Introducing Troubles Online

Starting with Seven Troubles

The idea for this collection came from a shared frustration with what we view as the troubles of teaching and learning online. We come to this collection from the fields of critical disability studies, mad studies, and critical digital pedagogy—all intersectional realms that challenge the status quo of technology, access, and how non-normative bodyminds exist in academia (Clare, 2017; Price, 2011). When this project began, we were two of many precariously positioned pedagogues obligated to teach and learn online in a 2010s ethos of rapid digital expansion at the whims of our respective institutions’ austere ambitions. Year after year, and semester after semester, we witnessed academic ableism online but little concern from our respective institutions about the complexly embodied experiences of those of us teaching and learning online. Concurrently, online teaching and learning were pushed forward in the name of access even as it reproduced long-standing experiences of ableism and its intersections: racism, sexism, sanism, colonialism, and other oppressive “isms” that seemed to be (falsely) neutralized by modes of digital pedagogy. Our career trajectories unfolded under an ambiguous, buzzword-laden banner of “diversity” (Ahmed, 2012) that, even today, often encompasses online pedagogy, suggesting that digital teaching and learning can work for everyone. Our experiences suggest the opposite: online learning is not inherently more accessible than other forms of pedagogy, and it discriminates. This realization is among the first of seven distinct troubles that we developed in collaboration with the co-authors of this collection to describe the ableist underpinning of online teaching and learning:

(1) illusions of online pedagogy as a solution to the problem of inaccessible higher education;

(2) misperceptions that digital classrooms are universally accessible and available to all;

(3) failures of new modes of digital praxis being attributed to individual users;

(4) pandemic-related shifts in online teaching and learning that put this praxis in crisis with an unreasonable expectation of recovery;

(5) the unresolvable nature of the complexities of online teaching and learning;

(6) the fallacious presentation of online teaching and learning as apolitical and ahistorical, resulting in the erasure of crip, neurodiverse, and other digital creators’ world making; and

(7) the invitation to cause troubles online through active resistance to and reimaginings of our digital futures.

In a bid to “stay with the trouble” so that we can move from critique to resistance, as per Donna Haraway’s (2016) feminist post-humanist directive, we spent four years developing this collection before and during COVID-19. The pandemic brought with it a spat of delays and rapid changes to online teaching and learning that triggered many starts and stops in the editorial process. Our additional editor, Lisanne Binhammer, came on board in response to the fitful nature of the project and to provide the perspective of a digital product designer and recent graduate of a pandemic-induced, fully remote master’s program. The 18 chapter authors’ long and patient engagement with this project has resulted in new visions of accessible critical digital pedagogy that resist ableist norms in higher education. We take these troubles both as difficulties that evoke anxiety and unrest about the praxis of online teaching and learning and as invitational turbulence, as points of mobilization that might support the work of troublemakers with long traditions of usurping, resisting, and world making in ways that support the critical praxis of digital teaching and learning.

To us, troubling the norms of online teaching and learning is a critical move that can mean thinking broadly about accessibility and digital pedagogy. In this sense, we propose accessible critical digital pedagogy as a way of infusing contemporary thought about pedagogy with concern about, and attention to, access. This approach launches from critical pedagogy, an evolving philosophy and pedagogical movement that underscores the political in education (Freire, 1997; Giroux, 2020; Hill Collins & Bilge, 2016; hooks, 1994; McLaren, 2020). Following hooks (1994) and Freire (1997), critical digital pedagogy is often rooted in hope and promotes a critical awareness of social reality through reflection and action. In taking critical digital pedagogy online with specific attention to the broadness of access and accessibility, we acknowledge that higher education is always already a site of oppression and potential emancipation (Migueliz Valcarlos et al., 2020). And we layer in a foundational recognition that disabled, mad, d/Deaf, and neurodivergent people have long refined embodied connections in digital spaces as a mode of access creation and innovation (Hamraie & Fritsch, 2019). As for hope, this collection is an invitation to reflect on the limits of contemporary pedagogy in a digital world and to witness higher education’s ongoing transgressions in moments of significant cultural change, including but not limited to the COVID-19 pandemic. We posit that online learning is not better than in-person learning or vice versa. Both modes are entrenched in ableism. Both modes demand that we not give up. In the stories below, we chronicle our collective entanglements with these and other troubles that informed the scaffolding of this collection, punctuated three times by what Vorstermans and Mohler (Chapter 10 in this collection) call “moments of reckoning” that sparked our pedagogical transformations.

The First “Moment of Reckoning,” 2018

It is 2018, and a presenter fumbles over podium gadgets while I, Chelsea, sit in the audience of an international online learning conference. There is no hint that someday soon a pandemic will swiftly push all of the pedagogues in this room online and toward an emergency-paced digital pedagogy with no end in sight. These days distance education is still mostly voluntary (Kovacs et al., 2021). Online teaching and learning are something of a novelty at the Toronto-based university where I work. The presenter assures us that we will get started right away. Then a woman’s face appears on the large screen. The woman begins talking. The trouble is that nobody can understand what she is saying.

Her voice is a loud, jarring hum of electronic crinkles, like a jammed video call. It is impossible to understand her, not because of her speech with its undulating hints at bodymind difference, but because she is at the epicentre of a technical disaster with no live transcription, sign language interpretation, or closed captioning. The presentation is inaccessible. Yet the presenter quips “What I love about Catherine is that she’s a real go-getter!” But what is Catherine saying? This goes on for 10 minutes. Astonishingly, in the end, people clap.

With their applause, Catherine’s supercrip status is solidified. Her story, though distorted, is the predictable, tokenistic tale of overcoming barriers to learning through her own perky resilience with a digital learning management system rather than through any university’s meaningful commitment to removing barriers to her participation in both virtual and in-person spheres. It is academic ableism in action (Dolmage, 2017). The applause speaks to the room’s low expectations of both a disabled learner, Catherine, and the limited promise of online learning. I do not clap.

I later recalled this moment in University Affairs (Jones, 2018), arguing that, when a supercrip story becomes the marker of accessible online learning, the bar is set too low. Educators must consider disability and accessibility concomitantly and as more than an add-on to already established pedagogy. Rather, disability is a significant, ongoing part of critical scholarship crucial to any conversation about online and in-person access—and any hybrid modes in between. And, as Jenna Reid and Fady Shanouda point out in their chapter in this volume, “Caring Online: A Justice-Oriented Approach to Online Pedagogy,” access is not only about access to information. Access to necessary learning—including learning about difficult content in difficult times—requires politically rooted pedagogies of care, love, and justice. As Reid and Shanouda explain,

A justice-oriented approach … requires faculty and sessionals to understand that the decisions they make, the materials they use in class, the assignments they create, and their synchronous versus asynchronous approaches are not apolitical. Regardless of the subject matter or the disciplinary approach, we have to unearth and acknowledge the histories of exclusion in our fields of study so as to communicate this difficult knowledge to our students and to ensure that our field grows in the direction of justice.

Sentiments about retheorizing the classroom according to justice-based online pedagogy emerge repeatedly in this collection, with all authors strategizing on how to plan for and build relational virtual spaces in which an embodied connection is not guaranteed, and perhaps not even likely, despite simplistic supercrip stories of disabled people’s place in pedagogical advancement.

Critical Access and Universal Design for Learning

Recalling this moment—when a disabled student was objectified for the institutional advancement of online pedagogy—reminds me that planning pedagogy that considers justice and accessibility in the same breath means paying serious attention to how disciplines invest in access as a critical topic—a prerequisite to this collection. Critical disability studies, deaf studies, and mad studies, for example, trace the eugenic histories of universities, pointing out that disabled people historically were unwelcome in the academy (Dolmage, 2017; Kelly et al., 2021; Shanouda, 2019). They as well as feminists such as Sara Ahmed (2012) teach us to be critical of institutions that lean on jargon such as “inclusion” and “diversity” while simultaneously refusing to acknowledge historical and contemporary failures to make programming accessible, both online and offline. Disabled, d/Deaf, mad, and neurodivergent learners and teachers have spent decades advocating for access, and in some contexts educators have paid attention. For example, such advocacy sparked the creation in Canada of a publicly available, accessible class at Humber College, whose creation story is chronicled by Nathan Whitlock and Anne Zbitnew in their chapter, “Making Accessible Media: An Interview.” Their plans for developing an online course went beyond the basic retrofit formula of adding captioning, sign language interpretation, and clear language to their pedagogical tools. Instead, the authors ushered in a process of collaborative access that invited difference into the online space at the outset and remained committed to an ongoing engagement with evolving accessibility.

More commonly, though, access is uncritically conflated with universal approaches to classroom building, as in online teaching and learning inherently benefit everyone and are somehow exempt from the institution’s ongoing oppressive legacies. In their foundational work establishing critical access studies, Aimi Hamraie (2016, 2017) reminds us that the “benefits everyone” approach is a product of relatively young universal design philosophies transferred from fields of architecture in which a building is seen as accessible if it complies with a list of preset requirements. This checklist approach—which renders disability as depoliticized—has been applied to the digital world via Universal Design for Learning (UDL). Its advocates support a type of accessibility premised on the inclusion of all. To include everyone is to imagine those other than ourselves and plan for their presence. Although this type of planning seems to be a friendly intervention, it carries the colonial objectification of empathetic and inclusive design that leads educators into a process of othering students by making assumptions about their lived realities (Mehta & Gleason, 2021). Such simulation exercises cut off opportunities for learners to contribute their own strategies for removing barriers and heightening access (Williams, 2017). And, increasingly, as pandemic reflections fill the growing canon of critical digital pedagogy thought, we observe that, although COVID-19 provides new reference points for evaluating long-standing social problems that affect education (Sherwood et al., 2021), emergency remote education is sometimes touted as “a pathway to a new normal” rather than taken up as a short-term response with potential for meaningful social change (Grant-Smith & Payne, 2021). In this “post- or with-COVID-19” context (Vorstermans & Mohler, this volume), UDL re-emerges as a normalizing framework (“lessons learned”) as researchers offer new calls for individualized, solution-focused learning (Xiao, 2021) and in so doing identify challenges “experienced by all” (Lelli et al., 2021). This UDL creep is uncritical and dilutes the intricacies and complexities of access that disability scholars have animated in many different forms throughout the 50-year history of the field. This history includes Hamraie’s (2020) push for critical access studies, engaging with the political commitments of accessibility from the perspectives of disability justice and disability culture. With this in mind, and following María Migueliz Valcarlos et al.’s (2020) rephrasing of Audre Lorde’s (2007) seminal quotation, UDL creep has us asking: can we dismantle the master’s house with the master’s repurposed tools?

UDL creep looks like the omission of the “critical” and the “pedagogy” from the field of critical digital pedagogy—a move against which Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel caution (2018, p. 1). This depoliticization takes many forms: a focus on best practices, a push for universal approaches, ontological leanings toward online pedagogy as inherently constructive, and the chronic upholding of supercrip narratives when disabled people are teaching and learning online. However, as Hannah Stevens and Mary McCall explain in their chapter, “Students as Designers, not Consumers: Framing Accessible, Participatory Learning as a Social Justice Approach to Online Course Design,” universal approaches, rooted as they are in disability activism (Hamraie, 2017), are also a useful ramping up toward online teaching and learning informed by the most affected. Universalist approaches have paved the way for user-centred design, which helps us to rethink the roles of teachers and learners, specifically shifting us away from consumer subjectivities by nurturing new understandings of the limits of widely used learning management systems and accessibility checklists. Here online teaching and learning can be oriented toward disabled, mad, d/Deaf, and neurodivergent people’s experiences. In this way, we can start to crip critical digital pedagogy. A crip approach is highly political and engages with online discoveries that account for a focus on intersectional justice that centres on anti-blackness, anti- Indigenous racism, queering online spaces, and collective resistance. At least two chapters in this collection argue for a crip approach: Kimberlee Collins, Kristin Smith, and Donna Jeffery’s “Online Social Work Education in Canada: Disappearing Disability in the Academy” and Fiona Cheuk and Esther Ignagni’s “Materializing Access in the Dematerialized Space of Higher Education Online Classrooms” point to the potential reclamation of time and embodiment amid digital interactions. And, following Kelly Fritsch (2016), if we take crip to be an action verb—as something that we can do online—then we find ourselves at the precipice of crip technoscience, a theoretically based field of research and practice that disabled people have nurtured for some time.

With decades of crip technoscience leading up to the conference presentation in 2018 that prompted this collection (the one at which I found myself not clapping), I wondered: where is the critical thought? Where is the crip legacy? My refusal to clap for a presentation so blatantly and tiredly ableist in its singular explanation of online learning as beneficial to disabled students is what Vorstermans and Mohler call a “moment of reckoning” in the final chapter of this collection. Sad, enraged, and unsure what to make of it all, I returned to my job and tried to smile at my students from behind a webcam as I delivered yet another online class.

Troubles Online as Accessible Critical Digital Pedagogy

We began to scope out potential contributors to this book in early 2019, before a pandemic scuttled us into worldwide lockdowns and distinguished routine online learning practices from “forced online distance education” (Kovacs et al., 2021), “emergency remote teaching” (Hodges et al., 2020), or “emergency remote education” (Xiao, 2021). Our focus in the initial stages of this book was on the political context and critique of our growing engagement with online education. This would not be a book touting the advances of online learning, even as global lockdowns pushed us all online in 2020. Many universities were ill equipped to make the move so quickly. This disruption to normative culture was welcomed by some disabled students and faculty because barriers once solely the burden of disabled people were now collective, global conditions that required the deployment of sweeping digital access strategies. However, this incidental access “failed to reach its full crip potential” (Chandler et al., 2022). To paraphrase Eliza Chandler and co-authors, accessible modes of connecting, such as through live-streamed events and classes, were standard fare in disability communities but suddenly were taken up as pandemic practices rather than accessibility practices. Since then, pandemic-focused critiques of online teaching and learning have also decentred access, leaving behind crip communities whose digital interventions have been crucial to our capacity to work in times of crisis.

As pandemic conditions progressed, we remained aware that our early obligatory online presences came with unignorable warning signs of the troubling state of the neo-liberal university and its ableist demands. These troubles are still with us as institutions work to curb what we’ve learned about emergency remote access into narratives of universal design and hyper-productivity as well as a type of flexibility that individualizes and self-responsibilizes students’ choices in very gendered, racialized, and classed ways (Cherry et al., 2021 Dolmage, 2017; Fleming, 2021 Gair et al., 2021; Houlden & Veletsianos, 2021; Manzi et al., 2019). As the neo-liberal university strategizes for its diversity agenda (Ahmed, 2012), marginalized people’s experiences of online education are still under-represented. And, although legislation in different parts of the world (e.g., the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act in Ontario, where we are based, or the Americans with Disabilities Act in the United States) directs accessible course building, academic ableism still unremittingly shapes learning and teaching experiences in the ableist, colonial context of higher education. And, though teaching tips about Universal Design for Learning are easy to find, the precariousness of access-related labour remains hidden (Dolmage, 2017). This techno-determinist rhetoric has been in place since the start of the e-learning movement, what Norm Friesen (2012) calls an “optimistic technological determinism” that emphasizes only the positive qualities of technology inclusion, ties innovation and progress to technology development, and subsequently marks those critical of its inclusion as Luddites, if not worse. Up against a form of technological determinism rapidly pushing us and our students online, we propelled this collection forward, feeling a deep need to create space for radical reimaginings of what critically troubling online teaching and learning can mean.

As we stated above, not giving up is to “stay with the trouble,” which means turning toward, critiquing, and resisting cultural myths that position online learning as an apolitical, ahistorical, and universally inclusive solution to the problem of inaccessible education without questioning the motives behind its implementation. For example, an institution might claw back the recently learned accessibility practices listed in Jay Dolmage’s foreword in favour of getting “back to normal” but still allow some online enrolment to prevent students for whom campuses remain unsafe from dropping out. This move can be marketed as curricula enhancement, and the catch is that academic ableism takes a new form: in-person retrofits are abandoned as many with bodymind differences are relegated online not in the interest of access but for the benefit of the institution’s bottom line. The notion that access can be produced through a superficial shift online lets institutions get away with not creating new classroom and pedagogical designs. Assumptions that treat technology as an inherently “good thing” ignore complex socio-cultural contours that constitute bodymind difference and buy in to neo-liberal ideologies that risk “offering more of the same” (Selwyn et al., 2020, p. 2). Instead of falling prey to simple but persuasive arguments that online pedagogy is an automatic win for access, we offer Troubles Online as a new orientation to critical digital accessible pedagogy that can alter our ideas of what it means to teach and learn in higher education.

Our hopeful turn toward new modes of thinking through pedagogy brings us to another trouble, evoked by imaginings of the “misfit,” a feminist materialist concept that Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2011) uses to describe those never invited into normative social structures such as higher education. Generally, misfits are not the imagined students and teachers who are young, non-disabled, tech savvy, unburdened by other responsibilities, and available to keep up with digital updates. Tressie McMillan Cottom refers to the imagined universal user of online learning spaces as the “roaming auto-didact,” “a self-motivated, able learner that is simultaneously embedded in technocratic futures and disembodied from place, culture, history, and markets … [and] conceived as western, white, educated and male” (2017, p. 8). However, we misfits find ourselves here, online, disrupting the norms that brought us to this very collection. Work by misfits is chronicled in the fields of Indigenous technoscience and critical access studies, both of which describe an action-based process driven by those most affected by inaccessibility (Hamraie, 2017). In A Digital Bundle: Protecting and Promoting Indigenous Knowledge Online, Jennifer Wemigwans (2018) describes how online work can affect the flow of power between Indigenous people and the state when informed by frameworks of Indigenous resurgence. And a combination of transnational studies and postcolonial technoscience points to a renewed awareness that our borders are blurred amid the context of the international online traffic of people, ideas, and technologies that keeps higher education going (Anderson, 2002). The digital labour behind higher education is a movement with deep, multidirectional roots worthy of study, held in place by the intellectual anchor of crip, disabled, mad, and neurodiverse people’s legacies of theorizing access. This collection, then, can represent only a sliver of this theorizing and contains noticeable absences: despite our efforts and those of the press at recruitment, Indigenous people are under-represented in this collection. There might be many reasons for this, not the least of which is that Indigenous technoscience is burgeoning elsewhere; other groups are gathering a myriad of commentary on online teaching and learning to come. The individual and collective actions of those within and beyond this collection are reimagining online education—a reimagining that has us delighting in the prospect of a final, and hopeful, vision of trouble to push forward. Oh, the trouble we can cause!

The Second “Moment of Reckoning,” 2020

With the COVID-19 pandemic in full force, we issued a new call for submissions to this book. We also invited the original authors to recast their chapters, dipping into both pre-pandemic and pandemic eras in their critical considerations of online work. The aim of these revisions was to ensure that emerging narratives on online praxis would carry the necessary context to inform our reimaginings of accessible critical digital pedagogy. During this time, I, Fady, was working at an art and design university as an instructional designer. A decision was made early on at the university to encourage asynchronous course delivery, but not everyone saw its merits. One faculty member argued that an asynchronous approach was inaccessible, that it siloed students at a time when they needed community and collaboration. She maintained that asynchronicity further divided a community of students, faculty, and staff that was already fractured.

I disagreed. An asynchronous modality acknowledged students who were working or caring for children or other family members and could not attend classes at prescribed times. This modality offered international students flexibility to participate during regular hours rather than disrupt their sleep schedules. A more flexible approach also gave disabled students access to recorded lectures that they could playback. Working asynchronously was a way of recognizing the lack of access to tech for some students in homes with only one computer or a spotty internet connection. My advocacy for asynchronous learning was prompted by the “Zoom fatigue” that many of us were (and might still be) experiencing. What this modality inevitably sparked was a constant reminder of this unusual moment—of the severe collective grief—when learning strictly on a schedule was far less important than self- and communal preservation. An asynchronous modality imagined and made room for a more complex student and teacher bodymind that was not only a product of the tech-centric 21st century but also desperately trying to survive a pandemic.

In retrospect, I think that we were both right. Asynchronicity provided the flexibility described above, but it could not build community or sustain it in the same ways as traditional in-person or synchronous modalities. Yet synchronous modalities were too rigid an approach for a time when everything was in chaos and students were thrust into situations for which they were unprepared and desperately tried to manage. Debates like these highlight tensions between instructor autonomy and student compassion, a common push-and-pull in the sphere of remote teaching, with educators seeking pedagogical tips from each other and from social media channels, including the “Pandemic Pedagogy” Facebook group that, at the time of writing, has over 32,000 members (Dam, 2021). Although we were both trying to create community and ensure flexibility—two goals that at times were contradictory—our focus on choosing the “right” modality clouded other possibilities. Similar tensions are described by authors in this collection. In “Poetic Journeys: College Students with Disabilities Navigating Unanticipated Transitions during the Pandemic,” two students write conflicting accounts of their experiences of learning during the pandemic and of the difficulties that they faced transitioning from in-person to online learning. The students’ poetry, curated by Mina Chun, illustrates the tensions between online and in-person learning. The tensions that Elena Garcia and Erika Johnson describe in “Ethical Challenges of Digital Technology and the Utah Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints” are similarly caught between the digital and material worlds, but in their case the tensions are compounded by conservative religious beliefs and tenets about technology that not only limit access to technology but also profess its dangers and warn against social media as political and toxic spaces. Teaching online in a religious community thus brings up additional access frictions that remain unresolved (Hamraie & Fritsch, 2019).

Many of the writers in this collection describe significant moments that changed their views, and subsequently their praxis, of online teaching and learning. For some, as for my colleague and me, the infamous “pivot” online represented another trouble: online teaching and learning seemed to be divorced from the foundational concepts of techno-ableism (Shew, 2018), crip technoscience (Hamraie & Fritsch, 2019), and techno-access (Jones et al., 2021). Instead, academia’s capacity to shift online quickly was touted as its own ahistorical saving grace: not only could technological adaptability keep the wheels of higher education spinning during a worldwide crisis, but also it could do so without much consideration for digital divides that amplify inequity and spark digital world making. Even when scholars did consider the digital divides created by the pandemic, the calls for action that followed, including more faculty training or improved technical solutions for educators and students, aimed to maintain the inaccessible demands that existed before the pandemic (Siddiquei and Kathpal, 2021).

This rupture had us taking sides in an ideological war that pitted asynchronous versus synchronous online course delivery against each other. I was following a UDL approach to online learning in my push for asynchronous course delivery. My colleague was invested in ensuring that emergency remote learning did not abandon those who needed the structure of the university the most. It seems that what we really needed was to complexify our digital pedagogy. There are many ways to embrace this complication. A mixed pedagogy—a layered pedagogy—of synchronous and asynchronous certainly would have been the best, but it too rubs up against labour issues, work-life balance, and the limits of what can be offered by faculty also dealing with the consequences of a global plague. Stommel and Morris, in Chapter 3 in this collection, speak to a third—“synchronish”—space online, one that acknowledges the absences we feel in digital spaces but makes room for us to create more accessible possibilities for online learning. The third space is cushioned between liminal zones of development in which complex hybrid discourses can offer counternarratives and possibilities for transformation (Hsieh & Saleh, 2021). Cheuk and Ignagni write from deep within this third space in their chapter in this volume. They reflect critically on a new digital space making built upon crip and decolonial sensibilities, in which blending our desires and approaches might lead us to come up with something more. In some respects, pandemic conditions made creativity and flexibility requisite parts of online pedagogy. In the final chapter, Vorstermans and Mohler suggest that one way to start this process is by applying a disability justice lens (Sins Invalid, 2015) that positions access as complex, non-formulaic, and emergent by barring the interconnected systems of racism, ableism, heterosexism, patriarchy, classism, and others “that structure higher education [and] are on full display” now, just as they were in pre-pandemic times. Selecting one modality over the other during COVID-19 thus had little impact on students’ experiences, especially if our conception of access was rooted in building in accommodations rather than in creating accessible critical digital pedagogies of care that trouble the entrenched exclusions of higher education. The authors in this collection describe new and exciting possibilities for accessible critical digital pedagogy that refuse an inaccessible future of compliance with already- existing, neo-liberal forms of academic ableism.

Troubling Post- and With-Pandemic Teaching and Learning

This book is not about recovery. It is not about getting back to normal. We are not going back to normal; the troubles at the heart of this collection remain unresolved as we move through the critical praxis of teaching and learning online. Instead, we are witnessing a growing area of pedagogical scholarship concerned with the material and affective impacts of the neo-liberal university’s push toward the digital even amid catastrophe and the subsequent exhaustion evoked by the state of the world. To strive for a return to normalcy would be to continue centring the norm in our visions for online pedagogy—a dangerous, ableist way forward.

The crux of this book is found in the notion—or the trouble—that digital learning is ready for and available to all when both in-person and online approaches remain inadequate (Hamraie, 2017; Hendren, 2020). There are complex reasons for this uncritical orientation toward universal design, as Felicita Arzu-Carmichael describes in her account of feminist activisms that consider bodies and presence in online spaces. In her chapter, “Virtual Bodies, Material Implications: Black Feminist Epistemology as a Framework for Online Education,” Arzu-Carmichael challenges the false dichotomy of professional and personal as she describes how and why her black scholar-teacher-mother body was a candidate for online teaching, explaining that the cultural narratives (“romantic notions of distance education”) that make online education the primary choice for some are important to understand. Arzu-Carmichael points out that, when our bodyminds do not fit into what online teaching and learning have to offer, we are faced with yet another trouble: difference becomes a problem and is wrongly inscribed on and internalized by individual users who fail to assimilate to the increasingly demanding requirements of a neo-liberalizing university system. We think of this scenario as a transference of academic ableism that accepts technological mediocrity in the name of progress without the input of those most affected (Sins Invalid, 2015). Manzoor and Bart’s (2021) review of 20 years of literature on the challenges of online learning suggest that those most affected are first-generation, undocumented, Indigenous, and international students. This review demonstrates a failure to consider disability in wider conversations about digital pedagogy; Troubles Online is an intervention in the absenting of affected disabled, d/Deaf, mad, neurodivergent, and other crip communities from the emerging literature. Urged on by critical theories that point to the possibilities of failure, including crip arts of failure that commit to “leaving no body behind” (Mitchell et al., 2014, p. 310), the authors in this collection point to a wealth of knowledge in the margins: we cannot continue to engage with online praxis without accounting for the sustained perspectives and genealogies of black, Indigenous, queer, and crip digital world making, technology creation, hacking, and social media resistance. As Christine “Xine” Yao (2018) argues, online pedagogy has a responsibility to weave the realities of this digital activism into its theory and praxis; these realities chronicle legacies of survival, push back, and strength through collective vulnerability (Hsieh & Saleh, 2021).

Conclusion

This book is premised on a wake-up call: we cannot continue to offer online pedagogy as a solution to the problem of academic ableism. In response, we offer seven troubles that propelled our thinking as the starting point for Troubles Online. From here, in concert with the collection’s authors, we follow Kevin Cherry et al.’s (2021) suggestion to move from critique to resistance and to expand our collective thinking on the troubles of accessible online teaching and learning. Each chapter challenges the usual expectations of what it means to make online learning accessible and to whom, in and beyond pandemic times. In the face of vulnerabilities and uncertainties embedded in this praxis, contributors trouble how education in digital realms shapes and responds to our ever-changing world. Necessarily interdisciplinary, this collection recognizes and narrates contemporary online pedagogical inquiry, setting new, critical standards for accessible teaching and learning and calling for justice-based approaches rather than a “return to normal.” Moving forward, we anticipate more complications in this space as different bodyminds in higher education continue to change and as digital and material overlaps complexify. We hope that you find this collection troubling, in the best of ways.

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