpose of delivering knowledge on disability as part of the higher education industry. As such, as we lived access through the virtual classroom, we were conscious of the discrepancies between our desires for disability access as love (Mingus, 2011) and the university’s desires for access as capital through the inclusion of a greater quantity of students under the auspices of “inclusion” (Ahmed, 2012; Lee, 2017).

This third layer of space, which Soja and Chouinard (1999) called “thirdspace,” attends to the complex creative relationships that allow us to experience and dream of access in our reflections on our experiences with the debate assignment. There is a continual and complex negotiation of space, identity, and personal resources in our reading, as femme queer disabled scholars, of academic space as a thirdspace (Hseih & Saleh, 2021). As Stommel notes in his interview with Jones and Maloley in this volume, thirdspace forces us to “ask questions about how this space might function significantly differently” as meanings of the space are constructed as it is lived and, most importantly, experienced by those who use and transit through a given space (Soja & Chouinard, 1999, p. 204), thereby inviting us to push against the meanings imposed through the ways that the space was imagined and planned by the university and urban planners. Similarly, Hamraie (2018, p. 455) notes that there is a need to attend to the “value ladenness” of socio-spatial data often presented to the public as though the values are neutral, such as Google Maps, when data sets like maps are “composed and designed through observations, narratives, deliberations, and materializations.” We find this helpful for thinking through the Desire2Learn Brightspace Learning Management System or D2L Course Shell, an interstitial space between the intersectional socio-spatial relations that we have just named, and our experiences in guiding students through the online debate assignment. Here we interpret the D2L Course Shell as both a virtual space in which many of our interactions with students take place and a virtual map through which students navigate access to their instructors, course materials, and each other to share their content and other relevant forms of participating in the course.

The shell’s design went through its first iteration when the course was offered online during the regular academic year in response to softening enrolment in part-time programs, such as disability studies at TMU, and the challenges that students were experiencing in committing to the two-week intensive delivery module during the summer months. In its online form, our course was open to the wider university community and could attract a much larger enrolment beyond our program students. This meant that the program students—largely from working-class, rural, remote, and/or migrant communities—shared the virtual space with TMU students from departments such as engineering, business, and performance. However, it is important to keep in mind that, pre-COVID-19, online spaces were institutionally neglected and often invisible in university policy. Disability studies students, situated around the province and farther afield, risked profound social invisibility in the university. For instance, part-time online program students like those in our program were not able to “pre-enrol” or course-intend for courses. As such, the D2L Course Shell is a layered and interconnected virtual terrain “value laden” with elements, tools, and university expectations of its students and faculty. We also read the course shell as an agentive space that constantly pushes against the significance of the values behind how it was built, including assumptions about the accessibility of online spaces. For example, Esther’s experience in transitioning to the online space after having taught the same course in person for many years left Esther feeling dislocated. Her instructions and guidance to students, usually seamless and well-honed after a decade of utterance, were interrupted by the disjunctions in time and space created by the online space of D2L. Nothing happened quickly, and in some sad instances her posts or messages to students were never read. Things proceeded without the energy and passion that bubbled in face-to-face interactions. Yet accessibility seemed to be better: everyone had resources, comments, and clarifications recorded in text, and competing schedules could be accommodated by the asynchronous model of the course.

We tell these sedimented relational histories of the course shell, how it came to be online, and our struggles because they provide the nesting grounds for our experiences with guiding the debate project in the next section. The complex spatio-conceptual materials used to build the course shell depict access as “a never-finished, always troubled project of access experimentation” (Hamraie, 2018, p. 479) that both complies with and unsettles the university’s interpretations of access.

First Site: Emails

Emails are a key, but not an intentional, element of the debate assignment. Although collaborative spaces within the D2L Course Shell and the collaborative documents (see below) were intended as the site of dialogue and collective labour, emails to instructors mobilized progress on and completion of the debate assignment. They provided sharp insights into how the values of the institution are always in friction with our convivial aspirations. Significantly, emails also interrupted our carefully designed plans for how students would make their way together through the assignment. Emails were the channel through which students could directly tell us that our assignment instructions were not working for them. Yet emails also acted as a site in which care relations between instructor and student could be pushed beyond the university’s neo-liberal expectations of teaching work as transactional since students also used them to share aspects of their lives other than strictly related to the course.

For instance, emails to us often display the complexity of intersecting desires for access in students’ complaints about their group members’ labour. The flexibility and openness of the online debates can mean that the collaborative ties of the course are uncomfortably loose (Bauman, 2005). In the neo-liberal university in which students are encouraged to perform and move upward in keeping with colonialist, racist, sexist, and ableist logics, another’s need for flexibility can be perceived as a threat. More worrying is that online space affords the anonymity and somewhat sterile context in which students become the gatekeepers of capacitation and debilitation. Students who might not readily understand the reading, navigate effectively through the LMS, or write with fluency and speed are left to wither (Ong, 2002), whereas those who thrive within the contemporary university, even in its online form, consolidate their agency and success. We are left wondering whether the private, singular, and possessive space of email works to foster the conditions of individual competition and complaint and works against the crip desires of this particular assignment.

To illustrate, we turn to the emailed complaint that a fellow member was “absent” from the group. On the one hand, the meaning of absence here seems to be attached to the idea of what counts as “fair” labour. The idea of “fairness” is haunted by the idea that equality is synonymous with “sameness” since this assignment is a group assignment and all members of the group will receive the same grade. Hence, there is the idea that all members must contribute “equally” in order to be equally deserving of a shared grade, subsequently rendering those whose labour is “absent” (or not visible enough) as less deserving. On the other hand, disability studies theorists and activists have challenged the idea that sameness is synonymous with equality and how it does little to “[embrace] difference, [confront] privilege and [challenge] what is considered ‘normal’” (Mingus, 2011). What if we were to narrate absence differently? What if not participating in an activity is a form of resistance to the normative demands of group work? What if non-participation is a way to make visible microaggressions among group members, the material challenges of attending university, or a move towards self care?

Although students often used emails to communicate troubles with access for the assignment milestones, they also used emails to connect with us by sharing detailed stories that allowed us to understand better who they were and the contexts in which they were experiencing difficulties with the assignment. We felt much gratitude to the students who chose to share their stories with us, but having been on the other side of the educator-student divide as disabled students left us haunted by the institutional pressures to disclose the full and often personal circumstances of requests for accommodation (Shanouda, 2019). When students were absent from email participation in their lack of response, either in direct conversations with us or reported through team members’ emails to us, there was a complicated mix between the neo-liberal focus on individual student performance and our commitment to disability justice.

The former would interpret such an absence only as a student’s failure to fulfill assignment requirements and thus be undeserving of a passing grade. The latter would allow us to centre interdependence in our learning community, including how we designed the virtual collaboration space for the debate. For example, whereas some of the emails about absent team members focused on the fears of the students that their group marks would be affected, or a sense of unfairness that the whole group would receive the same mark despite believing that not everyone had participated equally, for some groups the emails also contained a note of concern about the absent student, especially if the student had been participating and then seemingly lost contact.

Regardless, a kind of care work was present in both contexts since these emails generally came before the assignment was due and carried with them the expectation that we, as educators, would be able at least to contact the absent student rather than leave them unaccounted for somewhere in virtual space. When we received those emails, we often felt fear about whether students were safe or well or whether our assignment or teaching style was inaccessible to the point where some students had become completely disengaged. As such, the emails offered a site where practices of care between students and us were both subjected to the university’s transactional, bureaucratized, and dehumanized expectations of care within the classroom, expectations, we would add, reinforced by the seemingly disembodied aspects of online spaces and the focus on access for the purpose of convenience and efficiency in the move to online teaching before COVID-19 forced universities to pivot to emergency remote teaching and later to hybrid teaching. Yet the emails that we received can also be interpreted as pushing against the university’s expectations of what care looks like in higher education online learning spaces.

We situate emails about students’ absences as a space in which to ask questions about how access is experienced by our students. How might their absence from participation in group work be connected to their embodied relationships to the time, place, space, and land in which our digital classroom takes place? And what might the stories that students choose to share with us allow for an understanding of the socio-spatial relationships that affect how they end up participating in our class? How do they challenge the values behind how participation is designed by us as instructors and more broadly the university? For example, a strong and stable internet connection is necessary. However, for Indigenous or rural students zooming in from reserves or rural areas, there can be barriers to accessing a stable internet connection. Or a student might not be able to afford a personal connectable device, have limited time to access the internet via library computers, or only have access to devices shared with their guardians, children, or siblings that are vital to their work or educational needs. Or perhaps a student is not participating with group members because English is not their first language or they find it difficult or impossible to communicate according to the conventions of a society that prioritizes English and verbal speech. Perhaps that is also why the student is not communicating as much with us.

Here we would like to draw attention to thinking about linguistic norms as socio-spatial practice. A student’s ability to communicate in English is often central to how that student is evaluated in North American higher education spaces. The linguistic choices in a classroom are not neutral (Brand, 1995). The English language is a powerful colonial tool that produces and reinforces spaces to suit the embodied socio-spatial norms of the colonial authority. In educational contexts, how students in anglophone-majority universities, such as TMU, are always inadvertently evaluated by their English-language skills works through a blend of ableism and colonialism. As wa Thiong’o (1986, p. 12) wrote, “English became the measure of intelligence and ability in the arts, the sciences, and all other branches of learning. English became the main determinant of a child’s progress up the ladder of formal education.” In this sense, students’ absences reported to us as a “problem” through emails can offer a way of connecting students who experience barriers to participation in the assignment with the colonial relations to L/land and spatial practices within the university materialized through the normalization of English and verbal and textual modalities of communication that continue to haunt the course regardless of digitalization.

Students have shared many such stories with us that complicate absences from participation. Thinking of the spatial, L/land, place, and embodied relationships allows for a fuller narrative of what it means to access higher education that complicates online learning’s narrative of access and inclusion for all.

Second Site: Videos

Debate assignments culminate in the production and posting of a short video argument that either supports or refutes the given proposition. The videos—in their departure from the regular form of course content—are invitational, bringing students into the course in ways that consolidate their depth of knowledge and their role as teachers-learners. Their embodied presence gestures not only toward the university’s desire to become an inclusive space but also toward the seditious potential of the third university that foregrounds students as knowledge producers and sharers (la paperson, 2017). Videos meet the modern university’s project of utilitarianism, providing students with digital literacy and production skills that meet the demand of the market (Ahmed, 2020). Many students comment that the videos are useful in their online learning, contributing to the sense of belonging to an embodied community “with real people, not just names and black boxes.” Students are required to display their collaborations by posting six-minute videos shot at home and featuring one or more of their team members to the course shell. Once both the supporting and the opposing teams have posted their videos, classmates can post questions, experiences, and alternative analyses in response. Teams not only engage immediately with these responses but also keep track of them to address in a three-minute rebuttal to be posted several days after the debates have gone “live.”

The brevity of the videos is deceptive in the sense that it masks the significance and meanings of the complex activities and interpersonal relations that went into students’ production processes. For instance, considering that access is one of the criteria by which these videos are evaluated, students’ experiments, agency, motivations, and intentions behind making their videos accessible are invisible to the viewer. Moreover, the short temporal manifestation of the students’ production cannot display how the videos’ production processes operate through the sense of time naturalized as normal to everyday life at the university yet a timescape bureaucratically designed by the university (Titchkosky, 2011, p. 20). The university, the students, and us as course designers and instructors all had different understandings of appropriate ways to spend time on the course. Those understandings affected the time that students could spend experimenting with access and the time that we could spend to encourage students to experiment with access in imperfect ways rather than comply with our course expectations regarding access. Thinking here with Hamraie’s (2018) point about the value ladenness of socio-spatial data in maps and the importance of attending to the interpretations that went into designing those values, we would argue that reflecting critically on the temporal data behind the overall assignment and the videos allows us to unsettle the neo-liberal university’s interpretations of time as well as to connect access to the different meanings attributed to the different temporal investments that made digital iterations of the debate in the form of video presentations possible.

Thus, our interactions with students regarding the production of the videos showed that the unaccounted time that exceeds the space of those six- and three-minute videos paints a messy relational picture of access that went into producing those videos. For instance, absent from the video is the time that students spent collaborating on how to collaborate. At the heart of such work is the question of how to make the collaborative process accessible to all collaborators. Students required aligned time maps to arrange their schedules so that they could create pockets of shared time in which they could make themselves accessible to each other to deliberate on debate points and record and edit their videos. Yet, in an increasingly digitized world, what would have required synchronously timed collaborations in making deliberation accessible to the whole team now could be done asynchronously. That is if that was what the students had spent time negotiating to do as part of their collaborative process. Students also needed to figure out how to make the videos accessible together, but this process involved multiple perspectives on what accessible meant: each student’s, the instructors’, the university’s, and the broader society’s dominant narratives of access.

The time necessary to make sense of all this was complicated by the assignment’s timeline within the neo-liberal institution’s rendering of time. This meant that time was framed as a finite resource and that students would have only so much time to experiment with access. Unfortunately, even with the attempt to design access as part of the collaborative process through the requirement that transcripts be included with the video for evaluation, some of the groups found that they ran out of time and did not include them in their submissions or only offered last-minute point-form notes. Transcripts are crucial for D/deaf, hard-of-hearing, and learning-disabled students and faculty (including one of the authors), but they help anyone who cannot access the video because of technology, learning preference, or time. Echoing part of a eugenicist ideology–laden narrative of academic ableism as described earlier in this chapter (Dolmage & Ineese-Nash, 2018), we as instructors had to reinforce the narrative of time as a finite resource for which exceeding it would mark a student’s embodied performance.

Third Site: Google Docs

The use of collaborative docs as part of the debate assignment began during the onsite summer institute offerings of DST 501 to facilitate collaborative and professional work and skills. At their introduction, they seemed to be poised to foster access within groups and facilitate our work as instructors. They offered flexibility for students who balanced coursework with employment and home life; students could contribute to a single document in real time while at a distance or consecutively such that an assignment was always in flux.

For us as scholars, shared documents have always been convenient sites of collaborative dreaming, problem solving, and creation. They operate as important sites of collective access. For Esther, they enable “real-time” co-writing in which text can be entered anywhere in a document and then quickly cut and pasted into the coherent flow of the document by a writing partner. For Fiona, neurodiversity allows her to experience sound and language differently. In-person collaborative spaces are often auditory focused and have been inaccessible, leaving her scrambling to make sense of and recall what her collaborators discussed. Collaborative documents open spaces to reflect and participate in our own time and manner.

Uing shared documents in teaching soon became uneasy in light of our power relationships with students. Our role in the collaborative document veers between support and surveillance given the different relationships that we and our students hold within the classroom space. Specifically, our access to the students’ collaborative writing document means that their collaboration is subject to the university’s gaze on what counts as valuable participation in the course through our teaching bodies and subsequently carries with it other social relationships that contribute to the privileging of a hegemonic student body that meets the university’s desires. In Jones and Maloley’s interview with Stommel and Morris, the interviewees highlight how issues of surveillance have become more apparent under the sudden shift to emergency remote online learning in COVID-19 times; for many of us, these issues always have been apparent. The university, and more broadly Western models of education, have always been invested in governmentality or ways to categorize and control students from deviating from the university’s expectations of which ways of learning constitute the “normal” student (Foucault, 1995; Hunter, 2019). Eunjun Kim (2017, p. 15) offers the concept of curative violence or “practices which construct the normative body by inducing metamorphosis according to its own determination of benefits and harms, as established by how closely disabled bodies resemble and mimic the normative body.” In a similar vein, Shanouda (2019) writes about the “eugenic desire” of the university to conceal non-normative bodyminds.

The digitalization of learning has indeed enabled increasingly sophisticated technologies of surveillance in ways that provoke questions about the university’s investment in surveilling the student body and how it configures the classroom space. As disabled instructors who have been students in hyper-surveillant contexts such as the Bloorview classroom, we are aware that surveillance is not just about the student’s work but also about the educational institution’s investment in normalizing a hegemonic student body and “pushing out” those who do not fit the institution’s expectations of what counts as a “normative” learning body (Tuck, 2012). Like the teacher’s role at Bloorview, our role at TMU is to monitor how the students participate in the assignment and how they collaborate with each other in ways that align with broader social relationships that have normalized what counts as the right sort of work at the university. However, that is not the single story here since collaborative documents also serve as sites for collaborative thinking and writing that refuse the traditional top-down power dynamics between teacher and student within the digital classroom space.

Collaborative documents can promise space for disability affiliations. They serve as a space of vulnerability, for we all fail in the co-production of the shared document: commenting on the wrong section, committing grammatical and spelling transgressions, revealing our half-baked ideas and feedback, deleting another’s strong text, and otherwise falling short of producing the coherence of a “clean” text. In a culture that uses failure to fuel the neo-liberal drive for improvement and self-governance, writing publicly in the messy, half-formed manner of the collaborative online document also risks essentializing one’s failed or failing status as a scholar and, in the context of our course, as a collaborator and learner (Halberstam, 2011).

Yet collaborative documents can be a public space of critical witnessing. They can reveal and possibly resist how university demands produce potentially excludable learning subjects. Thinking with Haraway (2016, p. 87), collaborative documents provide an “ecology of practices,” a space in which students hold and take up one another’s ideas, cultivating collective responsibility for their learning. As a site of collective access, collaborative documents enable interdependent learning and scholarship, resisting the valorization of the atomistic and autonomous student. Together we help one another to stay with our entangled and messy ideas. At their horizon of possibility, collaborative documents can weave together a multiplicity of insights, languages, analyses, and perspectives. Pushing us further, these documents can be a site of critical reflection and interrogation as we attend to whom and how we might all contribute. The resulting arguments might be more aligned with the actual intention of the debate assignment itself, a tentative unsettling of the binaries of “right and wrong” or “winning and losing” sides to surface the great complexity of disability dilemmas.