Responding to a film by Christie Sun Kim
The highlight of the film for me is when she said she wishes we could hear with the eyes. It was amazing to see how she uses different medium to translate one sense perception to another through performance. She was literally “making sounds”. This is important as it expands my thinking on perception. How sound, sight, touch can be way more than how they are come across through hearing, seeing and touching. And how people with disability have a more expanded field of perception. In fact, this is far from being “disabled” but “trans-abled” – having abilities transcending the normal perceived notion of perceptions. Although within my teaching practice, I seldom encounter students with sense disability, many of them have learning disability or are neurodivergent. Many of them are incredible in other modes of communication for example, a student of mine has severe dyslexia but is an amazing coder and made incredible robotic installations. This film demonstrates so beautifully that “abilities” come in many different forms and they are all legitimate and worth celebrating.
Responding to resources #DisabilityTooWhite article/interview with Vilissa Thompson & ‘Deaf Accessibility for Spoonies: Lessons from Touring Eve and Mary Are Having Coffee’ by Khairani Barokka (accessible via Moodle).
I’d like to combine my responses of the two resources as they are interrelated. The interview connects me back to what we’ve learned from session 1 and 2 about intersectionality and the complexity around having more than one or more disadvantages, one of which being invisible disability, that are prone to oppression. A particular shocking statistic about how less black children are diagnosed with dyslexia because their learning disabilities become normalised as part of who they are, which is an ugly symptom of structural and systemic racism so ingrained in our society.
Barroka’s piece hits the nail in the head on this issue. A particularly illuminating point is how she takes ‘the social model notion of disabled as the opposite of ‘enabled’ rather than ‘unable’, which is the view that disability is caused by barriers in society and how it is organised, rather than by a person’s impairment or difference. This speaks to the above point about a person being “trans-abled” rather than disabled. If she cannot perform standing up, she can perform sitting down. I feel that this notion is very empowering and will definitely apply this to my teaching practice. Perhaps I’ll spend time devising teaching tools that will empower students with dyslexia, mental health, neurodivergent issues in using their disabilities to their advantage in creating wonderful pieces of writing and artworks.
I find it so interesting how you connect the ‘social model of disability’ to the resources, as I was recently thinking about how to look at this model as an intersectional model and what this would entail.
There might be all sorts of tricky and interesting bits to that, though, and I was reminded of that when you wrote, “Although within my teaching practice, I seldom encounter students with sense disability, many of them have learning disability or are neurodivergent.” In my teaching context, I feel that this is quite similar – though I guess even that is hard to say, as disabilities come in so many forms and variations to being “impaired”. And then it also makes me wonder why there are so few students at UAL who are D/deaf or blind/visually impaired or in a wheelchair etc., and whether this doesn’t only tell us that they have been excluded somewhere along the way!
Realising that this might be the case, I believe it is crucial to try and avoid “relativism” as part of intersectional approaches – and actively think about how to get disabled and other marginalised people involved who are not already in the room – and who still haven’t been given access.
Absolutely. I have had to think about my own access issue recently because of an impending knee surgery which will result in inability to walk properly for a short period of time. Then I realised it significantly limited my ability to work on my campus as involves a lot of walking across buildings. I would have to significantly reduce the number of students I see. In hindsight, there is always a way to circumnavigate it for example asking all my students to see me in one location instead. But many times as person with disability might already be prevented to come/apply/initiate because of access issues. That’s why Barroka’s work is so important.