Month: October 2023

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(with a h/t to Jessica Coblentz’ “Dust in the Blood: A Theology of Life With Depression”)

…that the aetiology of depression is just as much of a hot mess as it is for autism. The best minds have basically concluded that it could be caused by about a half dozen things and given up trying to arbitrate which is the right one. It could be particular gene expressions, hormones composing in a certain way, a particular mix of gut bacteria (yep, the tiny creatures sharing your body in your microbiome can change your mood!), brain chemistry, or none of these things. This is the case to such an extent that the DSM (diagnostic manual for psychologists in the USA) gave up completely since 1980 (this is referred to as “causal agnosticism”) and was revised to simply focus on symptoms. But then this is also a bit of a mess, as the DSM originally had an exclusion for major losses (so it might be considered normal to feel depressed for several months after losing a parent or spouse, this is the “bereavement specifier”), but bracketed out other non-bereavement losses (e.g. end of a significant romantic relationship, job loss, etc.) which might not be quite so culturally-sanctioned as “loss” and then the diagnostic manual was even further revised to exclude even bereavement as well. So context doesn’t matter either!

With that said, if you are feeling depressed, do please feel free to give me a shout. It’s part of my life and that of many other scholars and friends and while we’re not experts (lol, like there can be such a thing anyway apparently!) we are happy to share from our experience of getting through and navigating low mood as part of your lifeworld.

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I was listening to radio coverage of the COVID-19 inquiry yesterday and it was remarkable to hear suddenly revealed sentiments by people who were secretly expressing their horror at the incompetence or cruelty of the people they were working with or under whilst Britain tried to mobilize an effective social response to the pandemic. The radio commentator quipped that academics everywhere are reconsidering their use of whatsapp. But I think there’s another opportunity here.

I was struck by the symmetries between that dysfunction which has been revealed over the past decade within the government and health service and my experience of working in higher education. As I’ve drifted into executive leadership in various professional roles I’ve been, with increasing frequency, confronted by policy design that causes oppression to others. When we discuss these things, the group consensus is often, “yes, we all agree it’s not great, but right now it’s too costly to be seen as noncompliant or it’s simply impossible to make changes here so I need to save my energy for another fight later” In some cases I’d expected disagreement, but instead I found some form of fear, apathy or tactics of non-confrontation. By extension, our organisations, especially in non-profit sector, are often saturated by a culture of excessive compliance. This is so pronounced that our organisational risk aversion can even result in the phenomenon of over-compliance (see the “Tickell report” for more on this).

It’s worth noting how this posture can arise from a variety of contexts as I’ve already hinted above. Some people may be deploying compliance as a tactic of resistance, e.g. choosing battles strategically or trying to stay under the radar where hostile opposition is imagined. In other cases, this can be a result of a firm belief in incremental progress (a small-c conservative value with which I’m very familiar). Or, in some cases, there may be a sense by a person that I’m too tired and traumatized to fight anymore, so I’m just keeping my head down as I need to be able to buy groceries and pay for my mortgage.

My research in ethics tends to focus on analysis of the genealogy of contemporary moral philosophy inasmuch as it conveys symmetries and dissymmetries with the 20th century. And what I’ve found is that as we survey the various forms of violence which were mobilized decisively in that age of technological and economic progress, we can see that in many cases evil arose from fear, apathy and tactics designed to avoid confrontation. It is particularly striking to observe the ways that national socialism in Germany and other fascist movements around Europe were cultivated in Universities through the introduction of small incremental policies designed to create a “hostile environment,” for “weird” folk like me, enhance fear of non-compliance, and magnify the sense of risk hovering at the gates. I’ve also observed that right alongside cultures of compliance, there were adjacent outlier movements which sought to capture idea of non-compliance as a specifically fascist ideal, situating it within the very movements that we might seek to resist, and perhaps magnifying the “everyday” discomfort with this form of action.

About four years ago, I was looking at statistics around representation in my own scholarly discipline and feeling righteous and enraged that more hadn’t been done. And as I began to look around at who I might cast blame upon for this situation, it dawned on me that in spite of my continuing awareness of my own precarity, I now occupied the elite category. In some ways, there were almost no elite categories above me in my organisation. Grappling with this led me to make a decision that when I am confronted by a policy or phenomenon that causes violence and harm to others and I cannot identify someone with more power than me who is active in confronting it, I will make it my problem.

I’ve started in some quite modest ways. People who know me well will appreciate that I am not a “fast mover”. Nevertheless, even the work of asking questions and observing problems has made my life more and not less difficult. I’ve been accused of bullying or of defiance and subversive intentions. Some former collaborators quietly disappeared, and others began to more frequently resist even ordinary requests. I’ve been accused of laziness. And I’ve done a lot of apologizing. I’ve been confronted with the quite intense levels of anxiety that flood in when you stop seeking shelter.

Reflecting on this all this weekend, it felt like it might be time to report on what I’ve learned and what’s next. Here are six conclusions I’ve arrived at:

This work may not be safe to undertake for many people: I do not underestimate the ways that colleagues, especially when they are navigating some form of un-concealable difference, precarity, or vulnerability, might find this kind of work exposes them to forms of surveillance, control, anxiety and fear that are too much to navigate. I know many people are actively seeking employment in other sectors and places (but also discovering that this form of experience is more widespread than they had anticipated).

You need friends: One of the most crucial things has been the formation of mutual aid networks, in some cases formed by friends who recognised the need to create a safe space for others. It’s crucial to have people to speak to about the things you discover, register your concern, and test out whether your reactions are warranted. In some cases, it’s a matter of friends telling you to slow down, work strategically, and helping you to expand your network in strategic ways. But I think as the narratives around resilience become more intense, it’s important to observe that the formation of support networks really isn’t enough. We need to find the energy and develop the skill to speak truthfully in places where it will be uncomfortable.

Conflict is not abuse: But people will often think it is. This phrase comes from Sarah Schulman’s book, “Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair” (with a h/t to Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s “Elite Capture” for directing me to it). You will frequently experience contexts where other people will find the mere presence of overt disagreement and the initiation of conflict as abusive. Sometimes this will lead to disengagement. In other cases you may find yourself unexpectedly suffering sanction or surveillance as a “subversive” agent, for daring to express disagreement or frustration, especially if it is outside of an expressly interpersonal space.

Less antagonism… we’re not enemies: I’ve learned here from Chantal Mouffe, who foregrounds the work of “agonism” as a contrast to “antagonism”. I’d describe the former as “disagreement which is sustained for the sake of some mutual work”. Far too often people assume that you are trying to be antagonistic because they conflate conflict with abuse. And to be fair, many of our movements of resistance do veer towards antagonism far too often and forget the work of organising needs to be maximally inclusive (because of rage, oppression, or learning yet to be done). For me, this means that, at least in terms of how we procedurally approach our organisations, there are no enemies. If we organise our work around simple binaries of “good person” and “bad person,” “workers” and “management” it’s really quite hard to engage in the work of agonism. There isn’t always good faith in working with specific individuals, but the concept here is that we’re striving to develop social infrastructure where disagreement can be heard and changes approached as a form of discursive activity.

Sometimes we need to work on the margins and in the undercommons: I’m grateful to scholar and activist Nick Anim for directing me to Vincent W. Lloyd’s book, “Black Dignity: The Struggle against Domination.” Lloyd is unflinching in his diagnosis of modern universities, concluding that they may have become spaces where political deliberation and justice is simply impossible. Pressing for matters of justice and equality can seem quite hopeless in cultures of compliance, so Lloyd observes – drawing on the wisdom of Black activists in the USA in the 20th century – that we may need to create (tuition-free, nonhierarchical) spaces which are adjacent to the University so that we can begin to engage in these kinds of conversations. Just like there may be insurmountable barriers to conversations about repair and reform within our institutions, so too, these kinds of truthful conversations about justice and equity I am suggesting here may simply be impossible, the enclosure of our intellectual spaces may be too complete.

We are inexperienced: Finally, and perhaps most of all, I’ve learned that doing the work is hard. Especially in mainstream spaces, we have long since discarded and lost access to generational knowledge which might inform mature forms of mutual aid and agonism. I have gotten things wrong, emphasised my point too strenuously, underestimated the vulnerability of others, and caused unnecessary discomfort for collaborators. I’ve also learned so much about the unexpected challenges that wait in store for us when we start to form communities of collective support and deliberation. Our internal arguments with allies can be far more rancorous and draining, and we need to be prepared to proactively pace ourselves and care for one another as we learn. This learning is a mutual process, which requires some level of self-disclosure and vulnerability.

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So I think this might be a good summary of an ND preferences wrt/ digital systems. The author doesn’t claim to be autistic, but I certainly shout “amen” like every other line. Would love to know if others relate: https://catgirl.ai/log/comfy-software/

I also think that customisability is important because it’s often the only way that many of us can getting software accessibility. Eg by making it that way ourselves. So I’m a hacker because I like to play with digital tools, but am also starting to realize that I HAD to become a bit geeky or I would have been left behind in a zillion ways. Get to the front of the pack so you don’t get left behind…

The HackerNews comment thread for that article is also a hot and interesting mess – highlighting the ways that different ND flavours and generational cultures frame how we are allowed to speak. I found myself wondering if it was a suitable proxy for what we might find if at UOB we could pull back the curtain… c/w: discussions of depression, suicide, ablism, and generally insensitivity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33053144

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Now that I’ve started paying attention I’ve realised there are hundreds of little papercuts slicing in at me from a hundred directions in my workplace (zero choice in software, short-notice (and often pointless) policy changes, 300 newsletters a year I have to read, module timetabling nightmares, construction noise, random beeping sounds everywhere, nightmare venues, a zillion pointless interruptions just the minute I get into the flow), and I’m really not sure where to get started. The few times I’ve brought something up informally, reactions have been either confused or defensive. I did push for a formal flexible work plan and managed to get a compressed teaching timetable, but the whole process took two years, a half dozen meetings, three separate forms, a huge input of energy, and left me feeling like I was supposed to be deferent and grateful for that systems had been temporarily shifted to run a different way on my behalf. I had colleagues who helped me with this process who were totally amazing about it all, but the process was still pretty deflating, and the end result really wasn’t what I’d asked for, rather it got shifted to a model that other people thought I needed.

What this has left me wodnering about if a useful shift in our approach to accommodation within our organisations is not to emphasise privacy and procedure, but to be relational, discursive and perhaps find ways to draw in a mentor or more experienced self-advocate with lived experience of disability as part of the actual process (e.g. sitting in meetings with you, commenting occasioally, posing questions etc.). My main problem is that as soon as things start to get difficult, I begin to doubt myself and wonder if I’m just special pleading (and there are systems and cultures which press us into this kind of thinking). Having someone with similar experience of the world to sense check a process might be quite useful. And for other people with less tenure and experience than me, I can imagine it might be even more vital.

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What tools and techniques do you use to preserve the flow (e.g. work around interruptions), lean in on your monotropic self, and mitigate challenges brought about by co-occurring bits (mood, anxiety, etc.)?

Here’s a first one to get us started: I find it takes a lot of emotional and mental energy to set up meetings. And it’s one of those things which comes at you interrupts flow and requires setup each time. And the consequence of this was that it was taking ages for me to jump in and get stuff organised even for simple one-to-ones. So I started using an online scheduling tool (first calendly.com then cal.com when calendly jacked up prices and went in a non-open direction). I created profiles for my time (e.g. when I don’t want to be interrupted, and also consolidating certain types of conversation so I can get in the flow with a series of meetings).

Using the tool had a learning curve – there were a few months where I had twice as many meetings as I could really handle in a particular interval and I had to tweak. I also found that I needed to create “public” style meeting options and “private” ones, so that friends could book in really any time they wanted with a much less restricted set of options, and certain less exciting work tasks could be put in a very specific bin. It has made a huge difference for my workflow and energy levels each week. I’ve also been pleasantly surprised to see how many (some neurodivergent) friends, colleagues and students were also really grateful to have a low-friction way of setting something up.

Cal.com opens up a website for people to click on date and time to set things up, and then automatically puts it on my digital calendar along with any special information I’ve asked for (which is very useful for one-to-one meetings with students so I don’t forget what they want to talk about). It can also do automatic reminders to people so they don’t forget the meeting and then it’s a robot nagging them and not me which is also nice.

At our University IT services migrated to a new off-premise exchange server setup last year and in the space of a week turned off all access to our calendars for external tools without warning or consultation (at least not any that I’d seen – and I would have provided a response if I’d been asked!). My attempts to explain what a severe impact this had on me fell on deaf ears. So I had three months where my diary and life were in total disarray last Spring. So I don’t use exchange for my calendar anymore. I’ve got another one offsite I use (on my own server if you’re curious). I put a message in my diary for every day of the year which warns people that I don’t use outlook for my diary. The downside is that it’s a pain for colleagues doing meeting requests in exchange. Upside is that I don’t have to worry about IT changing policies on me without consultation in the future, which I’m sure they will do.

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I’ve been part of a lot of conversations lately around digital accessibility. Part of this is because, during lockdown Microsoft made a major play to certain kinds of organisations, especially higher education institutions with certain kinds of management cultures, to be their software package of choice for ALL things. This has led to a very sudden shift to Microsoft Teams. I didn’t notice this when it happened, because the transition happened in administrative support across the university before it started to creep about a year later into reshaping interactions among academic staff. But by this time, policies had been developed around enforcing use of the platform, and exclusive use of that platform for “University business”. It has been weirdly difficult to problematise this as responses are quite binary: people either (1) “get it,” that is feel these problems deep in their psyche the moment they start using the tools, or (2) people are unaffected and quite skeptical about anyone who raises issues about Microsoft UX digital accessibility. This isn’t unusual for matters of accessibility which can be quickly invisibilised. It doesn’t help that Microsoft has made a pretty strong attempt to ND-wash their work by proactively asserting that it *is* accessible based on their comprehensive(TM) consultation of autistic and ADHD people.

My presentation this past summer marked an attempt to frame out my protest on the level of critical theory.

Since then, I’ve been involved in more practical discussions about what is going on here. Part of my anxiety relates to the way that the tool is meant to mobilise more stringent workplace surveillance as part of “performance management”. For those who haven’t yet been looped in on this concern:

(excerpt: “Your employer can monitor what you’re doing within Teams. They can also log conversations, record calls, and track your camera when you’re in a meeting. But there are also things they cannot do…”)

https://www.guidingtech.com/can-microsoft-teams-be-used-to-spy-on-you/

(excerpt: “Everything from how many meetings that user organized to how many urgent messages they sent is recorded. Separate numbers are given for scheduled meetings and those that were ad hoc. Even individuals’ screen-share time is there… Microsoft is measuring privacy settings, device types, time stamps, reasons why someone may have been blocked, and “the number of messages a user posted in a private chat.”

https://www.zdnet.com/article/i-looked-at-all-the-ways-microsoft-teams-tracks-users-and-my-head-is-spinning/

Discussion of this by various remote workers here:

Could my boss be using teams for surveillance? To what extent is it possible?
byu/ParmyBarmy inMicrosoftTeams

I had a few thoughts this week on the matter from a more practical level which I wanted to get down here:

  1. I think it’s important to start by opening up the categories a bit, e.g. between the tech we DO use and the tech we WANT to use. So far arguments I’ve heard in favour of using teams (from sympathetic allies) have never rested on a claim that it is a nice / good tool that people actually want to use. The vibe seems to be, this is the thing I have to use, and because inertia / flow I would rather just use one thing please. I totally understand this! But it troubles me a little bit because we’re going with the flow and further consolidating the hold this social communication tool has on our life as a community because we’re too tired to fight it.
  2. I do also think that some of us are exposed in different ways to the downsides of Teams. I know a few people might not worry about surveillance because (a) they are happy to be bold and loud about their radical action (me!) or (b) because they’re already surveilled all the time and it doesn’t matter. But some (disabled) others will find the levels of surveillance and enforcement psychologically unmanageable.
  3. Or some people aren’t really affected by the visual clutter and bad UX choices around “noise” in teams which makes it hard to find information, or to silence unwanted notifications. I know this stuff hits me HARD and some other people are relatively unaffected. Like, I sometimes find that the inability to curate notifications in teams can make me feel panic and that is disabling – there is stuff coming in from lots of different directions and I can’t turn off messages from my HoS or some other team I’ve been drawn into but didn’t want to join. At least for my kind of autism, this is kryptonite. I can’t find things, and I can’t focus the stream of information, and these are mutually reinforcing bad things. And Microsoft has made the tool impossible to customise BECAUSE this gives managers and executives the ability to control the flow of information you receive, and this is a USP for the product.
  4. So it’s a bad tool, but only some of us feel those consequences at levels which are disabling.
  5. But also, teams is embedded in a structural problem, that is, it’s controlled utterly by people who do not consult end users on their product aquisition choices and do not have feedback mechanisms which are tied to authentic willingness to make adaptations. And to get changes made we need to convince those people (who are already skeptical) who aren’t interested in consulting us before they roll out products and policy changes.
  6. So part of my resistance to this tool lies in a political or organisational culture direction – we need to be able to make choices and how we communicate, and if someone wants to tell me that they have utter control over how I receive information and communicate in my day to day work, that is a form of (ableist?) oppression which needs to be resisted at all costs.

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I’ve just been reading a WONDERFUL piece of work by Sonny Hallett around diversity and why our organisational cultures resist it. Anyhow – there’s a longer form piece here https://medium.com/@sonnyhallett/counselling-for-different-ways-of-being-b89730c6ca2 which I highly recommend giving a read (also via video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irIruFqFTMc

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I sat through a teaching session with some children this week, in what was an eye-wateringly bad, cringeworthy, accessibility-worst-case scenario. And a few basic principles popped into my head while I watched the speaker shame and marginalise children who were desperately trying to find ways to engage with the material and show their enthusiasm for the topic.

  1. Cut your one hour talk into 5 minute pieces
  2. Is there seating?
  3. Will ambient noise in the room be amplified or dampened by acoustics?
  4. How can you share information through discussion and mutual exploration?
  5. Assume you will be interrupted, how can you plan so that interruptions will not feel to you as facilitator and powerful-person-in-the-room like a challenge but a form of eager interested participation
  6. Members of your audience may assume that you don’t want to hear from them. How can you show that this will be different from other lectures they’ve attended?
  7. Your participants may need to fidget. If you expect them to be still it will be oppressive for them. How can you create opportunities for motion?
  8. How are you accommodating a person who can’t process auditory information?
  9. Some people may participate differently – shaming people for not holding up their hands or participating in conventional ways is cruel.

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Is it just me? I’ve noticed that much of what used to be individual emails are getting wrapped into omnibus newsletters. My working theory is that this arose as a form of communciation elsewhere (maybe the push towards mailing lists as part of a personal platform?) and has since gotten folded back into everyday work spaces and practices.

It took me a while to realise this but it dawned on me last year that this form of communication is a lot less accessible for me and that it’s a problem with noise compounded by a problem with navigation. Here’s the scenario: if I get ten emails, which are each about a single “thing” I can quickly sift pointless noise from important announcements by paying attention to the subject lines, scanning opening lines and deleting before deep dive reading. When it’s in a newsletter, I have to scan in a linear way (worse still, sometimes leaving my email application and the flow of work which pertains there for a PDF reader) and can’t sift as easily for information which is actually for me, or actually necessary knowledge. The end result is that I process the entire thing in great detail.

I think that maybe MS Teams has the effect on me of making all of life like this because there’s not much one can do to “sift” – conversations can’t be easily threaded, so you have to read everything when you’re just trying to find a reply. I’m wondering if anyone else finds this to be a struggle? If it’s just me, that’s one kind of request I need to make. But if there are others also struggling, then maybe there’s good reason to ask if colleagues doing this kind of bundling can do it in a more careful way… Just wondering which I should pursue! Thus are the travails of unmasking, developing a disability identity, and learning on the fly how to request (and be rejected) accommodations from friends and colleagues.

This gets even more oppressive when the people who are driving these changes around sending correspondence in a newly consolidated way start to set rules on how others can’t use alternative forms of communication. Please stop bombarding me with all these short emails – it’s so unhelpful just put it in the “bullitein”! or worse still, requirements about how we must continually attend to notifications on MS teams, leaving our email on at certain times of the day, responding at certain regular intervals etc. The idea that you need to just be open to a bunch of small distractions across the whole day seems about as sterotypically allistic as I can imagine. Different kinds of cognition may require consolidation of work tasks. And this in turn can make a person/worker more happy and productive to work in a neuro-affirming mode.

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I’ve had three weeks of great energy, finishing things, starting things, and starting yesterday I can feel my executive function flagging. Big time. And this loops in with increased load of anxiety, insomnia, death spiral of rumination and unhelpful but seemingly inevitable paralysis on 25-75% of the things I need to get done. 🙂 And I’ve observed that some other folks are hitting the wall now too. I’ve been watching this cycle happen to me for a while with a new level of self-awareness and thinking a lot about how to put some supports in place for when these things happen. Or better yet, focussing on forms of work that don’t contribute to the cycle and avoiding those that do. But this is VERY hard to do, in part because, at least for academics, the “lone hero” executive model seems to be default.

I’ve identified two possible long-term wellbeing helping fixes which both require structural change: (1) shared co-leadership so one can pool abilities & inabilities with a colleague (ideally who already knows you well enough that you don’t have to spend months educating them about autism before starting) – (2) (at least for academic staff) working in partnership with support staff to divide up work tasks and planning. Having another person in the loop naturally helps with executive function as someone else can mind deadlines / milestones and chase me if I’m flagging, breaking the loop (sometimes). Both both of these models seem to be REALLY hard to implement in a lot of higher education management structures.

In these organisational cultures leadership can’t be shared, or has unhelpful externalities. It can hamper promotion prospects for your co-leader if they’re more junior (or female) as bias prevents people from seeing achievements as shared. But also workload allocation models prevent this practice as the work doesn’t split 50/50, but ends up being a bit more like 65/65 as there is additional labour in being collaborative (I think the overall results are improved, but the practice is not “lean”). And then sometimes there just aren’t enough people around. And you have to be careful about not using & abusing your allies (if you have them).

I have been successful in forging partnerships with support staff at UOB, and I have massive gratitude for those folx who have been willing to come alongside, listen, and share their energy in making great things happen for students and ressearch projects.

BUT it has become a habitual pattern that when I do find a successful partnership with a colleague where we can divide up tasks in a helpful way, have a change to get to know one another and develop a good flow – within 3-6 months of sorting that out, they’re seconded to a new position in a different team. This has happened to me a half dozen times. And it’s not just inconvenient, but actually there is fallout, as I can’t manage a portfolio solo that I can with collaborators, and then I have to cancel events and walk back activities that I’ve commited to. And it’s hard to explain why this is the case. I’m not sure why so many Universities have such a revolving door approach to support staff teams, but this seems to be endemic. So I’ve found myself starting to avoid forging partnerships like this because the risk is just too high. And you can’t ask a person if they’re going to stay in a post for more than 12 months, as I think that’s impolite?