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Upstate faculty selected as one of 11 inaugural fellows to SUNY program aimed at enhancing digital accessibility

Liz Bowen, PhD, assistant professor of bioethics and humanities at Upstate Medical University, has been named an inaugural fellow in the SUNY Accessibility Advocates and Allies Faculty Fellowship Program. Bowen is one of only 11 individuals selected from across the SUNY system to work on expanding digital accessibility and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) practices across their campuses, which is crucial for student success. 

This cohort of fellows will establish a community of faculty leaders and champions committed to promoting and growing accessibility practices in and out of the classroom on their campuses.

Students with disabilities self-identifying with their campus Disability Services or Accessibility Resources offices are increasing as a share of total enrollment, with over 10% of students enrolled across the SUNY System. This number does not capture the many students who do not self-identify with the student disability office, either because they do not know they are eligible or have chosen not to disclose due to a wide variety of reasons, including stigma. SUNY has invested $10 million in annual recurring State funding to increase support to students with disabilities at all State-operated campuses. 

Bowen said she was honored and excited to serve as a first member of the fellowship program. “This role is both personally and professionally meaningful to me: I identify as disabled and my scholarly work as an ethicist and humanist is deeply grounded in the field of disability studies,” she said. “Disability has, for too long, been treated as a disqualifying factor in the practice of medicine, when in fact disability can equip health care professionals with valuable forms of knowledge, understanding, and connection with patients that come from shared experience.

“We need doctors, nurses, and allied health professionals with lived experience of disability, and so we need health care education to be accessible,” Bowen continued. “I look forward to thinking and working with Upstate learners, faculty, staff, and leadership to cultivate a culture of access and possibility that will build a better health care system for us all.”

In addition to her Upstate faculty post, Bowen is a Presidential Scholar at The Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute, where she served as a Rice Family Fellow in Bioethics and the Humanities. Bowen earned her doctorate in English and comparative literature from Columbia University, where she also earned a certificate in feminist scholarship. 

Bowen teaches the Health Systems Science: Health Humanities course and the Clinical Bioethics course in the College of Medicine. She also teaches Health Care Ethics in the College of Health Professions. 

Bowen’s research explores the intersections of disability studies, bioethics, and the health humanities, with a focus on how cultural narratives of disability shape public perceptions of ethical responsibility. Her other research interests include animal ethics, the environmental humanities, disability arts and poetics, anti-ableist education and pedagogy, and reproductive justice. 

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