Kat Chudy
March 29, 2025
3:30-4:30 PM PST on Zoom
Access Needs in the Classroom (and how they help us all)
Your donation this week will benefit disabled folks displaced by the LA wildfires and the Opulent Mobility accessibility fund. Suggested donation $10-30; no one turned away for lack of funds. This form only accepts PayPal. To use Venmo or Zelle, exit this form and email laurabrody@verizon.net.
Meeting access needs is the bare minimum for disabled students in the classroom, a process often bogged down with unnecessary bureaucracy. The curb-cut effect is especially visible within a modern classroom as students utilize things like voice to text in their multitasking and text to speech to increase their productivity and efficiency. The wisdom of disability - its resilience, foresight, and adaptability - is a strength that should be tapped in order to improve the lives of all students as they learn and grow.
Academic spaces are especially hostile, quick to tokenize and even faster to deny real accommodation. All these issues are compounded by miscommunication, conflict avoidance, lack of planning, and procrastination. The “last minute-ism” of the busy academic is incredibly unhealthy and especially disruptive to students who need to be able to plan medical care around classes. All these things create a constant state of trickle down emergency - not really fixing things and jumping from one fire to another.
The solutions to the problems facing us as a society will not be born of panic and reactivity, but require of us a softer, slower, more mindful approach - Crip Time as the new way of navigating the effervescent, boiling chaos of our world and the classroom.
Kat Chudy is a visual artist living in Tallhassee, Florida and working in both Tallhassee and Thomasville, Georgia. Chudy mentors for an Art and the Environment class at Florida State University and has been teaching classes at the Thomasville Center for the Arts in Thomasville, Georgia since August as their printmaking instructor. They have a BFA in printmaking and art history from the University of Texas at El Paso and recently graduated from Florida State University with an MFA in Studio Art. They have an extensive educational background in both art and science and seek to find the edge where the two disciplines meet and inform one another through the subject of their work – invisible disability. Chudy is an advocate for disability rights, healthcare rights, and educational reform. Their work is shown both in disabled shows and venues, as well as mainstream exhibitions, determined to help bring disability culture to the mainstream as part of the larger picture of human experience.