At the outset, we should note that none of us is an occupational therapist. In taking on the work described below, we were probably more animated by the idea of exploring our role as ‘political beings’ within a university community. More than therapists, we saw ourselves as would-be legislators attempting to ameliorate or modify what we felt to be the obstacles facing those from a working-class background at an exclusive United States campus. This focus on our identity as part of a collective working-class community gradually shaped a collaborative writing project that interacted with policy debates around disability and education. Before that story can be told, however, some background is necessary.

The Transatlantic Fed is a partnership between the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers (FWWCP) and the Writing Program, Syracuse University. At the outset, the Transatlantic Fed was a listserv discussion group bringing together a Syracuse University Civic Writing class and FWWCP members charged with the task of addressing a seemingly straightforward question: Does the working class in Great Britain and the USA share similar experiences? This was not an innocent question to ask in the context of Syracuse University, an educational institution where university fees can average over $40 000 a year and where, not surprisingly, the number of working-class students is relatively small. Indeed, Parks developed the connection with the FWWCP as a means to provide working-class students at Syracuse University with an entry point into a tradition of writing and analysing working-class experience for the knowledge and insights it can provide. An additional goal for Parks was also to provide a forum for more privileged students to learn about the reality of working-class life.

Within a class of approximately 20 students, the Transatlantic Fed project attracted six students, all from working-class backgrounds, half of whom also faced issues of physical or mental disability. The online conversation with the FWWCP soon focused on the intersection of class, education and disability. As might be expected, the initial stories were personal, individual and focused on the discrimination the participants faced daily. Eric Davidson wrote: ‘I don’t know what it’s like in the USA, but in the UK there is a lot of prejudice against Survivors – we are seen as incapable, socially inept, self-obsessed, boring, incapable of self-expression … right down the list to smelly.’

The question of ‘what to do’ echoed throughout the posts and called forth the role of potential legislators within each participant. Before moving on to the actions taken by the group, however, it is worth spending a moment discussing Gramsci’s (1971) conception of legislators.

A fundamental tenet of this idea is the belief that we are always already participating in collective aspects of public life. Even our most immediate or personal actions work to reaffirm or to resist normative systemic expression. For instance, the sheer act of the students bringing working-class experience and writing into an institution that could be viewed as structured against such opportunities was a legislative moment – it affected in a small way who could speak and what could be said. More broadly, it could be argued that such work was an attempt to enact an emerging collective belief among participants that such personal issues needed to be systemically represented within the legislative framework of the university. For Gramsci (1971), then, the initial work of legislators is to elaborate this emergent collective sensibility across the locations where one has legislative authority, moving to create spaces where a new definition of normative representation and behaviour exists. Later, the work becomes that of further articulating those spaces within the system, ultimately creating a new ‘governance’ structure in a way that has affinities with de Certeau’s (1984) concepts of tactics and strategies.

Within the context of using personal writing about class/disability as a means to alter the ‘normative representations’ and governance structures of a variety of institutions, the work of the Transatlantic Fed began to take on more meaning. The writing produced became an attempt to enact a collective role as legislators to affect local change within discussions occurring at Syracuse University and the FWWCP (see also Chapter 3 and Chapter 6). To track these changes at Syracuse University, we want to examine the particular trajectory of one participant, Melodie Clarke, whose work is chosen not for its individual merits but for how it speaks to the collective effort of the Transatlantic Fed.

As with many of the Transatlantic Fed members, Clarke’s initial posts to the group focused on the particulars of her situation:

In response, Nick Pollard wrote back stating: