Michele Cooke signing "deaf" against a white background

Inclusion, Equity, and Advocacy

Michele Cooke doesn't wait for institutions to become more inclusive — she makes them that way. Through decades of leadership, she has become one of geoscience's most consequential advocates for deaf and disabled scientists.

Disability Advocacy

Person with a hat and plaid shirt standing in a desert, arms outstretched as the same fault line in front of a large rocky wall.

Cooke's disability advocacy operates at every scale, from the individual classroom to the international stage. Through hands-on workshops and short courses, she equips colleagues with concrete tools for building inclusive workplaces and classrooms, translating advocacy into everyday inclusive practice. 

Her work on accessible field trips models inclusion for disabled scientists and students in one of geoscience's most exclusionary spaces, demonstrating that fieldwork itself can be redesigned. She has ensured that disabled scientists' perspectives directly inform how professional societies and federal agencies set priorities and shape policy. 

Selected publications on disability and accessibility:

The Mind Hears

Graphic with a circular progress bar, question text "How much listening is too much?", logo of The Mind Hears with a graduation cap.

What matters deafness of the ear, when the mind hears? The only deafness, the true deafness, the incurable deafness, is that of the mind.

- Victor Hugo

This quote encapsulates the idea that our potential to contribute to academia, knowledge, and society is not constrained by our ability or inability to hear sounds. The challenges that arise from working in hearing-dominated environments can be met with creativity and resilience, which are features of the mind.

The Mind Hears provides networking opportunities and crowdsourced strategies to thrive in academia with hearing loss. The blog has 95+ blog posts from 30+ Deaf/HoH authors and maintains several resources, including:

Equity and Inclusion Within Academia

Group of researchers on some rocks outside

Cooke translates equity research and principles into institutional policy and practice.  She has been working on faculty workload equity policies that build on years of national leadership exposing and dismantling the "hidden curriculum" of graduate education. 

Some of her initiatives include: