Ryan Roach: What is your name and how do you identify?

Andrea Manning: My name is Andrea, and I identify as neurodivergent.

RR: Do you have any accommodations, supports, or outside needs that were interrupted by the pandemic? And, if so, what did that look like for you?

AM: Honestly, the pandemic made things better for me. I have a lot of trouble with making sure I was on time to places, or sometimes I would get really anxious trying to go to class. So, I would skip it. And I only had one professor who would do live captioning, and sometimes it’s really hard for me to process what people are saying, so once we moved to online, I could access closed captioning. I could show up and it wasn’t stressful. Some teachers didn’t even do meetings or live class meetings. I felt like the focus was more on my work and not necessarily on the more social aspect of school, which is kind of like showing up and being places and things like that. And teachers were giving more time to do stuff because they were understanding that things were really weird. So yeah, and for the most part, my teachers were pretty accommodating at the start of the semester anyway even before it, but obviously there’s only so much that they can do.

So I would say honestly it helped a lot. It made things a lot easier for me. Like, I didn’t have perfect grades or anything at the end of the semester, but I definitely think I would have done much more poorly had I stayed in person for the whole spring semester.

RR: During the pandemic, the government and media have deemed the chronically ill, disabled, and immunocompromised communities as “vulnerable.” What are your thoughts on the terminology of “vulnerable”?

AM: I have mixed feelings about it because, on the one hand, there are certain people who really will get extremely hurt or die if they were to contract coronavirus, and I don’t want to negate that experience. But at the same time, we’re still doing that separation of the community - those who, if they were to get it, would die and those who have a better chance of survival. I don’t think that negation is helpful.

I think if we were to just care collectively, then we wouldn’t have to worry about identifying who is most affected. So yeah, I guess I have mixed feelings. Like, I recognize that because we don’t have that collective care, we have to recognize that certain people are more affected. But then it’s also, like, we should not have to do that - we should have that collective care.

RR: Moving forward, how would you like to see the government and society start responding to the COVID-19 pandemic?

AM: I think it goes back to that idea of collective care. Not just in a very material sense of how we should be practicing mutual aid and actually caring about each other, but in the psychological sense of, “we should care about each other’s livelihood.” Or each other’s lives.

I think that – you know, there was a point at the start of all of this when there was a lot of conversation around who gets ventilators or who gets support. Like basically whose life is worthy of being saved. And there was a lot of talk about, “Well, we don’t have the money for this, we don’t have the money for that.” And, you know, like a month in, we have these uprisings surrounding police brutality, and we see, like, “Wait a second, [laughs] things like the police budget is like heavily inflated.” If we were to take that money and allocate it, then we wouldn’t question whose life is more valuable and who we should be saving. We can save everybody. Also, we would be changing this whole issue in communities of color surrounding policing.

That’s the way I want to see things change. I want to see people caring more. I think part of that is changing the language that we’re using – changing our perspective. I have heard a lot of people that kind of don’t think it exists because they haven’t gotten sick and don’t know anybody directly who has gotten sick. Or, like, they know people that maybe got sick but are like, “Oh, it’s probably just the flu,” or, “I think that people are just kind of like conflating the virus at like the hospital.” And I’m not saying it’s not possible that there’s not a possible instance of malpractice, but I don’t think you should allow that to dictate like the value of somebody’s life essentially. Like, what’s more valuable? You being right? [Laughs]. Or like somebody living?

RR: In addition to the pandemic, the United States has experienced uprisings across the country in response to the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by police. Uprisings in physical spaces are not always accessible to all folx. Have you been involved at all with the uprisings over the past few months? And, if so, what has that looked like for you?

AM: Okay, I was thinking a lot about this the other day, and I was talking to Sam about this because I was thinking about my role in activism. ‘Cause I started pretty young, and when you start out, we all have this idea of what it looks like or what it should look like. We kind of follow that path, or at least I followed that path. So that started with, like, organizing protests and town halls, and things like that. And I realized pretty quickly that that’s not me. Like I don’t mind going to them occasionally, but like for me – and I completely support them, I want to clarify that, too. When it comes to the work that I do and the work that makes me feel like I’m actually fully contributing, I realize that I’m a big information person – like learning and understanding stuff. So I think, for me, my most effective form of protesting activism is when I’m taking the time to inform myself and then inform others. Because I think that information, and the basis of knowledge, is kind of our ability to be free, to free ourselves and our communities. Without that understanding, we kind of just repeat what’s happened in the past or we repeat mistakes, or we just don’t have the vision to see what the future can be outside of what it is currently.

I guess at first I felt really guilty about not going to any of the protests. And part of the reason why I did not go was because of the pandemic, and then also because a lot of the protests were met with police brutality, which is ironic. And a lot of the fears surrounding that and then also just kind of feeling like really out of place. So yeah, I guess for me I realized that, like, even though I am not physically participating in protests, I think my role is more so as an informant or an educator. Like, I inform myself, and then I share that knowledge with others, and people can take from that what they will. So yeah, like doing more of that side of things and hopefully being able to change perspectives through research in addition to through education.