An Interview with Annika Konrad

Emma Kostopolus

Annika Konrad is a Senior Lecturer at Dartmouth College. She earned her PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research focuses on disability, rhetoric, and the intersections thereof, and her writing has appeared in The Best of the Journals in Rhetoric and Composition, Composition Forum, and, most recently, College English. I met her when she gave a talk at the University of Kansas and was struck by the utility of her framework for thinking about access. I wanted to talk to her more in-depth about her ideas, as she continues the work of turning them into a longer project. Interview by Emma Kostopolus. ''Emma:'' First of all, as we get started with this, I just wanted to thank you so much for speaking to me and for engaging in this work and this labor, since the process of ever talking to anyone about anything involves some legwork on your part. I feel particularly with the work that you do in your concept of access fatigue. So just thank you very, very much for agreeing to do this and for engaging in this work with me and for everyone who's going to read the eventual interview. ''Annika:'' Thank you for inviting me to talk. [[Settling Terms and Definitons|continue A]] [[Situating Within a Broader Conversation|continue B]] [[Praxis|continue C]]

''Emma:'' Your recent article that came out in College English (Konrad, 2021) was about this concept of access fatigue, which was something that I became familiar with when you visited the University of Kansas campus a couple of years ago and gave a talk about it. I think it's really important work that we need to be thinking consciously about. But before we get going, for anyone who hasn't read the College English article, which I will, of course, link to. But if you could just give us a brief explanation of this concept of access fatigue as you understand it in your work, and if your understanding of it has progressed beyond the College English article as you've continued working on it. [[Context and Readings for Question]] [[Response]]

''Annika:'' The concept of access fatigue is part of my way of answering this question that I feel like I always come back to and have had for the last few decades of my life. Why is it so hard to talk about disability? When I conducted interviews with people who are blind and visually impaired, I discovered a similar pattern in their experiences as I had experienced spending years, if not decades first, not talking about disability at all, and spending that long, really like decades of figuring out how exactly to do it. And through my analysis, I was also finding that deciding to talk or not talk about disability actually has real consequences for people. It has consequences for their access to material, things like documents and employment and education, but it also has consequences for their social, emotional, and mental wellbeing. I found that not only is it hard for people to figure out how to talk about disability, but there can be so many instances in which people have to figure out how to talk about it, how to ask for what they need. So many instances, even within a given interaction or within a given day that the demand to do so can be so overwhelming that people, sometimes people just give up and don't communicate, don't ask for access altogether. I had personally felt this sense of exhaustion as well in situations where I was kind of constantly having to remind people about, say, sending me electronic versions of their presentations or things like that, that I found myself a lot of the times just not doing it and therefore actually missing out on information and doing that for years and years and, and almost so much that I didn't even see it as a problem, right, that I was missing that information. Then by seeing the similar pattern in other people's accounts, I had this realization—Oh! this is more than just exhaustion. This is an actual phenomenon specific to the work of seeking access. And I think where my thinking is going, and isn't maybe fully fleshed out in the College English article, but I'm hoping it'll go in the direction of theorizing access as a fundamentally rhetorical phenomenon, something that requires rhetorical competencies from people with disabilities and requires so much so much labor that at times it's simply not worth the effort. [[Toward a Habit of Interdependence|continue 2]] [[Back to Section Questions|continue A]] [[Back to Section Selection|Introduction ]]

''Emma:'' In this article, you talk about how, in the public imagination, we often conceive of access as procedural and how it's about the processes of getting these certain material goods or services provided. And how that's maybe a framework and a way that we're thinking about it that is not perhaps getting the full picture or is not the most productive. In my experiences with access both as an instructor who has worked with trying to make those spaces accessible and as someone who has needed to ask for access in things for herself, I have often found that I've conceived of access, perhaps not fully, but in part as a structural thing, right, where the structures in which we are operating have very real ramifications for the access that we are allowed to provide or to be provided. So I was just wondering if you had a thought about branching off this article, or what frameworks for thinking of access kind of move beyond the procedural and what might be a more productive or holistic framework? [[Context for Question|info 2]] [[Response|response 2]]

Synopsis on current models of thinking surrounding disability (Models of Disability, 2022) Current perspectives and tips on creating accessible learning environments by Vanderbilt University (Thurber & Brandy, 2018) [[Response|response 2]] [[Back to Section Questions|continue A]]

''Annika:'' I think it's a tough question because on the one hand we don't want to totally abandon the structures that we have in place, right? Because they do initiate a process of accessing funds and resources that are allocated for people with disabilities. But I think what is not being accounted for in those structures is this kind of unseen labor on the part of individuals to access those structures in the first place, and then utilize those structures in ways that actually work for them. And a lot of that then depends on interacting with individuals within the structure and getting them to do things in ways that will work for them. So I'm thinking about, say, like a lot of the people I interviewed even if they had, say, formal accommodations available for them in the workplace or in school, they still required that they interacted with their colleagues or teachers in such a way that helped them learn how to do things a little bit differently in a way that would help them. For example, I'm thinking of a teacher of the visually impaired I interviewed who teaches K–12 students. I think she was referring to high school students in this particular example. She has to coach those students to remind the teachers, and help the teachers figure out how, to give them documents in the right format. So the students may already have the technologies that they need in order to access that information in a way that's going to work for them, but they still have to negotiate with their instructors in a way to help them remember, okay, this is where the folder is, where I need you to put the document. This is the kind of format the document needs to be in. And that's hard work for—especially for—a teenager. And that's a lot of labor on top of the labor of accessing something in a format, which was not originally created in, or in a way that it was not when it was not created to be accessed in that way. So I think that we need, and I'm in the process of developing, a theory that I'm thinking of as a structure of habit for interdependence. Because, as I was just describing, I feel that a lot of what I'm seeing is this work that individuals have to do to get people around them to be open to change, to be open to doing things differently, to invite engagement with difference, to embrace unfamiliar relationality, to uptake the work of restructuring things. And I think, a lot, we are not really in the habit of doing those kinds of things. We're not really in the habit, unless it applies to us, of taking on that work of figuring out, okay, how can we do this a little bit differently? And how can we make that part of our actual habit? I think it's a matter of finding a way to keep the resources that the structures we have make possible, keep those in place while individuals develop a habit of being more interdependent and actually taking up the work of access in small ways in everyday life. [[Follow-Up|continue 3]] [[Back to Section Questions|continue A]] [[Back to Section Selection|Introduction ]]

''Emma:'' This theory of this habit of interdependence is really fascinating to me. I don't want to ask you to dig into it if it's something that's still in the ether, but you're referring to something as interdependent in this way, I think, is super important because so often we don't think of things like access as being a habit, something that benefits all. So could you talk perhaps a little more about that? [[Response|response 3]]

''Annika:'' I wrote a whole chapter on it, so I should have something to say, whether I can formulate it now. I'm trying to think of an example that comes to mind that would help me ground it. One thing I'm thinking of is that a lot of what I was really interested in participant accounts I gathered was that a lot of people, not all participants, but some, seem to have actually developed pedagogies of interdependence. So after years, decades of not talking about disability, figuring out how to talk about it over time, some people seem to have actually developed pedagogical theories about what they think works in getting people to actually learn habits that will result in access and then transfer those habits to future situations. So one small example was one woman I interviewed described that she tries to positively reinforce and actually point out to people what exactly they're doing that is providing access so that they become conscious of it and then can do it on their own. So, actually, when I was interviewing her, we were sitting in a coffee shop, and a barista came over and put a coffee mug down. And I think she had been there before. So they had some prior point of reference. They put the coffee mug down on the table and, and said to her, your coffee mug is, you know, in front of your hand to the left and it's very hot. And she responded and said, "Thank you for letting me know where it is and that it's hot." And she pointed that out as an example of making people conscious of the things that they're doing that make access possible. And so I think that what I'm imagining and hoping for is a way of developing a pedagogy that we can actually use to teach people how to think in access-oriented ways and actually uptake habits of interdependence. And part of how I've seen that happen in my own teaching again comes from making transparent the work of access. So obviously my students become very attuned to accessibility because the content of the class is about disability and accessibility, but I try to not only make transparent what I am doing as an instructor to create an accessible experience for them, but also to find ways to make them responsible for creating accessible experiences for me and for each other. So, for example, on the first day of class, I talked with them about what access looks like for me and what it looks like for them. So I set up our way of thinking about access as very collaborative. And I ask them when they're interacting with each other, say in workshop groups to be thinking about, okay, my peers may have different preferences for ways that they'd like to receive feedback, different modalities they'd like to use. Maybe they would prefer written. Maybe they would prefer a Zoom call, a video recording and to actually ask their peers what, what they would prefer, to give them options. And so I know this sounds like really small things, but my goal essentially is to teach students to be responsible for access for each other and then take those habits with them into other classes. So that's kind of an example of how I see that structure of habit for interdependence happening. [[Back to Section Questions|continue A]] [[Back to Section Selection|Introduction ]]

''Emma:'' I think it's important that we're considering not just big macrostructural things, but that we are considering daily lived experiences. Going back to referencing that College English article, you talk about that access demands a list of four things. And I was really interested in the last one, which is pedagogy, and talking about how, in order to achieve access, people who need the access have to develop these rhetorical competencies and the access is itself kind of a rhetorical competency thing. It feels like that rhetorical competency is something that is very consciously learned and taken up and developed. Even though I'm someone who has needed to ask for access in the past, that it's not something that I feel particularly skilled at. And so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how the process of this pedagogy develops and how we could use that, then, to shift into getting everyone to think about access as this more collaborative endeavor. [[Response|response 4]]

''Annika:'' Over the past few months, I've been looking at this question as I revisit the interviews and that is essentially the story I'm trying to tell in the book. I can say for now that I'm finding that the journey of developing rhetorical competencies for access is intimately intertwined with the continual process of developing a sense of self as someone who has both abilities and needs and ultimately being able to sell that coupling of characteristics to others as legitimate. People with disabilities are often encouraged to be as independent as possible, including developing self-advocacy skills for access. The problem that this logic contains is that it requires a sense of disabled self as capable and having needs. Many people I interviewed develop understandings of themselves through the ways that others see them, which disarticulates their abilities from their needs. In other words, they do not always see themselves as BOTH capable and having needs—the ways people react to them disarticulate those two characteristics from each other, which makes asking for access more rhetorically risky. If you don't view yourself as both capable and having needs, then asking for help feels like an admission of defect, of failure, an exposure of difference and you're more likely than not to avoid it. On the other hand, over time some people seem to slowly develop an understanding of themselves as BOTH capable and having needs and develop competencies for showing other people that they can have abilities and needs. This rhetorical work, though, is demanding and involves inventing ways to demonstrate ability, create comfort around difference, and teach other people how to participate in meeting their needs. While some people do seem to develop more calculated approaches over time, it is not a linear progression—there are still fits and starts and setbacks, and it is still an exhausting, relentless demand that at times, is simply not worth the effort and at times people need to disengage out of a need for self preservation. [[Next Question|continue 6]] [[Back to Section Questions|continue C]] [[Back to Section Selection|Introduction ]]

''Emma:'' When you were theorizing access fatigue in this article, you drew on a lot of intersectional theory, right? You drew some on critical race theory, you drew some on some feminist theory. I think it's really important to always be explicit and have the conversation about how the work we're doing is intersectional and how we consider those things. And so I was wondering if you could just speak a little bit about how you see those other bodies of theory informing the work that you were doing and how these bodies of theory are all informing one another through the lens of this thing that you have created. [[Context for Question|info 5]] [[Response|response 5]]

Op-ed on intersectional disability (Perspective: Disability and Intersectionality, 2017) Essay on intersectional disability in the academy (Manchanda, 2020) [[Response|response 5]] [[Back to Section Questions|continue B]]

''Annika:'' I think, put simply, the labor of being accepted within dominant society is something that has been theorized in rhetorical studies, critical race studies, and intersectional feminist studies—the labor of seeing yourself through the lens of the dominant society and the emotional and social tolls of that have been theorized through microaggressions. But I think that what access fatigue is attempting to do is to specifically theorize what the fatigue of disability access specifically looks like. I think that what might be unique about the labor of seeking disability access is that it often requires other people doing everyday routine things differently and inputting energy, tools, and resources into redesigning those activities. Like I was explaining before, kind of having this openness to kind of reimagining everyday tasks and habits and ways of moving. At the same time, I want to highlight that the work of seeking disability access—which as I state above involves moving others to reimagine and redesign routine activities—is intimately intertwined with how we all think and feel about disability and disabled people. We cannot disarticulate the actual work of access from our collective thoughts and feelings about disability, and this is where the prior work of critical race and intersectional feminist scholars is hugely helpful in understanding how everyday acts of inclusion are tied up with collective feelings about embodied difference. I am very much benefiting from the work of critical race scholars and intersectional feminist scholars who have given me the language to understand how socially and emotionally draining it can be to attempt to seek inclusion to the dominant. What I'm hoping to add to that conversation is understanding how disability access specifically calls us to be more willing and open to reimagining and redesigning everyday spaces and interactions in ways that pushes us to reconsider how we think about those everyday spaces, interactions in, in tasks and in normative and ableist ways. [[Next Question|continue 7]] [[Back to Section Questions|continue B]] [[Back to Section Selection|Introduction ]]

''Emma:'' You've spoken about how you use these lenses and these things in your own classroom and how it's all a process of communicating what you're doing and then getting them to see access in their spaces. What are some methods that you use in getting those conversations to happen in the classroom? Because you've mentioned before that there can be a lot of discomfort surrounding it. So how do you foster those conversations productively in a classroom space? [[Context for Question|info 6]] [[Response|response 6]]

Introduction to Universal Design for Learning (UDL) (Morin, n.d.) Guidelines for UDL instruction (CAST, 2018) [[Response|response 6]] [[Back to Section Questions|continue C]]

''Annika:'' I kind of think about it in two categories. On the one hand, currently I'm teaching classes where the subject is the rhetoric of disability and accessibility. We read about it, and so there's no way around not talking about it. But in cases where that is not the subject matter of the class, I see that work happening more in the way that I frame the class around accessibility. As I mentioned, I start the class by talking about what access looks like for me and what access looks like for them. The very first thing that I talk about is accessibility. And that's very different for students, right? Even if they're first year students, they're like, this isn't something that professors talk about, especially not the first thing that they talk about. I follow the recommendations of Tara Wood and Shannon Madden (2013), who have that great Kairos webtext about syllabus accessibility statements. And I mentioned Universal Design to students on the first day as something that I'll be using as a way to design their learning experience. But I know that many of them likely don't know what that means. And so when I'm explaining, say, what we're going to do on any given day, I might say we'll work on this one concept first by watching a video, and then we'll talk about it in groups. And then we'll do some individual free writing about it as a way to give you many different opportunities to engage with this concept or to give different learners different ways of understanding and engaging with this concept. I'm always experimenting with different forms—are you familiar with ungrading? (Note from Annika: The strategy I describe above of making transparent multiple different ways of engaging could be read as just good pedagogy. But I'm pushing for more than that. The system of ungrading I describe below aims to actually dismantle the normative and ableist assumptions we have as teachers about what counts as learning and what learning looks like. In other words, you can have good pedagogy that involves offering multiple different means of engagement but still have normative and singular markers of success and learning driving the pedagogy.) ''Emma:'' More or less? It's been something that I've considered but haven't really played around with a whole lot. ''Annika:'' I want to start from the assumption that students engage and express what they know in different ways. So this past term, I experimented with collaborative self-assessment—allowing students to suggest a grade and provide justification for that grade based on their assessment of how they met the learning objectives. And that was pretty revealing in helping me understand all the different ways that a student might engage and removing me as the single authority who can actually see and evaluate their modes of engagement. When I ask students to create things I also ask them to think about accessibility. For example, in my most recent class, one of the units involved writing a digital essay that they published on a WordPress blog, and it involved making choices about visual rhetoric and everything from font and text size to including media and part of that work of the rhetorical work of figuring out, how do you reach a broad audience? How do you communicate your ideas to a broader audience fundamentally requires thinking about accessibility. It was super interesting because I actually heard students take up accessibility in ways I wasn't even initially thinking about, right. Like, so I was thinking mostly about, like, is your WordPress screen reader accessible? But I heard students taking up the lens of accessibility in thinking about their actual language and setting a goal for themselves to make the research writing they had already done more accessible for a wide audience in its voice and tone and language, which I thought was really awesome. I think really my ultimate goal is to get students to see accessibility as part of the rhetorical situation, right? Like, we can't really think about rhetoric or how we successfully get across what it is that we want to get across to the people we want to get it across to, without thinking about whether that information and motive, expression is accessible to the people we want to get it across to. I think that speaks to—it's not only my pedagogical goal but also the theoretical question I want to tackle is, what happens if we put accessibility at the center of this, of the rhetorical situation, what else needs to change? How do we need to rethink how we think about the rhetorical situation? [[Next Question| continue 8]] [[Back to Section Questions|continue C]] [[Back to Section Selection|Introduction ]]

''Emma:'' How do you plan to continue taking up and what are some future directions for this work, as you see it, or new directions that you want to take it in? [[Response|response 7]]

''Annika:'' I'm currently at the outset of turning this all into a book project, where I hoped to lay forth these concepts of access, fatigue, rhetorical pedagogy of interdependence, as well as one called normative commonplaces, which we didn't really talk about. From there, I am hoping to further develop the concept of access fatigue by getting more insight from more people with different disabilities. So the thing that excites me the most about the concept of access fatigue is getting it out there and seeing what people do with it and, and what they make of it. I think it's a concept that could be really impactful and useful for people, because I think it names something that a lot of people have experienced but haven't had a language for. So, first, I'm really excited to see what people do with it. And I think it's a concept that could be really useful in a field, say, like counseling psychology. I'm really interested in thinking about how we can use the framework of access fatigue to help people with disabilities, understand what it is that they're going through. So much of the way people with disabilities are, if they're given anything or at all or the way they are taught to think about disability is primarily biological, primarily their own responsibility. And so I'm thinking about, like, what if I, or my participants, had been given the language of access fatigue to understand what we were going through. I would love to continue developing that by hearing from more people with different disabilities, mental health experiences, to understand how it applies to their experiences, to see how it might be taken up in different ways. Here at Dartmouth, I've grown interested in student advocacy surrounding accessibility. There's a very new student group at Dartmouth called Access Dartmouth. They've been involved in basically promoting accessibility in different parts of campus. For example, when Elizabeth Warren visited campus, they worked with her campaign to figure out how to make it more accessible. And in working with my students who have developed their own research projects about accessibility, I've gotten to think about a lot of different ways that accessibility creates rhetorical challenges. So for example, Dartmouth is a college where the outdoors is a big deal. We are in the middle of the woods, and a lot of student life surrounds being outdoors and outdoor activities. There has been some movement among students and in academia and thinking about what inclusion means in the outdoors, from the perspective of race and class, but not so much disability, as usually is the case. And so I've had some students who've done research about what accessibility to the outdoors means and what arguments for accessibility to the outdoors look like and what the challenges are. And it's been really interesting to learn about how environmental philosophy stemming from the philosophy of leaving no trace, being outdoors and not disrupting the environment and conservation, how that often can conflict with accessibility. And so my students have been thinking about, like, how do we rethink what it means to be accessible in the outdoors while still maintaining the philosophies of conservation? So that's gotten me really excited just to see what rhetorical challenges students have encountered in their advocacy surrounding accessibility in campus life. And I would definitely like to continue working with building this structure of habit for interdependence, and that will likely involve more pedagogy, pedagogy-oriented study, where I'm looking at, say, how students are, or aren't, actually learning habits of accessibility. I would really like to tackle that question of, can we get students to think about accessibility as part of the rhetorical situation, and how might that change how they think about the composition process? [[Back to Section Questions|continue B]] [[Back to Section Selection|Introduction ]]

Annika Konrad's personal website "Access Fatigue: The Rhetorical Work of Disability in Everyday Life" by Annika Konrad (2021) in College English [[Response]] [[Back to Section Questions|continue A]]

''Annika:'' When I teach my course on rhetoric of disability and accessibility, students want to believe that technology can open access for people with disabilities. What they are surprised to learn is that assistive technologies are often not very accessible—they can be hugely expensive, unattractive, and limiting, and even accessibility features built into mainstream technologies can be buggy, incompatible with other software, and unreliable. What my book aims to show is that we all participate in creating the inaccessible situations that technologies aim to modify. In addition to improving the design and distribution of accessible technology, we need to understand how we are all responsible for reimagining the situations that technology aims to adapt. While adaptation is often imagined as something that a single user does on their own to meet their own needs, access requires our collective participation in altering a situation by reimagining routine tasks and activities and redefining how we imagine what it means to be agentive in any given situation. It requires that we see cooperation among human and nonhuman tools and adaptive strategies—rather than autonomy—as a source of agency and requires altering how in any given situation we determine what counts and who belongs. For example, one blind woman I spoke to described being "tech savvy" but still needing to do a lot of work to educate people about how to make it possible for her to use that technology. When she attends presentations, she often has to remind the presenter several times to share their materials ahead of time so she can read them on her own screen. While the public radio app on her phone is technically accessible, its front door is not, leaving her with the task of contacting the developers to educate them about how an app with an inaccessible front door doesn't allow her to use it without the help of a sighted friend. A teacher of the visually impaired who described having to coach her K–12 students on how to teach their classroom teachers to make sure their documents are in accessible formats and how to find the shared drive where they can place it to share it with the blind student. She also described having her students give show-and-tell presentations to their classes in which they describe each piece of assistive technology they use to help their peers understand it and admire it, rather than other it. Another blind woman rejected a video magnifier before she left for college, a tool that would have greatly aided her ability to read, because she didn't want to have to explain it—she didn't want to have to explain to her roommate and anyone else who would visit their dorm what it was for and why she had it. These examples remind me that technology is part of the rhetorical situation of access, by which I mean that it is situated within the fabric of everyday routines and activities. In addition to improving the design of technology so that it is more accessible, we all need to participate in redesigning our routine tasks and activities to make them more open to users with a range of bodies and minds. This work involves challenging our tacit assumptions about who belongs and what counts and making space for notions agency and base empowerment on cooperation among human and nonhuman tools and adaptive strategies. [[Back to Section Questions|continue C]] [[Back to Section Selection|Introduction ]]

''Emma:'' The affordances and constraints of different types of technology often play a large role in our classrooms and our lives, particularly in terms of how they provide or occlude access—what we can research, what we can experience, and what and how we can compose. How do you see technology, either granularly or writ large, working with or against the ideas you've brought forward here? Are there ways people interested in the affordances of technology can take up these ideas, say, in digital spaces? [[Response|response 8]]

[[ Defining Access Fatigue|Continue]] [[Toward a Habit of Interdependence|continue 2]]

[[Concerns of Intersectionality|continue 5]] [[Future Research Directions|continue 7]]

[[Developing Rhetorical Competencies for Access|continue 4]] [[Practical Classroom Applications of Theory|continue 6]] [[The Affordances and Constraints of Technology| continue 8]]