Speaking & Training
I offer invited talks and workshops for employers, higher education institutions, professional associations, and leadership audiences. Talks examine disability, ableism, accommodation systems, and institutional design. Workshops build on those ideas by giving participants structured methods for analyzing policies, practices, and decision-making processes and identifying where redesign is needed.
Invited Talks
We Need to Talk About Ableism
Why can most people define racism and sexism, but not ableism? This talk examines the costs of leaving ableism unnamed: structural barriers are interpreted as personal failures, institutional standards go unquestioned, and disabled people may internalize exclusion. Drawing on lived experience in higher education, it gives audiences language for recognizing ableism in their own institutions.
Understanding Disability as Diversity
This presentation examines disability as identity, culture, community, and a dimension of diversity too often reduced to accommodations and compliance. It considers what changes when institutions recognize disabled people’s shared histories, knowledge, and claims to belonging, including implications for visibility, disclosure, and institutional practice.
Higher Education Workshops
From Compliance to Belonging: An Infrastructure Parity Diagnostic
Using the Infrastructure Parity Diagnostic, participants examine whether disability is reflected in governance, institutional priorities, cultural programming, communications, and community life. They identify a priority gap and a feasible first institutional step. This workshop can follow Understanding Disability as Diversity or stand alone.
Ableism in Campus Policies and Practices
Participants use a structured diagnostic method to identify ableist assumptions in campus policies, procedures, technology, events, communications, and student-facing operations; examine the burdens those assumptions create; and consider what redesign requires.
Ableism in Teaching Practices
Faculty and academic leaders examine how course and assessment formats, participation requirements, and deadlines can mistake customary methods for academic standards. Using a structured diagnostic method, participants identify unnecessary barriers and consider alternative practices.
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An Infrastructure Parity Diagnostic. Whether disability is reflected in the governance, priorities, programming, communications, and community life of the institution.
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Where disability-related barriers are embedded in ordinary campus policies, procedures, routines, and participation expectations.
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How course and assessment design, participation expectations, and assumptions about deadlines and pacing create unnecessary barriers for disabled students.
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What Leadership and Departments Need to Know. How departmental policies, practices, and norms affect whether disabled faculty remain and succeed.
Retaining Disabled Faculty: What Leadership and Departments Need to Know
For department chairs, deans, provosts, and academic leaders, this workshop examines how workload, evaluation, tenure and promotion, and assumptions about productivity and professional legitimacy affect disabled faculty retention. Participants consider which expectations are genuinely necessary and which institutional practices could change.
Employment-Related Workshops
Making the ADA Interactive Process Work
This workshop examines why accommodation processes can become reviews of employee proposals rather than effective efforts to identify accommodations. Participants consider how responsibility is allocated, essential functions are analyzed, expertise is used, and the process continues when an initial option fails or is denied.
Ableism in Workplace Policies and Practices
Participants examine how workplace rules, technology, routines, and performance expectations can embed assumptions about bodies, minds, and ways of working. A structured method helps identify unnecessary barriers and consider changes to policies and operational practices.
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An Infrastructure Parity Diagnostic. Whether disability is reflected in the governance, priorities, programming, communications, and community life of the institution.
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Where disability-related barriers are embedded in ordinary campus policies, procedures, routines, and participation expectations.
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How course and assessment design, participation expectations, and assumptions about deadlines and pacing create unnecessary barriers for disabled students.
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What Leadership and Departments Need to Know. How departmental policies, practices, and norms affect whether disabled faculty remain and succeed.
Formats
Keynotes and invited talks run 45 to 60 minutes, including discussion. Workshops run from 90 minutes to a half day. Retaining Disabled Faculty and From Compliance to Belonging can also run as two-part series. All sessions are available in person or virtually and can be tailored to a conference, leadership retreat, or single department or team.
Selected Speaking Engagements
Upcoming
Philosophy, Disability and Social Change 7 - 2027
Eastern Division Meeting, American Philosophical Association - 2027
Recent
Leadership in Higher Education Conference (Magna) - 2026
AHEAD Annual Conference - 2026
Pacific ADA Symposium (with Mark Passero, Esq.) - 2026
NASPA Region II Annual Conference - 2026
Philosophy, Disability and Social Change 6 - 2026
Start a Conversation
To discuss an invited talk or workshop, please get in touch.