Speaking and Training
I offer invited talks and workshops for employers, higher education institutions, professional associations, and leadership audiences. My presentations examine disability, ableism, accommodation systems, and institutional design. My workshops build on those ideas by giving participants structured methods for analyzing policies, practices, and decision-making processes and identifying where redesign is needed.
Selected Speaking Engagements
Upcoming
Leadership in Higher Education Conference (Magna) — 2026
Philosophy, Disability and Social Change 7 — 2027
Eastern Division Meeting, American Philosophical Association — 2027
Recent
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
Invited Talks
We Need to Talk About Ableism
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.
This presentation is suitable for broad institutional audiences and can be delivered as a keynote or invited talk.
Understanding Disability as Diversity
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 changes 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.
The presentation can be adapted for higher education institutions, professional associations, employers, and broader institutional audiences.
Employer Workshops
Making the ADA Interactive Process Work
Many accommodation processes are structured to evaluate employee requests rather than conduct a genuine search for reasonable accommodations.
This workshop examines how responsibility is allocated, how essential functions are analyzed, what information and expertise are used, and why processes often end before reasonable options have been fully explored.
Participants work through process failures, case examples, and practical methods for improving accommodation identification and decision-making.
The workshop can be adapted for HR, employee relations, ADA coordinators, legal counsel, managers, and organizational leaders.
Ableism in Workplace Policies and Practices
Ableism is often embedded in ordinary workplace rules, routines, technologies, performance expectations, and assumptions about how work should be done.
Participants use a structured method to identify where workplace practices privilege a narrow range of bodies and minds, examine the burdens those practices create, and consider whether familiar methods are genuinely necessary.
The workshop focuses on policies and operational practices rather than individual attitudes alone. Examples can be tailored to hiring, job design, attendance, meetings, communication, performance evaluation, technology, and return-to-work processes.
Higher Education Workshops
Retaining Disabled Faculty: What Leadership and Departments Need to Know
Departmental and institutional decisions shape whether disabled faculty can remain, contribute, and advance.
The relevant systems include how work is assigned, how performance is evaluated, how advancement is structured, and how expectations around productivity, presence, and career pace are defined and enforced.
This training helps department chairs, division heads, deans, provosts, directors, and other academic leaders examine the assumptions built into those systems and identify where customary expectations are being treated as necessary requirements; it can also be adapted for individual departments.
Ableism in Teaching Practices
Many of the barriers disabled students encounter are built into how teaching and learning are structured—not into campus policy, but into the ordinary design of courses, assessments, and classrooms.
Participants examine how assessment formats, participation expectations, and timeline assumptions embed capacities that are treated as academic standards rather than as one way of meeting them. Using a structured diagnostic method, they identify the assumptions built into a practice, the burdens it creates, and what redesign would require.
The training focuses on course and assessment design rather than individual attitudes. Examples are drawn from exam formats, participation structures, assignment requirements, and deadline and pacing decisions.
This training is designed for faculty and can be adapted for departments, faculty development programs, and academic affairs leadership.
Ableism in Campus Policies and Practices
Many barriers disabled students encounter are created by ordinary campus policies, procedures, routines, and participation expectations rather than intentional exclusion.
Participants examine how ableism appears in administrative processes, student-facing operations, technology, events, communications, and everyday institutional defaults.
Using a structured diagnostic method, they identify the assumptions built into a practice, the burdens it creates, and what redesign would require.
This training is designed for cross-functional campus audiences, including disability services, student affairs, academic affairs, faculty, and institutional leadership.
Does Your Campus Treat Disability as Diversity?
Accommodations can provide access to particular courses, spaces, or activities. They do not by themselves create disability visibility, community, cultural recognition, or institutional belonging.
This training introduces an infrastructure-parity framework for examining whether disability is reflected in governance, institutional priorities, cultural programming, communications, affinity spaces, and the visible life of the campus.
Participants identify a priority gap and develop a realistic student-facing pilot with a defined owner, first step, and visible result.
This training works as a standalone session or as a follow-on to Ableism in Campus Policies and Practices, for institutions planning disability inclusion beyond accommodations.
Formats and Audiences
Invited talks and workshops can be adapted in length, format, and level of participation to fit the audience and purpose of the engagement. Many organizations first encounter my consulting work through these talks.
For speaking and workshop inquiries, please contact me.