Daniel Reinholz, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at San Diego State University. They are a nonbinary autistic person with multiple disabilities. Daniel completed their postdoctoral work in the Center for STEM learning at CU Boulder, and has a Ph.D. in mathematics and science education from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MS in mathematics from Colorado State University. Their work focuses on mitigating racial and gender inequities in mathematics classrooms and using organizational theories to create systemic change in STEM departments. Much of this work is organized around the EQUIP classroom observation tool, which provides concrete analytics that instructors can use to reflect on their practice and learn to teach in more socially just ways. Daniel co-leads the guiding theories working group for the Accelerating Systemic Change Network.
Daniel’s Story
I’ve been disabled all of my life, and I’ve spent almost as much time trying to deny my disabilities. I was rushed to emergency care shortly after I was born, and it was unclear whether I would survive the first day of my life. The journey since then hasn’t gotten any easier. Cycles of sickness lasting months, hospitalization, and crawling back to normalcy are a regular feature of my existence. The medications that I take to stay alive are simultaneously destroying my body. That is the reality of autoimmunity, when quite literally, your body oscillates between trying to protect you and trying to kill you.
Growing up, I believed that if you worked hard enough you could overcome anything. When my body was sick, I felt that I just needed to work harder and push through it. These were the messages I received at home and the messages I received from a society founded on the falsehood of meritocracy. I also believe that my struggles with disability were a reflection of my own individual dysfunction, not a society that was not designed for people like me. Although I was disabled, I didn’t have a disability identity. I didn’t have the tools to see how ableism is woven into the very fabric of our society, and I didn’t have anyone in my life who could show me this. I wonder how different my childhood would have been if I only had a disabled role model or mentor.
For me, formal schooling was one of the most obvious places at which the contradictions of disability in our society were evident. Throughout my schooling, I was always good at math. I never found it particularly interesting, but with the exception of middle school algebra (which I only passed by copying from my neighbors), math was never a struggle. My real passion was music. It was a source of refuge through difficult times, and a beacon of hope for social change. I dropped out of high school to pursue music. I will never forget one afternoon during a practice session, when suddenly I felt a sensation that could only be described as a feeling of bolts of lightning climbing up my arms. I was in indescribable pain, and I couldn’t use my arms to perform the most basic tasks. I most certainly couldn’t play drums. I was later diagnosed with thoracic outlet syndrome, which is a painful compression of nerves in the brachial plexus. My mother had developed the same problem years earlier (it can often run in families due to structural issues in the body), and I saw how surgery left her somewhat improved but forever limited. I have refused the surgery myself, and have fought through well over a decade of constant, chronic pain, to redevelop my strength. I can play music again, but I will never be able to play at the professional level I was certainly destined for. With the death of one dream, a new dream had to be born.
Amidst this struggle, I enrolled again at a local community college, and eventually transferred into an engineering program. My health was very unstable at this time, and I remember missing months out of each semester. I was awarded a prestigious undergraduate research opportunity, only to spend months in the lab suffering from migraines and accomplishing little of substance. I started dropping out of engineering lab courses (especially in optics), because the physical demands of lab work became physically impossible. Throughout it all, I never had a notion that I could receive accommodation or support, or that I deserved it. (Even though I’ve never really fit into the “right” category of disabled to be accommodated, so who knows what difference it really would have made.) I simply concluded that engineering wasn’t for people like me. I thought that disabled people didn’t have what it took to succeed (cue, internalized ableism). My parents never went to college, and I didn’t have the slightest idea how the system worked. I only thought that if I just worked hard enough, all of these impossible systemic barriers would magically disappear. As someone who is white and masculine presenting, I was able to “pass” in dominant society, and was determined to do so, whatever the cost.
As my engineering future became rubble, I discovered my true love of mathematics in an undergraduate analysis course. This is a course that typically destroys mathematical dreams, but to me, it was the essence of beautiful, logical structure, which provided certainty to my world in which everything was uncertain. It was this experience that pushed me to pursue an MS in mathematics, and later a PhD in mathematics education.
Fast forward to the COVID19 pandemic. Although I have been disabled all my life, only in recent years did I develop a disability identity. I remember the start of the pandemic, just like yesterday. I remember the fear of the virus that only kills “old and disabled people.” I remember attending my last in-person meeting on the campus where I teach–well before the campus-mandated quarantine–only to be infected by COVID during that meeting. This was a meeting about social justice on our campus, and it was a meeting in which I came out to my colleagues about my many chronic illnesses, sharing that I planned to quarantine early for fear of my life. It was the meeting that my sick colleague (who developed symptoms while traveling abroad) chose to attend anyway, and infected me with COVID. The months of COVID sickness that ensued were an endless cycle of sickness, misery, and fear for me and my family. I still reflect on the contradictions of “social justice” that exists without disability justice, and wonder to myself how events could have possibly unfolded the way that they did.
This episode made me realize that I could no longer deny my disability, or it may very well kill me. It also made me realize that being visible wasn’t nearly enough, because even if people were aware that I was disabled, for nondisabled people, they didn’t really have the slightest conception of what that actually meant. At this time I also learned that I was autistic, and suddenly decades of my life began to make more sense, like my love of mathematics and structure, my inability to fit in, or my overly confusing relationship with gender. Owing to the growing neurodiversity movement, I found my way to disability justice, and started reading the words of activists like Lydia X. Z. Brown, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Mia Mingus, Alice Wong, and so many others. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t ashamed of my disabilities. For the first time in my life, I could see how disability is a political identity and how it could guide my fight for social change. I learned to embrace my disability, to see beauty in ugliness, and see how the fact that how disabled people continue to survive and thrive in a world that would prefer to pretend we are not here is a political act that aims to bring down all of the systems of oppression that exist in society. I came to see the organization of our society through the lens of ableism, and began to reinterpret so much of my life through this new lens. The anti-capitalist politics of disability justice resonated with my decades of activism, and suddenly things just fit.
The lens of disability justice provided me a with a new way to view the discipline of mathematics. It allowed me to see all of the contradictions in how mathematical tools are used to construct a false notion of perfection. It also helped me see how disability remains completely invisible in the mathematical community. It’s not something that we talk about, recognize, or even acknowledge in the most tokenizing ways. Disabled mathematicians truly are invisible in our society (despite being ever present), and that needs to change. The discourses of disability and mathematics only exist to denigrate disabled people, and that needs to change.
We hope to foster that change with the creation of Sines of Disability. We aim to reauthor the dominant discourses of disability in mathematics. We are more than crazy mathematical geniuses. We are more than charity cases for nondisabled special educators. We are more than tokenized speakers at mathematical conferences. (We haven’t even reached the level of visibility to be tokenized. We’re just invisible.) We don’t need to be cured. We will work together to dismantle ableism and all of the other systems of oppression that ableism upholds (racism, capitalism, anti-Blackness, patriarchy, and all the other isms). Are you with us?
My short time on this earth as a disabled person has taught me to take nothing for granted. It has helped me become more resilient than I ever could have imagined. Disability justice has helped me see the beauty in ugliness, and see the weakness in perfection. Being in community with other disabled people has helped me see that I am not alone, and that my experiences are not unique. It has made me see that we are all a part of a system, that we must either choose to uphold or to dismantle. We choose to dismantle so that we can build something better.