Speaking
Disability, Ableism, and Institutional Design
Overview
These talks examine how institutions and cultural norms shape responses to disability, from workplace accommodation systems to the psychological and social impacts of unnamed ableism. They are designed for audiences seeking analytic clarity and frameworks they can apply.
In some cases, institutions engage consulting to examine their own accommodation systems.
We Need to Talk About Ableism
For: Students, campus-wide audiences, public lectures, and orientation programs.
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 silence costs. It examines how disabled people internalize structural exclusion, how institutions hide behind “standards” and “merit,” 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.
Formats: Keynotes and invited lectures.
Structural Ableism in Institutional Practice
For: Institutional leaders, faculty, student affairs professionals, policymakers, and boards.
This talk defines structural ableism and examines how assumptions about standards, excellence, productivity, and professionalism become embedded in policy and practice. It distinguishes cultural narratives from institutional design failures and clarifies how they reinforce one another.
Participants leave with a framework for recognizing and addressing ableism as a governance issue rather than a peripheral compliance concern.
Formats: Keynotes, invited lectures, workshops, and professional development sessions.
Making the Interactive Process Work
For: Human Resources, ADA teams, employee relations, compliance partners, institutional leaders, and boards.
This talk examines why the ADA interactive process so often fails in practice and what effectiveness actually requires from employers. It analyzes recurring structural problems, including expertise mismatch, information asymmetry, risk-management defaults, front-loaded solution burdens, and lack of reassessment after accommodations are implemented.
The focus is institutional responsibility: clarifying what effective design of accommodation processes actually requires.
Formats: Keynotes, invited lectures, workshops, and professional development sessions.