Inclusive Practices: Disability

Inclusive Practices: Blog 1 – Disability

Collectively, the assemblage of articles, resources, and films around disability for this blogging task, speak to the wide range of experiences of disabled students, and consequently some of the challenges and opportunities of thinking through inclusive practices in relation to disability.

As a teacher of performance, I found the two artist portraits – the film portrayal of deaf sound artist Christine Sin Kim and the personal reflection by performance artist Khairani Barokka — inspiring and frustrating in different ways. The visual presentation of Kim’s visual experiments related to the materiality of sound and Kim’s own autobiographical reflection on the relation between sound, image, and language growing up as the immigrant daughter of Chinese-speaking parents captured the possibilities for performance to produce rich, multi-valent experiences and how artists from the “margins” a deaf artist, can reveal sound in new ways. (I am left questioning the heavy reliance on sound and underscoring in the film about a deaf artist however). Barokka’s description of her extreme physical pain is very poignant and a valuable model for students seeking to combine their activism with their art, as well as brining awareness to the invisibility of certain forms of disability, of “spoonies.” Nevertheless, I remain slightly hesitant about bringing an article such as this into the classroom; this is of course a subjective opinion, but my experience in the classroom is that while some students respond to this kind of autobiographical unburdening, the article is too easily dismissed as too self-involved and does not generate the feelings of solidarity and allyship that I assume is its political aim.

Likewise, while I find the subject matter of the interview with Vilissa Thompson to be an important conversation to bring into the classroom, I found the content of the article to be too narrowly focused on issues of representation. This speaks to my own politics, but I find an emphasis on issues of cultural representation has led to a severely limited form of politics, emblematic of one in which the primary members of a Tory cabinet can be identified as “representatives” of the Global Majority while enacting racist, anti-immigrant, reactionary politics. Perhaps that article could be supplemented with another text which presents a structural analysis of the ways in which disability services are underserving specific communities, highlighting the material stakes of not considering disability and race in an intersectional manner. (I am also wary of hashtag activism as effective model for social transformation).

In her article “The Erasure of Blacks from the History of Autism” in the Shades of Noir journal on Disability, Kerima Çevik provides a necessary lesson of why representation in the construction of the historical record of our understanding of autism matters for today’s policies. In what she calls the “eight minute” research challenge, she presents a panoply of African American autistic savants from the last two hundred year, showing that this information is readily and easily accessible on the internet, but ignored in contemporary conceptualizations of autism which center white subjects in both research and policy. The SoN key terms is an exhaustive but helpful glossary of sometimes confusing terminology; I could imagine using this as part of an in-class exercise into understanding the importance of knowing and employing current (and often quickly changing!) best language practices. Likewise, the UAL Disability Service webpages are an important resource for letting students know about the different forms of support available for them. Particularly helpful for me (as someone coming from the US), was the page which outlined the difference in language and procedures between Schools and University in helping newly arrived students understand that the responsibility as adults now lies with them to initiate any process for support.