Doctoral Research Visit at the Centre for Culture and Disability Studies

Disability "extends our knowledge about the human qualities of communities" (147), asserts Dan Goodley, and it is by traveling to other countries that one will not only realize to what extent disability helps to enhance our knowledge about the qualities of communities, but that one also comes to notice the very ways in which communities and their everyday practices are shaped by disability and its surrounding culture. From September 2016 to February 2017 I had the great opportunity to study and pursue my doctoral research at the Centre for Culture and Disability Studies (CCDS) at Liverpool Hope University. Right from the beginning of my stay, I was struck by the central role that community and inclusivity plays in the academic and cultural life at Liverpool Hope. During the first weeks of the semester, I would repeatedly be surprised by the various student groups that included wheelchair users, guide dogs, canes or other visual indicators of disability. Needless to say, it was not necessarily a particular group of students that captured my attention but the way in which these students so naturally seemed to embrace the campus space as their own. With its automatic door openers, its ramps, its support workers and—perhaps most of all—due to its positive attitude, Liverpool Hope helps to create a welcoming space where accessibility is no longer linked to constant struggles of the individual student or scholar and where inclusivity is not merely perceived as an additional effort that the institution is obliged to make. This is by no means to imply that the university exists in a utopian vacuum, freed from any ableist sentiments that still underlie society at large. Just a few steps away from campus, one will encounter steep streets with old lamp posts, decorating the sideways in picturesque yet highly impractical ways. Right on campus, students and tutors are currently struggling with government plans to cut disabled students' allowances (DSAs)—non-repayable grants that are used to cover costs for additional support. Being back in Germany, all of this appears ever more paradoxical to me. While my home university, the TU Dresden, has recently received additional funds to make its campus more accessible—thus paving the way to finally become more like Hope campus and leave parts of Germany's long history of educational segregation (cf. Pfahl and Powell) behind—British universities are now at a point where they are forced to fight for the grants that helped to establish their overall accessibility and inclusive practice.

Certainly, these observations are entangled in a complicated web of socio-cultural and historical developments that shape how disability is constructed and understood in different cultures. It is through my studies at the CCDS that I have further learned to describe, analyze, and understand these differences. Equipping their students with a truly interdisciplinary toolbox, instructors in the Department of Disability and Education (which is aligned with the CCDS) teach both text-based and empirical approaches to disability research. Throughout my stay, the development of my PhD project benefitted highly from the excellent guidance provided by CCDS director Associate Prof. David Bolt and his expertise in the field of literary and cultural disability studies. Moreover, I had the great chance to attend a wide range of Disability Studies classes offered at Hope University. Next to my participation in all of the graduate classes aligned with the CCDS, I gladly took advantage of the opportunity to sit in on all Level C lectures, designed for first year students in disability studies and education studies. It is due to the great diversity and interdisciplinarity of these classes and the enthusiasm and specialized research interests of each instructor that my stay at Liverpool Hope came to exceed all my expectations.

When the new term started in Germany, I found that my research had not only further evolved throughout my stay at Liverpool Hope but that my time at the CCDS had also immensely contributed to my development as a university teacher and helped me to grow as a person. As a teacher and researcher I am inspired by the way that...