Disability Futures

Not long ago, a good friend of mine said something revealing to me: “I don’t think of you as disabled,” she confessed.

I knew exactly what she meant; I didn’t think of myself as disabled until a few decades ago, either, even though my two arms have been pretty significantly asymmetrical and different from most everybody else’s my whole life.

My friend’s comment was meant as a compliment, but followed a familiar logic — one that African-Americans have noted when their well-meaning white friends have tried to erase the complications of racial identity by saying, “I don’t think of you as black,” or when a man compliments a woman by saying that he thinks of her as “just one of the guys.”

This impulse to rescue people with disabilities from a discredited identity, while usually well meaning, is decidedly at odds with the various pride movements we’ve come to know in recent decades.

Yet pride movements for people with disabilities — like Crip Power or Mad Pride — have not gained the same sort of traction in the American consciousness. Why? One answer is that we have a much clearer collective notion of what it means to be a woman or an African-American, gay or transgender person than we do of what it means to be disabled.

A person without a disability may recognize someone using a wheelchair, a guide dog or a prosthetic limb, or someone with Down syndrome, but most don’t conceptualize these people as having a shared social identity and a political status. “They” merely seem to be people to whom something unfortunate has happened, for whom something has gone terribly wrong. The one thing most people do know about being disabled is that they don’t want to be that.

I asked to appear in the series under a pseudonym for two reasons:

First, I am in a non-tenure-track position, seeking a tenure-track job. It seems to me that search committees for these positions tend to look for reasons not to hire candidates and, of course, Google can be very helpful in this regard. Given the sort of stigma that others tend to attach to people with depression, I worried that publicizing my condition under my real name could only hurt my chances in the philosophy job market.

Second, and perhaps relatedly, I’ve found that in instances where one speaks about one’s disability in a public, professional context, a particular kind of narrative tends to predominate, one to which my story does not neatly conform. These are stories in which one can clearly separate one’s life-as-disabled from one’s life-as-professional: one provides, within the story, assurances that one’s condition is under control, which is to say that one’s disability will not significantly affect one’s productivity, team dynamics, or any other features of one’s professional capacity.

Before the last year, I thought this was true of me as well. My most recent episode of clinical depression began last year, and the effects of it reverberated throughout my professional life in unexpected ways. I noticed that I had become more truculent with my students; I had difficulty grading assignments in a timely manner or preparing sufficiently for class; and I’ve really wanted nothing at all to do with my colleagues, many of whom are, in any case, rather cool and distant towards the non-tenure-track faculty.

There are over 1,000 embossed books in the Perkins Archive collection – but only one of them is arguably the most famous and historically important braille book in the world.

It’s “Procedure for Writing Words, Music, and Plainsong in Dots,” written by Louis Braille, the creator of braille, when he was just 20 years old. Only six copies are known to exist, and one of those recently sold for $95,000.

But price is not what makes the book so special.

This is the book that introduced braille to the world. In doing so, it launched an easy-to-use tactile alphabet that brought the power of literacy to generations of people who are blind. Braille also made the world more accessible, with the six-dot system eventually appearing on everything from menus to ATM keypads.

How “Procedure for Writing…” came to Perkins is a bit of a mystery, but Perkins Archivist Jen Hale thinks it may be possible Perkins’ first director, Samuel Gridley Howe, acquired it in Europe after the school’s founder, Dr. John Dix Fischer, sent him there to research blindness education.

 “We’re just incredibly lucky to have it,” she said. “It’s a rare, special book.”

Kenny Baker, the British actor who rose to fame by playing the robot R2-D2 in six “Star Wars” films, died on Saturday. He was 81.

His death was confirmed by a spokeswoman for Lucasfilm, the company that created and produces the enormously popular “Star Wars” franchise.

Mr. Baker was a little person whose adult height was widely reported to be 3 feet 8 inches. He referred to his short stature as “my height difficulties” in an autobiographical sketch on his official website, but it would have been impossible for a taller man to play the role that made him famous.

“They said, ‘You’ve got to do it; we can’t find anybody else. You’re small enough to get into it and you’re strong enough to be able to move it,’” he said of R2-D2’s cylindrical metal costume in a video interview in Stockholm that he shared on his website. “I was a godsend to them, really.”

A new study commissioned by the Adverse Childhood Experiences Public-Private Initiative (APPI) of Washington State finds that communities can create effective, local strategies that reduce the long-term social, emotional and physical problems related to abuse, neglect, and other Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs).

Research shows that the prevalence of 10 specific ACEs—such as witnessing domestic violence or experiencing physical abuse—trigger a stress response that can harm a child’s developing brain. That stress and trauma weakens the immune system, increasing the risk of social, emotional, and health problems in later life, from suicide and substance abuse to diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

Despite modest investments and limited staff, several rural communities in Washington State were able to weave together proven programs and innovative approaches, effectively decreasing the social, emotional, and physical problems linked to trauma.

For example, in Walla Walla, new approaches to discipline at Lincoln High School led to increases in graduation rates. In the Skagit Valley, the nurse home visits helped decrease smoking and alcohol use among expectant mothers and reduce the number of babies with low birth weight. A public awareness campaign in Okanagan County led to a 10 percentage point drop in teen drinking.

The issue of student laptop use in the classroom continues to be hotly debated, including among philosophy instructors. Some philosophers justify a ban on laptop use in their classrooms by appealing to studies that seem to show that laptop use during lectures and seminars lowers the overall performance of students. Other philosophers recognize the importance of laptops for many disabled students and allow exceptions to their bans for these students.

My recent post, “Laptops and the Accessible Classroom,” drew attention to concerns about the accessibility of one’s classroom and pedagogical practices that should be included in discussions about student use of laptops, as well as to the difference between the institution of accessible learning environments and the reproduction of learning environments in which disabled students and faculty are treated as "exceptions," accommodated within an otherwise inaccessible learning situation. In particular, the Digital Pedagogy Lab article from which I quoted in my post noted that research shows that nondisabled students hold negative perceptions of disabled students who are granted exceptions to classroom bans on laptops.

Rural landscapes dominate American geography. Depending on the definitions used, rural areas account for 72% to 97% of the total landmass of the United States. However, only a minority of Americans live in rural areas (approximately 15-19% again depending on the definition). Yet, people living in rural areas represent a higher percentage of people who are unemployed, living in poverty, are elderly, and experience a disability. Further, it has been well documented that individuals with disabilities living in rural areas face unique challenges in acquiring services and supports. For example, rural residents typically rely on services that are more informal and less specialized; must travel farther and pay more for those services; and tend to receive lower quality services than their urban counterparts (Whitener, Weber, & Duncan, 2001; Dabson & Weber, 2008).

The chart above shows the rate of disability across county types and are for all age groups. The rate of disability across the nation is 12.4%. However, when looking at just the rates of disability in metropolitan counties, the most urban county type, we see that number drop slightly to 11.7%. As counties get more rural the rate of disability increases to 15.5% in micropolitan counties to 17.7% in noncore counties (the most rural counties). Clearly, disability matters for rural America, but why is this? In the past policy makers and researchers have speculated that these higher rates could be due to the older population of rural counties. Indeed, the national rate of individuals aged 65 years and older is 13.6% of the population but this number increases to 15.7% in micropolitan counties and 18% in noncore counties, mirroring disability rates. Explore these data further in the map below and the links that follow.

Helen Sims is no ordinary writer – but then, her life has been far from ‘ordinary’. And, in her new book Taking Steps, she is determined to demonstrate that disabled people are so much more than their disability because, as a versatile writer and commentator, Sims certainly is.

Taking Steps is an extremely well-constructed collection of Sims’ poetry, short stories and commentary, which covers the emotional length and breadth of her childhood and adult years. In it, she treads a delicate line between appearing to write as a form of catharsis and wanting to make the reader stop, take notice and then question the subject matter in hand. But it’s a line that Sims never strays from – and it’s this personal investment she gives to her writing that makes her work so compelling.

There was, there is, no choice

Speaking to The Canary, Sims agrees that the process of putting pen to paper is cathartic, but explains there is much more to it:

I kept a ‘paper’ diary for years, and it certainly helped with my depression. Writing still does. It’s almost as if (when you put feelings down on paper – whether it be in a creative way or otherwise) I am clearing my mind. It doesn’t always work unfortunately, but it’s an outlet. There have been times when I’ve written things out, intending just to tear them up – but I kept them in the end, and they’ve been turned into pieces of work that I know have helped someone else.

It’s this idea of writing in the hope that the outcome will be to have “helped someone else” which shines through in Taking Steps. Because her brutal candidness means issues are tackled head-on, with no dressing-up. The reader is given the stark reality of situations many disabled people find themselves in from the beginning of the book.

EAST LANSING, Mich., Aug. 5 (UPI) -- Head Start early education programs were found in a recent study to have an especially good effect for children with disabilities, researchers in Michigan report.

Disabled children enrolled in federal Head Start early school programs fare better on tests of literacy, math and reading than those not in the programs, and are more likely to have their disabilities verified by a doctor, according to a study by Michigan State University.

"These findings align with Head Start's commitment to addressing the complete needs of the child and connecting families to community supports," Kristin Rispoli, an assistant professor at Michigan State University who led the study, said in a press release.

Activists are today (4 August) set to hold a vigil outside the Japanese embassy in central London to express their “horror and huge sadness” at last week’s mass killings of 19 disabled residents of a care institution in Japan.

The idea for the vigil came from disabled activist Eleanor Lisney, who is east Asian herself, with support from fellow activist Dennis Queen, a leading member of the disabled people’s anti-euthanasia network Not Dead Yet UK.

The hope is to hand the embassy 19 lilies, one for each of the 19 deaths, and the results of an online book of condolence organised by Disabled People Against Cuts, Inclusion London and People First (Self Advocacy).

Another vigil, unconnected with the London event, was also due to take place today in Lancaster.

Lisney said: “I am just hoping to show solidarity, to show that if you do things in one part of the world, it would not go unnoticed [in another part].

“I was really upset by what was happening and really sad that this happened in a care facility.

“I think we have to show solidarity because what happens to one of us happens to all of us. They were our brothers and sisters.”