During her 12 years at San Francisco State University’s (SFSU) Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability, Interim Director Dr. Emily Beitiks has tried to honor the legacy of the institute’s late founder and namesake. Longmore, an SFSU history professor who made major contributions to the field of disability studies, “beautifully wore [two] hats — bringing his activist work into his work as a scholar,” Beitiks said.
So, when Beitiks learned in 2022 that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation was accepting grant proposals for disability studies projects, she eagerly submitted one for a fellowship program designed to cultivate the work of disabled scholar-activists. The first year of that program, known as the Emerge Fellowship, just concluded, and the second of three years funded by a $1 million Mellon Foundation grant will begin this month.
Bowen Cho
Beitiks opened fellowship applications in January 2023 to early-career scholar-activists with project proposals related to disability studies or disability justice. Fellows receive mentorship and $10,000 in project funding. Beitiks and three panelists selected the first cohort of 11 fellows — all queer or transgender, mostly people of color — from more than 300 applicants. The selection committee prioritized selecting a diverse cohort and elevating projects targeting communities not normally represented in the heavily white disability studies field.
“The competitive applicants were considering disability justice from an intersectional lens,” said certified rehabilitation counselor Alexander Locust, the Emerge Fellowship’s program director. “Not just a single issue, but ‘How are Black and brown disabled people more impacted? How are queer Black and brown disabled people? How are multiple marginalized disabled folks at the center?’”
The first cohort of fellows — whose projects ranged from a first-of-its-kind campus accessibility ranking to a digital zine examining the intersection of anti-Blackness, fatphobia, ableism, and incarceration — gathered at SFSU for a month-long workshop in July 2023. Throughout the following 10 months, the fellows participated in meetings with their faculty mentors and optional monthly cohort-wide calls to discuss their progress.
One of the fellows, Bowen Cho, had been attempting to complete their project since early 2020, but had struggled to find collaborators — as disabled scholars often do, they said. Cho earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s in political science after more than a decade of entering and withdrawing from several universities because of mental health and accessibility concerns. Their web-based project, Neurodivergent-U, is an accessibility ranking of 89 U.S. universities using data provided by around 250 surveyed students.
