Troubles Online: Ableism and Access in Higher Education Celebrates Book Launch
By Emily Putnam
The Carleton community will be celebrating the launch of Troubles Online: Ableism and Access in Higher Education with the Carleton Disability and Access Studies Hub (C-DASH) on November 18.
This new collection edited by Chelsea Jones, Fady Shanouda and Lisanne Binhammer aims to trouble what online teaching looks like and think critically about how disability is addressed in online classrooms.
Through analysis, conversation, poetry and art they reflect on disabled, mad, sick, and crip online pedagogy and highlight the possibilities of expanding critical standards for accessible teaching and learning.
Rethinking Digital Pedagogy
Fady Shanouda, Assistant Professor, Feminist Institute of Social Transformation, says the collection, that began in 2018, is situated across three distinct moments: before the pandemic, during it, and in its ongoing aftermath.
“There’s been this push to return to normal,” he says, “but normal never worked.”
Shanouda notes that Troubles Online emerged from the realization that what was once called normal in higher education, accessibility and digital life was already exclusionary.
“It took the pandemic for this to become more of a reality, and when that happened digital pedagogy was kind of ushered in as the solution to inaccessible teaching and learning, but we knew that it wasn’t.”
“The tone of the book changed, because we were now working in this environment where disabled folks have been advocating for a very long time to be able to participate in learning and teaching in these more accessible ways,” says Shanouda.
He says it was around this time that Lisanne Binhamer became involved in the project.
“We came together trying to support each other, not only through the digital pedagogic changes that we were facing as learners and teachers, but also through conceptualizing this book.”
Lisanne Binhammer is an educator, researcher, and designer who received her MA in Anthropology with a specialization in Digital Humanities from Carleton.
Binhammer adds that her background in technology largely informed her approach.
“I wanted to know who’s building these technologies,” she explains. “It’s not just tech leaders or educators—it’s an entire ecosystem of choices and assumptions. I started thinking about that while completing my MA online.”
Centred in interdisciplinarity, this collection retheorizes the classroom around a justice-based approach to online pedagogy and challenges assumptions around universal design.
Contributions include Felicita Arzu-Carmichael, Fiona N. Cheuk, Mina Chun, Kimberlee Collins, Elena G. Garcia, Jay Dolmage, Esther Ignagni, Donna Jeffery, Erika Johnson, Curtis Maloley, Mary McCall, Elizabeth Mohler, Jenna Reid, Kristin Smith, Hannah L. Stevens, Jessica Vorstermans, Nathan Whitlock, and Anne Zbitnew.
The book’s cover art, created by Nadia Walji, is titled Musical Roller Coaster Ride. Walji is an Ottawa-based painter and visual artist.
Walji works with BEING Studio, a local space supporting artists with developmental disabilities who are working in visual art and creative writing.
In Fady Shanouda’s own chapter, “Caring Online: A Justice-Oriented Approach to Online Pedagogy” (co-authored with Jenna Reid), readers are invited to rethink care and connection in virtual classrooms.
Building Knowledge Through Collaboration
Chelsea Jones is an associate professor in the Department of Child and Youth Studies at Brock University and Faculty Fellow in Accessibility with Brock’s Centre for Pedagogical Innovation. Jones also co-produces Podagogies: A Learning and Teaching Podcast at Toronto Metropolitan University.
For Jones, the project began after publishing an article in University Affairs.
She says the response was immediate and strong—press representatives reached out asking if she would consider curating a collection that expanded on those ideas.
“It became something you couldn’t turn away from,” Jones says. “The book shifted as the contributors leaned into exploring disability and digital life not as a problem to solve, but as a way of thinking critically about our reliance on technology.”
She describes Troubles Online as a sustained act of “critical suspicion”—a questioning of both the hype surrounding technology and the rhetoric of “critical pedagogy” itself, which can sometimes reproduce exclusion rather than dismantle it.
“It’s not just a book that’s asking if digital pedagogy is accessible or not accessible. It’s really digging into the nuances of these questions.”
Jones points to a call for papers as the first act of collaboration, noting how contributors like Jay Dolmage and Lisanne Binhammer shaped the direction of the book.
“Jay’s foreword builds on his foundational text Academic Ableism,” she says, “while Lisanne’s conclusion reflects what it means to actually learn from and within digital spaces, when it’s working and when it’s not.”
Despite the comprehensive nature of the publication, Shanouda says there are still gaps in knowledge, and more research to be done in this field.
“We’re still missing voices—particularly Indigenous technoscience perspectives,” he says. He points to the influence of scholars in critical digital pedagogy and stresses the need for “deep engagement” that moves beyond established frameworks.
“Disability has always been framed as the trouble,” Shanouda says, “but that trouble actually enabled many of the pandemic’s most important adaptations—captioning, Zoom, asynchronous teaching. Those practices were necessary, and they’re not going away.”
Jones expands on the inextricable nature of theses adaptations.
“There’s an inseparability between disability and technology now. Intersectionality means we can’t make clear distinctions between what’s human and what’s digital. The real question is: how do we care for one another in these increasingly digital spaces?”
Shanouda adds that this becomes even more complex for racialized and queer educators.
“Teaching those histories requires a kind of intimacy,” he says, “but we’re not always there to provide care in the ways the institution imagines. The marketing around care and accessibility often hides how precarious and extractive these systems still are.”
On audience and impact
Jones says the book is “dedicated to all marginalized people.”
“We wanted to write for readers who already know these struggles—who might find a point of entry or solidarity here. Digital pedagogy can be isolating, but this collection offers a way to connect.”
“There are cultural legacies involved in this work that often go unacknowledged, especially when tech is hyped at us as if it’s something new and innovative, when in fact it comes with more baggage, and so through this we are trying to also give credit rights too.”
Shanouda hopes the book can inspire institutional change.
“If administrators, faculty developers, and teaching and learning services staff pick it up, maybe it’ll spark conversations about training and institutional change,” he says. “But that kind of change has to come from the bottom up.”
Binhammer emphasizes a broader reach.
“Technologists need to read it too,” she says. “They need to understand what the state of things actually is—the human cost of these technologies and the possibilities they still hold.”
“Folks like this can help develop the technology and an awareness of what things actually look like and how the creation of these experiences exist in the classroom.”
Those looking to attend the public book launch for Troubles Online: Ableism and Access in Higher Education featuring Drs. Chelsea Jones and Fady Shanouda in conversation with Dr. Manjeet Birk can do so at the Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre (CDCC), on November 18th from 7:00 – 9:00 p.m.