Inside the Little Plastic Castle

I appreciate the eloquent exploration of the social model of disability by Sunaura Taylor and Judith Butler as they stroll through San Francisco, with bonus thrifting (on YouTube no CC) and transcript. It’s an excerpt from Astra Taylor’s EXAMINED LIFE, a documentary featuring 9 philosophers walking and talking.

Someone on Ask.Metafilter needed book title text that punned on kitchen topics. Snarky MeFites delivered better than GrubHub, UberEats, and DoorDash combined. Amuse bouche:

• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Flour
• The Wings They Carried
• Finnegan's Cake
• A Distant Mirepoix
• Pho of Flying
• All Quiet on the Western Bundt
• Teff in Venice
• The Adventures of Tom Yum Sawyer
• The Island of Doctor Merlot
• Of Rice and Naan

I still haven’t seen Barbie yet, but I’ve enjoyed disabled people’s commentary!

Dr Therí A Pickens (on Medium) declares Disability Access in Barbieland Holds Up a Sober Mirror to Our World
archived

Poet Johnson Cheu explains why Becky Declines Barbie’s Dinner Invitation both print and audio. He’s referring to 1997’s Share-A-Smile Becky who comes with her own pink wheelchair. Travel blogger Karin Willison reviews all of the disabled Barbie-adjacent dolls.

Hats off to Erin Hawley geekygimp and Anna Goldberg nymeria941 for rustling up the Disability Readathon, running for all of April 2021.

I don’t Twitter, but I can bring my listserv wrangling skills to bear.

Disability Studies Quarterly, a free open-access peer-review journal, always publishes a few reviews in each issue, AND they’ve done two all-review issues:

Thirty-eight reviews in the Winter 2020 issue
https://dsq-sds.org/issue/view/234

Eighty-one reviews in the current, Winter 2021 issue
https://dsq-sds.org/issue/view/256

While most of these books are published by academic presses, the reviewers always take into account whether the works are accessible to those of us outside the academy.

The Society for Disability Studies (SDS) is a non-profit organization that promotes the study of disability in social, cultural, and political contexts. SDS con happens in concert with Multiple Perspectives, a disability-themed con sponsored by Ohio State University. You have to register for both conferences.. SDS subsidizes free reg for folks who need it. I’m happy to subsidize membership in the org, which includes access to the SDS Listserv, a very useful resource for researching disability.

The theme this year is

DEEP SIGH: (Re)Centering Activism, Healing, Radical Love, Emotional Connection and Breathing Spaces in Intersectional Communities

During these turbulent times of racial injustice and disappointing leadership(s), amplified by the current pandemic and climate crisis, the world is (has been, and continues to be) hurting, while some have been thriving at the expense of ‘others’. Right now, we need to take a step back and listen and learn from those who are members of some of the most vulnerable communities, in particular historically multiply marginalized communities. Pain, trauma, and vulnerability manifest in a myriad of ways. Rather than sweeping these issues under the rug, we want to invite folks to breathe for a moment and take space/time to (re)connect with their surroundings and with each other, while becoming attuned to the aches, tightness, and tweaks that our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual energies convey.

This is a moment for a deep sigh, a moment of “I am present,” a moment of becoming aware of how much wear and tear our mind, body, and spirit have embodied, toiled over, especially in the past several months of “what just happened?!”

Presenters and program items are being developed as I type, with details available by 1 April. I guarantee you’ll find something intriguing and educational. Mia Mingus mia.mingus will be speaking at 4pm Monday, 19 April 2021. She’s an outstanding presenter, thinker, and organizer and I treasure every time I’ve heard her present.

Conference Schedule Overview

Saturday & Sunday, 17–18 April, 2021, SDS@OSU:

• 9 Blocks of 4-5 Concurrent Sessions
• Plenary Event
• All-day Zola Help Desk
• All-day Display, Chat, and Respite Space
• DANCE DANCE DANCE

Monday & Tuesday, 19–20 April, 2021
SDS@OSU plus Multiple Perspectives:

• 6 Blocks of 2 Concurrent SDS@OSU Strand Sessions
• All-Day Sessions organized by the Multiple Perspectives Conference
• Plenary Events

( more background on SDS )

thanks to Susan & Teddy Fitzmaurice, with grants from a wide variety of folks, ADA 30 - Michigan is a festival of disability voices. They're currently at week 4 of 9. Until 27 September, you can attend their daily free programming, mostly 2pm CDT (1900 UTC).

These are all virtual events. Closed captioning and ASL interpretation will be available for all. Audio description will be added for primarily visual events. There is no cost to participate. But you will need to register at Eventbrite to get a password

registration link is labeled "Eventbrite" at the home page[1]

https://mi-ada.org

Don't let "Michigan" stop you: program includes items of world-wide interest, such as personal narratives, advocacy strategies for IEPs, history lecture, accessible movement and dance, films, and much more!

I particularly recommend today's session with Tom Olin, Photojournalist of the disability movement. He was there for the noisy disability activism in the US, for the last 40 years. (24 August 1900 UTC)

Too many to list them all; this one looks great

True Inclusion is Revolutionary: Disability Inclusive & Accessible Organizing Practices

Learn with member Dessa Cosma how Detroit Disability Power is mobilizing Detroit’s disability community to fight for inclusion, rights, and respect, alongside and included with mainstream activists and protesters fighting for justice. (3 Sept 2020 1900 UTC)

[1] home page is also the landing page for all events, with a single link via workshop title. Very accessible information design -- thanks to Susan's lived experience with intellectual disability.

Another fascinating essay from nursingclio_feed explores how anti-Asian racism builds on stigma, as per Goffman.

But targeting wet markets as the source of future pandemics obscures the complexity of changing human-wildlife relationships in the 21st century and their role in disease emergence. Anthropogenic changes to the environment including industrial and residential development, habitat disruption and destruction, and agricultural practices introduce new opportunities for pathogens to jump from one species into another. Wet markets that feature many different wildlife in the same space provide one opportunity for such species jumps to occur, but so do logging, mining, road construction, and rapid urban growth. Zoonotic diseases may emerge from interactions between fruit bats and pig farms in Malaysia, as in the case of the Nipah virus, or alongside residential development in the formerly forested suburbs of Connecticut, like Lyme disease. Exclusively focusing on wet markets and coronavirus ignores the history and reality of disease ecology.

https://nursingclio.org/2020/06/02/absolutely-disgusting-wet-markets-stigma-theory-and-xenophobia

This is what online access can look like: American Sign Language, Spanish interpretation, and English live captions will be provided. Multiple breaks will be built in to the webinar.

"Grounding Movements in Disability Justice" will take place this Thursday -- 23 April 2020 -- between 7-8:30 PM EST (in your time zone) via the ZOOM platform.

Presenters include Azza Altiraifi, Cyree Jarelle Johnson, Dorian Taylor, Dustin Gibson, Talila A. Lewis, and Nirmala Erevelles. They will offer the perspective of people grounded in #DisabilityJustice work as they all respond to COVID-19.

To receive the ZOOM meeting invite, you must register here: https://bit.ly/djgrounding

Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/214085396704598

cross-posted to access_fandom, kindly discuss there

The Society for Disability Studies is the academic home for people who understand disability from the social (justice) model. They’ve been publishing Disability Studies Quarterly since the 1980s. DSQ mixes up high academic and practical activism — it’s always worth checking out their open access archive if you’re interested in anything related to disability. The SDS is not a rich academic group, so they’ve recently partnered with Ohio State University’s ongoing Multiple Perspectives on Inclusion conference to maintain an in-person annual gathering. I’ve attended SDS several times, always learning a lot and (typically) never wrote up the sessions.

This year the con was held online. It turned out to be much cheaper — they had been paying hotel costs of ~$200/hour — and more accessible for some of us. (Nothing like attending a session while reclining in bed — thanks to my iPad holder.) Virtual meetings are by their nature easier to record; the SDS have promised to make all the sessions available — video, captioning transcript, supporting text and slide shows — for a month after the conference’s end. (While this hasn’t happened yet, it doesn’t surprise me. The conference organizers — most of them disabled — were operating at 160% effort and negligible sleep for a month before the 4 April start date.)

( Four hundred words about one presentation )

Cassandra Hartblay responds to yet another design school challenge informed by zero experience or input from actual wheelchair users.
Originally a Twitter thread in dialog with Louise Hickman _louhicky. Hooray for the Critical Design Lab folks who preserve it on their blog!

CDL member CHartblay reflects on the values and priorities assigned to assistive technologies, coining the term criptic innovation, to describe "design innovations that a crip user immediately sees as privileging ableist values over others."

( 166 words of more context )

The Critical Design Lab examines assistive technology with a disability justice perspective, with 12 projects currently as well as a blog and a podcast (with complete transcripts, naturally)
https://www.mapping-access.com/podcast

Up at 5, do our am stuff — lightbox, stretches. La Quinta’s provided breakfast included hard boiled eggs, safe enough for me. They forgot the vinegar, though, so it took 10 minutes to dig the shell off.

Of course we fly via preparations airways, so I had an apple, turkey jerky, and a choc chip hobnob. MyGuy went for gas and trapped a container of wild Chobani for me as well. While he packed the motel’s luggage cart full, Bella and I were delighted to some sidewalk to run back and forth on. Thank heaven for corporate policies that result in a Lowe’s building supply store having sidewalk on the street facing a residential block. May it be the seed of further sidewalk to come.

On the road at 915a.

Almost miss Avery Corporation HQ, funny it didn’t stick out.

( “babble” )

...and I finally attend the first SDS function, which is an informal chat with bonus clementines. I meet several fascinating women who share their research ideas and experience. More anon!

Back in October 2013, I had the good fortune to attend the “Disability Disclosure in/and Higher Education Conference.” It was a disability studies rock-star event: many of my favorite thinkers presented, and I learned tons of stuff. The focus was on disclosing in order to get accommodations: unusually, we examined both faculty and student experiences. An essay collection resulted from the bubbly stew of ideas, new from the University Michigan Press:

Negotiating Disability: Stephanie L. Kerschbaum, Laura T. Eisenman, James M. Jones, eds.

I sampled it via JSTOR, it’s also available on other electronic databases: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1012609341.

I was particularly delighted by the essay challenging stoicism and disability pride from Josh Lukin joshlukinworks. Josh floats in my ethereal intersection of disability studies and SF, and I first met him at WisCon. He's a wicked punster, a much-lauded teacher, and my kind of all-around intellectual. Josh rightly points out that when us social-model types push “disability pride” we can also create our own version of the “overcoming” trope we love to hate.

Essay nut graph:

begin quote
Once one realizes that one’s disability is not a moral failing, one is supposed, judging by the syllabi, books, and blog posts I have encountered, to embrace the social model of disability, become a proud activist, and write a memoir. I do have an unpublished draft of a memoir (Urgency: Growing Up with Crohn’s Disease), and I have been credited with activism in my teaching and scholarship. But the social model part and the pride part don’t work well for me, and I know from a number of students and from conversations in the disability community that I am not unique in that. So I want to consider why that might be, and how theoretical and science-fictional models offer alternative ways of being disabled–ways that are not really new discoveries on my part but that are already immanent in crip culture.
quote ends