Aesthetics of Disability Justice

possibility generators for good relationships: collective access networks

In mourning and radical networked solidarity this course is dedicated to the recent passing of Alice Wong, Disability Justice activist who committed her life to challenging systemic ableism through storytelling, advocacy and community organizing.

“The best scholarship and the most invigorated publics have this in common: They channel massive amounts of creativity. Into relationships. Into methods. Into networks. Into discourse. It is my intention for every chapter to be in conversation with the others and to ripple out through a mycelial network that builds, shares, and connects My Things to New Wondrous Things, tendrils of making, reaching high and low, in the shade and under the sun.” — Year of the Tiger: An Activists Life by Alice Wong

As I was able to perform with Sins Invalid and experienced its exquisitely high level of access for disabled artists, that experience refused to stay in one little corner of my life—I wanted all the QTBIPoC cultural spaces I took part in to be that accessible, that whole. I wrote pieces about cross-disability access that were tools I and other disabled BIPoC queers and allies used to help create the first Creating Collective Access network, an experiment in access made by and for QTBIPoC disabled people at the 2010 Allied Media Conference (AMC) and US Social Forum (USSF) that broke away from traditional formats of “access as service begrudgingly offered to disabled people by non-disabled people who feel grumpy about it” to “access as a collective joy and offering we can give to each other.” — Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

In this course we will move slowly and read together the entirety of two recent books: Year of the Tiger: An Activists Life by Alice Wong and Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. Each emerging out of a network of collective brilliance that affirms politics and practices like: relationships over outcomes, Disabled and non-normative bodyminds are desirable, trans* and Disabled people have cool tech projects and lots to share about how to build sustainably, there is no one pace that suits all, partial solidarity is worth it, that art making practices can uphold our communities and that we can have ways of working that don’t burn us or our network out.

Simultaneous to weekly readings we will invite weekly responses by participants (and guests) in the form of time-based artworks. These artworks could be thought of as a response to the text, a challenge to it, or a companion to think alongside it with. Every week, we will read a chapter from one of our books, and present it alongside an artwork from a colleague in the course. Formats for how to engage with the texts and accompanying time-based artworks will be developed together.

We will engage with a plurality of topics and meet artists, designers and scholars who are invested in: trans*feminist networking & technoscience, care, mutual aid, establishing and maintaining, decolonial praxis, transition as euphoria, anti-ableism and anti-racism.