Invited Talks
We Need to Talk About Ableism
Audience: Higher education institutions, employers, professional associations, and general audiences.
This keynote begins with a simple question: why can most people define racism and sexism, but not ableism? It argues that the absence of shared language is itself a form of harm. When ableism remains unnamed, systemic barriers are misrecognized as individual weakness or personal failure.
Drawing on lived experience navigating higher education with Just-Right Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, the talk traces what that silence costs. It examines how disabled people internalize structural exclusion, how institutions invoke “standards” and “merit” without examining the assumptions built into them, and how psychological harm follows when systems are never named.
Participants leave able to define ableism, recognize its patterns in their own environments, and understand why naming and challenging ableism belongs alongside their work on racism and sexism. Suitable for broad institutional audiences as a keynote or invited talk.
Understanding Disability as Diversity
Audience: Higher education institutions, employers, professional associations, and institutional leadership.
Disability is routinely treated as a legal or accommodation category while its identity, cultural, and political dimensions remain largely absent from institutional diversity and belonging work.
This presentation examines disability as a dimension of human diversity and considers what becomes possible when institutions recognize disabled people as members of a community with shared histories, knowledge, culture, and claims to belonging. It addresses visibility, disclosure, internalized ableism, and the limits of accommodations-only approaches.
Adaptable for higher education institutions, professional associations, employers, and broader institutional audiences. Campuses ready to act on these ideas can follow it with the workshop From Compliance to Belonging.