All posts in (dis)Ability

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• • (dis)Ability
  • Bibliothèque

  If I Can’t Dance, Is it Still My Revolution? An interview with AJ Withers

  January 19, 2012 • Kate-Christine Miller

  AJ Withers is a Canadian Disability Activist whose zine “If I Can’t Dance, Is it Still My Revolution?” had a profound effect on me as a disabled person and activist. After reviewing the zine and website for Shameless magazine (the Labour issue, out this week!) I wanted to connect with AJ and hear more about radical disability activism. Specifically, I wanted to know what it takes to build solidarity, among and with disabled people, how to connect the struggles of differently disabled people, and to reflect on how this work is transformative. I personally can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of their new book, Disability Politics and Theory, due to be published by Fernwood in April of this year.

  –––-

  Kate-Christine Miller - There are some great guides out there for being an ally, and the guide on your site points to a lot of the problems that come up with being a non-disabled ally. I would imagine there are a lot of issues with disabled organizers recognizing all of each other’s needs and experiences. Are these issues that you see come up in disabled organizing?

  AJ Withers - Yes, all the time. The mainstream disability rights movement has focused on getting middle-class straight white men the privilege that they would have had if they weren’t disabled. So, it has often been classist, heterosexist, racist and sexist, and worked to uphold the oppression of other groups and the many disabled people who are a part of them. I think it is important for all disabled organizers to recognize that disabled people are an incredibly diverse group and that we need to attack all forms of oppression, not just disablism.

  KCM- What advice do you have for disabled people just starting to be interested in radical disability organizing?

  AJW – 1. Make sure that the fact that disability is intersected with other oppressions is reflected in everything that you do.

  2. Work with a diverse group and inter-generationally. When people organize with people who think and act the same way they do, that work can be really limited and one-sided. It is important to work with lots of different kinds of people with different perspectives. Sometimes, this means that you will have fights and it will be harder to compromise, but the final outcome will be better.

  (more inside…)

• • (dis)Ability
  • Body Politics
  • Gender
  • Trans-

  An Intersectional RSVP

  November 28, 2011 • Shoshana Erlich

  Dear Event Organizers:

  I sincerely appreciate your open invitation to attend your event on this important issue, however, I find that I must respectfully decline.

  As an activist with a complex identity, it is difficult for me to condone attending an event that, while seeking to explain and draw interest into a matter that is very near and dear to my heart, has managed to ensure that my participation in your event will be virtually impossible.

  While I can appreciate that your event is being held in a wheelchair accessible venue, it is important to recognize that that in and of itself does not ensure that your event is indeed accessible. Had you publicized your event further than one week in advance I would have been able to contact you and request an interpreter in order for me to be able to attend. Additionally, while I appreciate that many events are being put together on a tight budget, when you inform me that your event is unable to provide interpretation services due to the cost required that tells me that there is a dollar figure attached to my participation, membership or sometimes allyship in this community. Furthermore, while attempts to find out if a video is captioned are appreciated, it would be best if that information was publicized on the event details. An even better response would be that upon finding out that a video is uncaptioned that the suitability of another video being shown was examined as well as banding together as an intersectional group to apply pressure to filmmakers to ensure that their videos are captioned and accessible.

  As someone who identifies as genderqueer, there are also additional barriers to my participation. (more inside…)

• • (dis)Ability
  • Event Listings

  Toronto: “From Blahs to Bliss”: Expressive Arts Therapy group

  October 11, 2011 • Julia Horel

  Planned Parenthood Toronto is happy to share with you its latest expressive arts therapy group, “From Blahs to Bliss,” for youth experiencing anxiety and/or depression.

  From Blahs to Bliss … and everything in between
  Finding Your Balance

  A closed expressive-arts therapy group for youth (up to age 29) dealing with depression and/or anxiety.
  When: Fridays, 1:30pm-4:00pm, Oct 14-Dec 2
  Where: Bloor and Spadina area

  TTC tokens available and light refreshments provided.
  Free of charge. Space is limited. (This is not a drop-in group.)

  Please call or email to schedule an intake interview:
  Sara Marlowe
  (416) 961-0113 ext. 176
  smarlowe@ppt.on.ca

  

  
  

• • (dis)Ability

  A Disability Back-to-School Guide

  September 30, 2011 • Shoshana Erlich

  September often brings with it a slew of back-to-school guides. It comes with tips for everything from how to handle your kindergartener’s first day of school to entire books full of transition tips for those just entering their first year of college or university. Being a student with a disability in post-secondary education can be pretty confusing, and even though most schools are willing to walk you through some of the basics, there are lots of things that sometimes need to be learned from experience. So, just to add to the pile of back-to-school guides out there, here are some tips on how to navigate the strange world of accommodations in post-secondary education.

  1) Register with the accessibility office in your school. This is the step that schools are usually pretty good about telling you about. Every school will have a slightly different procedure. Most accessibility services in schools are usually pretty medically-based. Be prepared to have to show medical proof that you are disabled, and many schools will want the doctor/other medical professional to tell them the accommodations that you need. This is problematic on lots of levels, but for this post I’m going to focus on how to make the system work for you rather than challenge why it exists as a whole. If the accessibility office will not give you the accommodations that will work best for you, ask them why, attempt to find some kind of compromise. Bring the issue to the manager’s attention if necessary. If you know that the accommodation is something that will help you succeed, it is important to ask for it and fight for it.

  2) Inform your teachers about your disability/accommodations. This part is essential. Just because you have registered with the accessibility office doesn’t meant that you are automatically accommodated in your classes. Most schools have a policy that students with disabilities are responsible for informing their professors, and until the professors are informed they are not obligated to accommodate you in any way. Most schools do this by providing students with information sheets to give to their professors.

  There are lots of important things to know about this. Students do not have to tell their professors what their specific disability is if they don’t want to. Students should be giving this information to professors as soon as possible. It is a lot easier to make the case for an extension on an assignment if your teacher knows this is one of your accommodations at the start of the semester as opposed to handing in the piece of paper to the professor while asking for an extension on the assignment due tomorrow. It can definitely be awkward to identify yourself this way, especially if you have had negative experiences when people find out about your disability, but by identifying yourself you are protecting yourself. The piece of paper is kind of like a contract between you and your professor; you fulfill your role as a student by telling them what they can do to help you learn, and they fulfill their role by fulfilling the guidelines put out in the document as best as they are able to.

  Another thing to know is that the piece of paper the accessibility office provides is usually incredibly general. This means that it usually isn’t a good idea to just hand the piece of paper to the professor and walk away. Sometimes it is really important to have a conversation or provide more information about what the things written on the paper really mean. For example, one of my accommodations reads “Sign Language Interpreter,” and that is the extent of the information that my professors get about my accommodation. However, as most professors have not worked with sign language interpreters before, there are lots of things that they need to be made aware of to make the process go smoothly. What I have done and have found to be pretty helpful, is I have created basically a form letter that is kind of a how-to guide for my accommodations and I make it a point to send it to each new professor that I have, and if I have professors again multiple times, I check in with them at the start of the term to let them know about anything new regarding my accommodations.

  (more inside…)

• • (dis)Ability
  • On The Job

  When Working is Radical

  September 7, 2011 • Shoshana Erlich

  It seems that I am something of a radical. That the things that I think, believe in and work towards are such a shift from the patterns currently entrenched in society that I am often mocked for my views and my tireless belief that eventually, we can get there.

  This summer, I had my radicalism confirmed by something that was decidedly non-radical. I decided that as a student, I needed a summer job. At the time, I thought that this was actually a relatively moderate idea, after all, I am finding myself forced to subscribe to academia, and the world of student loans and independent living, and everything seems to have a price tag attached to it. Since in this society we exchange labour for funds, getting a summer job seemed to be a fairly logical and extremely non-radical proposition. However, I quickly discovered that the concept of being a young disabled person who wants to work is quite the radical concept indeed. While this post could easily talk about the extensive discrimination I have faced as a young disabled person in the workforce, what I think is much more interesting are the broader systemic structures that force young disabled workers into positions of extreme vulnerability within the workforce.

  (more inside…)

• • (dis)Ability

  Centering Disability and Accessibility

  August 30, 2011 • Shoshana Erlich

  Recently I was asked to attend an event. I was quite interested in the topic, and given some of my recent work experience I was actually really excited about the event. The person who asked me to be there is one of the main organizers, and so when I knew I would be able to be there for sure, I let them know that given the size of the event, I would need interpreters in order to be able to attend. When the cost of providing interpreters became known the response was that we’d love to have you, but it’s too expensive and in the future we will make sure that we have a budget for interpreters.

  Although there are personal reasons why this frustrates me, the more frustrating part is how invisible disability is within our community. I know several people who do fairly inclusive event planning. By which I mean they strive to ensure that events are accessible in terms of race, class, family or immigration status etc. Childcare is typically provided, event fees can be made sliding scale or optional, there is recognition of oppressions and people seek to ensure there is representation and equality. However, for events taking place outside of the disabled community, the same effort for disability is rarely made. Efforts for disability are often tokenistic at best. The event is held in a wheelchair accessible location. We’ll even try to make sure that an accessible washroom is thrown in there too. While these are important accommodations and I don’t mean to belittle them, they are a tiny piece of providing a truly accessible event.

  (more inside…)

• • (dis)Ability

  What I Wish Non-Disabled People Would Understand

  July 6, 2011 • Shoshana Erlich

  Sometimes having a disability can be incredibly frustrating. There are times where it outright sucks so much you want to pound your fists into the wall and cry. There are times when you wish more than anything else that people around you understood what it was like and that they didn’t treat disability like it was some kind of bomb about to go off in their faces if they get too close. After spending the last couple of weeks in bed and dealing with chronic illness and all of the fun things it brings with it head on, here are some of the things that I wish non-disabled people would understand about this:

  1. I am still me. Everything about who I am - what I like, how I feel about things, who I care about, my intelligence, my identity - is exactly the same regardless of whether I am obviously sick or not. This means that me being sick does not need to be the only thing that we talk about. While it is my immediate reality it is awkward to talk about, gets old really fast, and typically puts me in the position where I have to make other people feel comfortable around the idea of me being sick. There are a million and one other things to talk about, and I probably spend most of the time that I’m not talking to people dealing with being sick, so a change of topic is nice and better for both of us.

  (more inside…)

• • (dis)Ability
  • Body Politics

  The Myth of Informed Consent

  June 29, 2011 • Shoshana Erlich

  One thing that you find out pretty quickly when you have a disability is that the moment that label is applied to you, you never really get to own or control your body again. There are lots of different ways that doctors can control your body when you have a disability. For example, they can place a hold on you which declares you a danger to yourself and others and that means that you are basically incarcerated in a hospital for 72 hours which theoretically can only be extended so many times, but can end up resulting in far longer hospital stays. They can put you on a community treatment order where you are made to comply with a doctor’s treatment plan for you such as attending regular ECT treatments as a condition of being able to remain in the community. Although both of these examples primarily apply to mental health, don’t be fooled into thinking that those with physical or cognitive disabilities are any better off.

  Theoretically, informed consent is supposed to allow patients to be informed of exactly what procedure will be done to them, how the procedure works (with as much detail as the patient is comfortable with), provide the patient with an opportunity to ask any questions that they might have about the procedure, including benefits, drawbacks and other options and allow patients the opportunity to refuse to consent to a procedure they don’t feel is necessary or beneficial. However, I think that true informed consent is rarely, if ever, realized. There are too many other factors that intervene.

  (more inside…)

• • (dis)Ability
  • Body Politics

  I Want to Ride a Bicycle . . .

  May 30, 2011 • Shaunta Grimes

  When I was a kid, my bike was more than a toy. It was a beautiful white beach cruiser that represented freedom and independence. Then I got a driver’s license, and a couple of years later a husband and a baby. I didn’t need my bike anymore. At least, I didn’t think so.

  

  Cruising with Ruby. (Shaunta Grimes)

  It took twenty years for me to get another bike. I honestly didn’t expect that once I did, I’d have the same sense of freedom. But I do. Riding my bike is not an exercise in fitness. It’s fun, and the fitness is a bonus.

  (more inside…)

• • (dis)Ability
  • Body Politics

  A White Coat Doesn’t Make You an Expert

  May 18, 2011 • Shoshana Erlich

  Like it or not, disability is irrevocably tied to the medical community. I’d like to take some space over the next few posts to explore how disability and medicine collide. For today, I’d like to start by challenging the role of doctors as experts.

  Don’t get me wrong; I am not anti-doctor. Like most people, I have had some excellent doctors, and I have had some pretty terrible ones as well. Mostly I am against the way that all doctors are seen as experts, and the emphasis placed on having a label for what is wrong with you.

  When you notice that something is wrong or different with your body, you go to the doctor. The doctor listens to you describe what is going on, and then attempts to verify what you have told them in some concrete way. This may mean that they draw blood, send you for an x-ray, look at various body parts, or any number of other tests that they could choose to perform. Then, they compare the results to what they know about the body. Are the numbers too high or too low? Do your organs look the way they are supposed to? Are there lumps growing where there shouldn’t be? Each answer points them in a direction to look for what might be going on. Eventually, if you are lucky, the things you are telling them and the things that they test will line up to match with a state where they know what is going on. The doctor will have come to a diagnosis, which also tells them what usually helps to fix the problem to the best knowledge that medicine has. Again, if you are lucky, there is a treatment that fixes the problem, and you go back on your merry way.

  (more inside…)

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