Throwback Thursday

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Illustration of the time machine from the film "Time Machine"
Two years ago in Disability Thinking: What’s The Deal With Kevin?

Kevin from The Office, that is.

Two years later, I think differently about cognitive impairment. I’ve also become a lot more attuned to how TV writers like to use ambiguously cognitively disabled characters, which allow them to poke grade-school-level fun at certain stereotypical tics, looks, and voices, while mostly escaping criticism for outright making fun of disabled people. I still believe the open questions about Kevin reflect similar uncertainty people sometimes have in real life, but I also think it gave the writer’s license to laugh at Kevin, supposedly guilt-free.

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Signal Boost: "Our ADA Stories"

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Disability Visibility Project: a community project with StoryCorps. “Recording disability history one story at a time.” @DisVisibiliy.

The Disability Visibility Project is partnering with the National Council on Independent Living for a social media campaign called #OurADAStories.

From the announcement by the Disability Visibility Project:
Purpose
To celebrate the rich diversity of the disability community and the impact of the ADA on our everyday lives and activities.
How To Participate
1) Tweet your story! It can be a written message, selfie or a photo of things you see in your community that relates to disability rights. Be sure use the hashtags #OurADAStories and #ADA25 in any tweets! Follow @DisVisibility for updates.
2) Post an image or written message to the Disability Visibility Project’s Facebook group (you have to join first). If you post an image to this group, please include a written description of your image.

The idea is to share your personal thoughts, experiences, and feelings about the Americans with Disabilities Act … in words and / or pictures. How has it affected your life? What are the law’s strengths and weaknesses? How has the ADA made your community better for people with disabilities?

This initiative will run from now until July 26, 2015 … the 25th Anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

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Another TED Idea

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Gerard Goggin and Katie Ellis, The Conversation - May 25, 2015


I had a little to say in Sunday's Weekly Reading List, about the TEDxSydney controversy, but mostly I was confused. Thanks the article linked above, I'm a little less confused, and a bit more interested.
"Key to the disappointment and anger felt by many in response to #stellaschallenge is a palpable irony. TEDx Sydney calls for conversations – but doesn’t recognise that there are already many conversations, relationships, and media, attitudinal, and social transformations underway. So, rather than speaking, genuine listening is required – often the hardest thing to do.
"Fabulous as Stella’s TEDx talk is, it’s time to go beyond just resharing it. We need to really listen to it. We must acknowledge and support the many other voices of people with disabilities."
I'm still not feeling the outrage others seem to feel, but I do agree the critics of TED's inital approach have made good points. It's not just the proposed methods, but the goal itself that should be re-thought, with Stella Young's specific points of view in mind.

Here's a thought ...

Why not keep it simple? Just sponsor a series of TEDxDisability conferences, in which all of the speakers are disabled people, representing a wide diversity of race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, ages, disability types, and above all, diverse perspectives and and philosophies of disability, from the intensely personal to the hard-edged political, and all the tones, styles, and positions in between.

Let's hear from amputee mountain climbers and quadriplegic protestors; little person accessibility campaigners and blind entrepreneurs; youth self-help motivators and middle-aged policy analysts; artists with Down Syndrome and litigators with spinal cord injury; autistic teachers and Deaf rehabilitation counselors; bipolar bloggers and learning disabled journalists. It might even be worthwhile to hear a speaker who thinks "Insipiration Porn" isn't such a terrible thing. As long as all the voices are authenttic disabled voices, there is room for all of us to hear all sorts of ideas.

A new set of TED conferences sounds like more talking, less action, which is one of the problems with the original plan. However, I would argue that giving a high-profile, more or less equal stage to all of the branches and clans of he broader disability community would help us decide what our priorities really are. At the same time, the non-disabled community would learn a lot, just by listenning.

As I said, it's just a thought.

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Memorial Day

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Black and white photo of three men with disabilities, two in wheelchairs two missing arms,
National Public Radio
1998

Memorial Day seems like a good occasion to think about the role of disabled military veterans not only in serving our country in war, but also in shaping the history of disability.

The First World War was one of the first wars to produce massive numbers of severely wounded soldiers who did not die soon afterwards. This coincided with other aspects of modernity, such as progressivism, which legitimized government action to address social problems, the professionalization of medicine and other related fields, which started to standardize care and weed out quackery, and advances in consumer technology, which enabled industry to meet newly identified needs more quickly than at any other time in history.

As this part of the NPR series points out, disabled veterans were still treated with condescension and pity, but at the time that was an improvement over how most disabled people had been perceived. As people started to think better of disabled veterans, it must have helped get people used to the idea that disability itself wasn’t the personal tragedy or societal threat it once seemed to be.

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Weekly Reading List

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Illustration of a stack of books
This is a collection of disability-related articles and blog posts I read last week, but didn’t have a chance to link to or discuss. It’s an opportunity to catch up with some of the good stuff that’s out there, but doesn’t fit neatly into the week's “big stories.”

Here is this week’s reading list:

TEDxSydney - May 21, 2015

Melissa Davey, The Guardian - May 22, 2015

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what happened here, which is why I haven’t written about it until now. From what I can tell, TEDxSydney, one of the loose affiliates of the TED Conference organization, decided to start a rather vague “media campaign” to honor the late Stella Young, the disability activist and all-around awesome woman who came to wider world attention for her TEDxSydney presentation a couple of years ago. It seems like disability activists, including people who loved Stella and her militancy, were upset by a combination of things, including a suggested starter question meant to help non-disabled people break the ice in starting discussions with disabled people, presumably to foster dialog and understanding or something. The question was something like, “Tell me about your disability …”

That question, and the whole tenor of the project, seemed very airy and abstract. Now Stella was an intellectual, so she was well acquainted with philosophies and social theories, but she was also very down-to-earth, businesslike, and very clear that most of disabled peoples’ problems stem from very real, concrete barriers in architecture and policies, not just “attitudes.” I think that’s why so many people got upset. It’s good to see TEDx responding, though the tone of their response seems equally guarded and bureaucratic to me, again lacking any solid point of view that can be pinned down. To be fair, these problems are perhaps to be expected from a TED initiative. TED talks are occasionally amazing, but just as often they are smug, self-congratulatory, and pandering to a certain sort of privileged, progressive, but apolitical audience that likes to feel like having a deep, meaningful conversation is the same thing as doing something. I’m a bit like that myself, but I see it as one of my weaknesses, not a strength.

Smart Ass Cripple - May 22, 2015

Mike Ervin’s take on “overcoming.” His Smart Ass Cripple blog is always worth reading.

s.e. smith, this ain’t liven’ - May 22, 2015

An excellent run-down of the most common ways disability is used, and abused, in literature and popular culture. s.e. smith suggests maybe writers might try a bit more creativity.

Nicole Cobler, San Antonio Express-News - May 19, 2015

Apart from the fact that home care workers are, usually, woefully underpaid, it’s good to see the people they work for fighting for them to be paid more. The problem is that home care users don’t have any real say in wages. It’s usually state Medicaid programs that pay. So the best home care users can do is organize, lobby, and protest their legislatures, as they did this week in Texas.

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Weekly Wrap-Up

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Furiosa

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I haven’t seen a movie in the theater in years, but this evening I’ll be at my local mall cinema seeing Mad Max, Fury Road. I’m going because I read this Tumblr post about the film, (via the Disability Visibility Project), and its amputee main character, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron). We’ll see how I feel afterwards, but in movies at least, I get a get stronger positive disability vibes when disability isn’t the main topic, but rather a visible but natural-feeling aspect of complex characters. I prefer “show, don’t tell," and it sounds like Fury Road does just that, and nothing else regarding Furiosa’s missing arm.

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"Geeky Gimp" Panel - Disability In Star Trek

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I had a great time last night talking with some fellow disabled geeks about disability in Star Trek, hosted by Erin of The Geeky Gimp. We covered a lot of ground, and basically agreed that disability in Trek is a mixed bag of good intentions, interesting ideas, and sometimes sloppy thinking about disability issues. Also, using Google Hangouts got me thinking about changing how I do my Disability.TV Podcast. Maybe a video chat is a better way to go. Just thinking ...

If you do Twitter, you should follow the other fantastic panelists:

Alice Wong: @SFdirewolf
Zack Kline: @zkline
Day Al-Mohamed: @DalAlmohamed
Host Erin H.: @geekygimp

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Airline Incident Followup

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Autistic Self Advocacy Network - May 21, 2015

Last week’s discussion about the autistic teenager and her family being kicked off an airliner frustrated me on two levels.

First there were the commenters who seemed to mold and manipulate this particular  incident into their preconceived ideas about overly-demanding special needs parents inconveniencing everyone else in pursuit of unrealistic accommodations for an annoying child. The fact that the flight attendants ended up providing what the autistic teen wanted in the first place, which means they could have done it right away without argument, didn’t matter to people intent on making the obvious point that an airline can’t meet every conceivable need.

Second, nobody seemed to share my concern about the teenager’s mother, (who I think was right in her advocacy), using negative stereotypes of autism to try to get what she was after. On reflection, I think she may not have been as insulting and harmful as it sounded.

Throughout the dialog … in news articles, blogs, Twitter, and Facebook … I kept wondering what the Autistic Self Advocacy Network would think. I am pleased to see that once again, ASAN has presented an issue in a strongly worded but well-reasoned press release centered on a useful response … asking the Department of Transportation for clarification of the applicable law, the Air Carrier Access Act. This is more than expressing outrage. It might actually help.

It can’t be said enough. The Autistic Self Advocacy Network is the most articulate, effective, and authentic voice for autistic people in the country, possibly the world. If you have any interest in autism from any angle and aren’t familiar with ASAN’s work, you are missing out.

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