Harsh adjustments: speech hygiene for disabled competitors in individual events

Abstract

Abstract Disabled competitors face unique challenges in competitive forensics individual events (IE). However, formal and informal institutional forces often erase their stories or worsen their situations. Although the lived experiences of disabled speakers have been studied and celebrated in disability performance art and other non-forensics performance spaces, IE has not caught up largely due to the historical shadow of the speech hygiene movement. Through a confrontation with our activity’s past and a community autoethnography of disabled competitors from the last decade, we argue that this history must be uncovered and interrogated in order to mitigate harms and promote positive change in the IE community.