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Eight years ago, I wrote “The Knot in the Wood: The Call to Multimodal Anthropology” (published in the American Anthropologist) using woodcarving as a metaphor for working with diverse research materials. When woodcarvers come to a knot in the wood, rather than extracting the knot, they respect the material’s unique nature and work with it. For example, working with visuals may naturally lead to making a film.
Since the publication of my essay, I’ve been asked to teach courses on multimodality, give talks and workshops, and serve on boards of professional organizations and academic journals to create peer-review guidelines for multimodal work—because in the age of AI, public mistrust of science and a proliferation of fake news, getting original research out in accessible formats is vital.
At the same time, I have been deeply involved in teaching and advocating for students with learning disabilities. From the intersection of these experiences, I have concluded that our reliance on a single text-based modality for communicating doctoral research—the dissertation—destroys uniqueness and can ultimately harm research, if not the researcher, by forcing Ph.D. students with learning disabilities who struggle with writing to produce a penultimate written text. Our education system attempts to extract the disability by relying wholly on assistive technology and accommodations (to make the student more neurotypical), and when that fails, we extract or eject the student from the Ph.D. program when they do not produce a dissertation to form. As a result, we create a brain drain and lose graduate students and researchers who would otherwise have produced original work in their fields.
Recently, I was approached for advice about a graduate student who by all accounts of her committee members has done brilliant and important research but is struggling to produce a dissertation. She was recently diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD and is a first-generation, minority student. I was told her struggles were dismissed by a faculty member who proclaimed, “We do not give out sympathy Ph.D.s.” This student is on a timeline and will lose everything. After seven years of Ph.D. coursework, funded by taxpayers, the student does not need sympathy but support, and if they were to be cast off, all their research and all the resources given to their training will be lost.
This is a very real-world example of what dyslexia researchers have been theoretically fighting against for years. People with dyslexia need alternative ways to learn and to show their learning (i.e., their research). Despite all the theoretical work that schools of education, neurological institutes and advocates have done to elucidate and remediate the struggle for students with dyslexia and ADHD, we continue to fail at the practice level, and we certainly haven’t turned the tide on prejudicial thinking when it comes to the simple fact that one can have a learning disability and be a genius. From kindergarten through high school, many public school systems are loath to cross the line between special education and gifted programs, placing students in either one or the other, but not both.
Successful people with dyslexia, like Richard Branson and the Made by Dyslexia campaign, have joined the fight by extolling dyslexic thinking as not only valuable, but much needed in the era of AI. Authors who have explored the advantages of dyslexia include the physicians Brock and Fernette Eide, the neurologist Thomas G. West, and pediatricians Sally and Bennett Shaywitz, founders of Yale University’s Center for Creativity and Dyslexia, which has done groundbreaking work on this topic.
This graduate student made it, against all odds, all the way to graduate school at one of the top public research universities in the world. A university dedicated to supporting first-generation, Hispanic and formerly incarcerated college students—all populations with high percentages of undiagnosed, undocumented and un-remediated learning disabilities (dyslexia and ADHD can be hereditary)—but that is still struggling with supporting graduate students with disabilities.
Making it into and almost through a Ph.D. program at a University of California campus with an undiagnosed learning disability indicates immense intelligence. High intelligence is a double-edged sword for students with learning disabilities, as it masks the disabilities for much of their education, helping them get far, but only so far. The same mask that hid the disabilities that are diagnosed late in a student’s career also mask the full extent of a student’s intelligence, which might come out in oral presentations and seminar situations but fail to exhibit in written tests and when writing a thesis or, in this case, the dissertation—because at some point, the mask, the crutches, no longer work.
Bright students who are diagnosed early with a documented disability fare no better in the public school system, where they are relegated to special education and are placed into nonacademic vocational tracks in high school regardless of their own ambitions. Many drop out of school or do not continue on to college due to discouragement, and those who do attend college often crash without the vital informal structures that helped get them there in the first place: parents who kept them on track, outside tutors, best friends. Dispirited, at this point they have already given up on an academic career. So imagine then the gusto, nerve and ability of a student with dyslexia and ADHD who almost makes it to the very end of a Ph.D. program only to be cast out at the very last stage: the dissertation.
What makes things more complicated is that not everyone with dyslexia has trouble writing. In fact, many famous writers have or likely had dyslexia: Agatha Christie, Jonathan Irving, Octavia Butler. They were also pioneering outliers in their genres, which set their writing apart and is why so many readers (by ear or by eye) embraced them. They did well because they wrote the way their minds worked, creating new genres or innovating the ones they were writing in—an allowance not given to dissertation writers. Cambridge University archaeologist Helen Taylor’s work on writing and dyslexia and her theory of complementary cognition point to the ways in which a one-size-fits-all model is stunting our evolution as a species.
While I was an early reader (stealth dyslexia) and not diagnosed with dyslexia until I was up for full professor, there were many moments in my educational career, from high school through the Ph.D., when my undiagnosed dyslexia (and certainly my dyscalculia) could have stopped my academic career in its tracks. I was a classic A/F student (A for concept and creative thinking, F for poor execution).
Looking back now, I see a classic 2E (twice exceptional—smart with learning disabilities) profile, which meant I excelled in some areas (for me, discussion-based graduate classes, where we read novels and philosophy and wrote in genres and styles of our choice) and failed in other areas, like courses where the rules were stricter, the reading material more mundane (many people with dyslexia need to visualize what they are reading) or those that involved math. (I would never make it through a Ph.D. in the department I teach in now due to the statistics requirement.)
Math prerequisites are another place we lose brilliant minds. Not that I was destined to be a great scientist, but my inability to get past college calculus stole me of the opportunity to ever take another biology course (or honors poetry, but that’s another discussion—and no, I don’t always write in iambic pentameter). I went into college as a double major in biology and international relations, having scored a 5 in Advanced Placement biology, which was one of my passions in high school. My mother, a chemist, could not even teach me how to solve a mole problem.
I was lucky to have a guidance counselor in international relations who allowed me to design my own major and accepted my argument for why an anthropology course on poverty could stand in for the microeconomics requirement. Instead of crunching numbers, I did fieldwork on a homeless community in Washington, D.C.’s Dupont Circle. I made it this far because I had mentors who saw beneath my spelling problems, bad math, nonlinear thinking, inability to take standardized tests and insistence on doing things a little bit differently. They believed in me. I learned from and even stayed friends with professors who gave me F’s, like my undergraduate economics professor (see dyscalculia above), whom I exchanged letters with for years.
A hallmark of many 2E students is that once a problem is solved, there is an ardent desire to move on to the next problem, rather than to spend time editing, summing up and outputting our findings in proper academese. This may explain why my disability or unique way of processing and thinking evolved into an experimental writing and multimodal anthropology practice—starting with my dissertation, into which I incorporated fictional vignettes.
The solution I see after more than 20 years of researching, writing and, especially, teaching is that when it comes to neurodivergent brains and out-of-the-box thinkers, multimodality (allowing an alternative output for research in lieu of a text-based dissertation) is the optimal method for retaining and working with the knot—that is, respecting and nurturing the unique thinking and diverse abilities a student/researcher brings to their work. In turn we save important research findings that might otherwise be victim to an overly rigid system.
I got into graduate school at Columbia University despite abysmal math GREs because I had the support of a faculty member who knew me as a student in her seminars at another university and had read my writing and made an argument that my intellectual acuity in discussions and my writing (despite structural experiments—she eventually had me delete every em dash in my dissertation) were more indicative of my future success than a high math score on my GRE. Without mentors, that one person along the way in the guidance counselor’s office or the English department, or the anthropology seminars, I would not have made it to and through higher education.
One of the hardest parts of higher education for me has to do with applications, which I generally put off until the 11th hour, as the need to write in neat boxes and answer formulaic questions sends me into a state of dyslexic overwhelm. Had my letter writers for my Fulbright grant, which I submitted the night before it was due, let me suffer the consequences of my abysmal timing and not written the last-minute recommendations, I would not have received the first-ever Fulbright grant for research in Iran since the revolution. The book and film that resulted from that research continue to be used and read 20 years later. Whether this was a sympathy move to overlook my poor timing, or they really believed I had a chance of receiving the grant did not matter: What mattered is they showed up for me. And not all graduate students have this kind of support. Often, it is luck of the draw.
The late Jason Arday, speaking on his book on disability, said, “Sometimes when people least deserve it, that’s when they deserve the most compassion.” My call, my hope, my wish is that we institutionalize compassion and make luck universal in academia by providing mentors and advisers who understand multimodal methods and disability and are visible and accessible to everyone who needs them across campus. And that we institutionalize allowances for alternative dissertation outputs.
Since my essay came out eight years ago in the American Anthropologist, I’ve observed that more and more researchers doing interesting multimodal projects are getting their research accepted in peer-reviewed spaces. But the struggle to include multimodality in the academy has mostly stayed at the faculty level. The discussion often centers around whether multimodal projects should count toward tenure and promotions for academics who have already met the initial qualifications in terms of books or articles—in other words, after they have already paid their dues and done their academic work the “correct way.”
This must change. Students diagnosed late with hidden learning disabilities and who were not given accommodations and support along the way and still reach the Ph.D. level are batting way above average—their disability masked their true intelligence, and even still, their high intelligence or special gifted area caught the eye of a mentor or two along the way. We need to allow students from the undergraduate level through the Ph.D. an alternative route to learn and to use that learning for the greater good.
We need professors, faculty, who are truly multimodal (a rarity) and dyslexic thinkers. Richard Branson believes dyslexic thinking can be taught and promotes dyslexic thinking as an entrepreneurial asset. I believe we need it as a mentoring asset. And, considering the chicken and the egg, that won’t happen if we don’t support Ph.D.s who are neurodiverse thinkers. This is why I am expanding my call to multimodality beyond the faculty practitioners. If we are to make a significant difference in our scientific community, multimodal output should be an option for the dissertation and the first major work for tenure. Nothing in the age of AI says “made by a human” more than diversity.
