When communists and anarchists are remembered, their disabilities often go unacknowledged, even though they likely deeply impacted their lives and perspectives. Disabilities should not be seen as a shameful personal failure but as a neutral characteristic within the natural variation of humanity. Here is a brief biography of some of those revolutionaries.
Disabled Communists and Anarchists (Volume 1)
Like many people in history, when communists and anarchists are remembered, their disabilities often go unacknowledged, even though they likely deeply impacted their lives and perspectives. Disabilities should not be seen as a shameful personal failure but as a neutral characteristic within the natural variation of humanity. Here is a brief biography of some of those revolutionaries.
Out of Sight; Out of Mind - Ewan’s Blog
Disability did not become fashionable. Disabled people became harder to ignore.
Social Model of Disability | The Paper Pilot
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology
Crip Technoscience Manifesto
As disabled people engaged in disability community, activism, and scholarship, our collective experiences and histories have taught us that we are effective agents of world building and dismantling toward more socially just relations.The grounds for social justice and world remaking, however, are frictioned;technologies, architectures, and infrastructures are often designed and implemented without committing to disability as a difference that matters. This manifesto calls attention to the powerful, messy, non-innocent, contradictory, and nevertheless crucial work of what we name as “crip technoscience,” practices of critique, alteration, and reinvention of our material-discursive world. Disabled people are experts and designers of everyday life. But we also harness technoscience for political action, refusing to comply with demands to cure, fix, or eliminate disability. Attentive to the intersectional workings of power and privilege, we agitate against independence and productivity as requirements for existence. Instead, we center technoscientific activism and critical design practices that foster disability justice.
Against Technoableism
One of BookRiot’s Ten Best Disability Books of the YearShortlisted for the Inc. Non-Obvious Book Awards“Wonderfully lucid.” —Andrew Leland, New York Times Book ReviewA manifesto exploding what we think we know about disability, and arguing that disabled people are the real experts when it comes to technology and disability., Against Technoableism, Rethinking Who Needs Improvement, Ashley Shew, 9781324076254
Anthropology and ableism
Abstract This article continues the tradition of writing about embodied knowledge production to highlight the underanalyzed issue of ableism, providing an opening for a disciplinary reckoning with oppressive legacies towards creating collective access in anthropology and academia. Building on the creative and collaborative labor of disabled and allied anthropologists, I argue that ableism is inherent to anthropology's disciplinary formations—especially expectations pertaining to fieldwork. I make a series of claims related to this argument: The continuation of fieldwork practices from the colonial model naturalizes able bodyminds, and without intervention, reproduces ableist anthropology. The normate anthropologist has always had a “nondisabled” bodymind, but once disability became a proper object for anthropology, a line was solidified between “anthropologist” and “the disabled,” thereby making disabled anthropologist a seemingly conceptual impossibility. The effect of the anthropological gaze turning towards disability introduced a “corporeal unconscious” in the discipline; the specter of becoming disabled (becoming subject to the anthropological gaze rather than being its source) haunts fieldwork and heightens the anxious relation of anthropology to disability. Illuminating the normative underpinnings of anthropology and embracing the unbearable possibility that we all might be(come) disabled should move us to collectively consider what anthropology might be otherwise. , Resumen Este artículo continúa la tradición de escribir acerca de la producción de conocimiento corporeizado para enfatizar la cuestión insuficientemente analizada de la discriminación o prejuicio contra los discapacitados, capacitismo, proveyendo una apertura para un lidiar disciplinario con legados opresivos hacia la creación de acceso colectivo en antropología y la academia. Construyendo sobre la labor creativa y colaborativa de antropólogos discapacitados y aliados, argumento que el capacitismo es inherente a las formaciones disciplinarias de la antropología –especialmente las expectativas pertenecientes al trabajo de campo–. Realizo una serie de aseveraciones relacionadas con este argumento: la continuación de las prácticas de trabajo de campo del modelo colonial naturaliza los cuerposmentes capaces, y sin intervención, reproduce una antropología capacitista. El antropólogo normate ha sido siempre un cuerpomente “no discapacitado”, pero una vez la discapacidad se convirtió en un objeto propio para la antropología, una línea fue solidificada entre “el antropólogo” y “el discapacitado”, haciendo de este modo al antropólogo discapacitado aparentemente una imposibilidad conceptual. El efecto de la mirada antropológica dirigiéndose hacia la discapacidad introdujo un “inconsciente corporal” en la disciplina; el espectro de llegar a ser discapacitado (llegar a estar sujeto a la mirada antropológica en vez de ser su fuente) ronda el trabajo de campo y realza la relación ansiosa de la antropología con la discapacidad. Iluminar los fundamentos normativos de la antropología y aceptar la insoportable posibilidad que todos podemos (llegar) a ser discapacitados debería movernos a considerar colectivamente lo que podría ser la antropología de otra manera. [ capacitismo, discapacidad, trabajo de campo, ethnograph, accesibilidad ]
Belonging Is a Right, Not a Reward
CW: Ableism Disabled people have been made to prove their worth for too long. Society sees value in work, earnings, or productivity, and anyone who doesn’t meet these standards is expected to…
10 Principles of Disability Justice | Sins Invalid
INTERSECTIONALITY “We do not live single issue lives” –Audre Lorde. Ableism, coupled with white supremacy, supported by capitalism, underscored by heteropatriarchy, has rendered the vast majority of the world “invalid.”
Against Technoableism
When bioethicist and professor Ashley Shew became a self-described "hard-of-hearing chemobrained amputee with Crohn's disease and tinnitus," there was no returning to "normal." Suddenly well-meaning people called her an "inspiration" while grocery shopping or viewed her as a needy recipient of technological wizardry. Most disabled people don't want what the abled assume they want--nor are they generally asked. Almost everyone will experience disability at some point in their lives, yet the abled persistently frame disability as an individual's problem rather than a social one. In a warm, feisty voice and vibrant prose, Shew shows how we can create better narratives and more accessible futures by drawing from the insights of the cross-disability community. To forge a more equitable world, Shew argues that we must eliminate "technoableism"--the harmful belief that technology is a "solution" for disability; that the disabled simply await being "fixed" by technological wizardry; that making society more accessible and equitable is somehow a lesser priority. This badly needed introduction to disability expertise considers mobility devices, medical infrastructure, neurodivergence, and the crucial relationship between disability and race. The future, Shew points out, is surely disabled--whether through changing climate, new diseases, or even through space travel. It's time we looked closely at how we all think about disability technologies and learn to envision disabilities not as liabilities, but as skill sets enabling all of us to navigate a challenging world.
Disability justice – Victorian Socialists
Disabled people have a right to independence and equal access to services. We’re fighting to re-fund public disability services cut after the NDIS rollout.
Remembering the Anarchist Resistance to fascism
Andrew Flood Remembering the Anarchist Resistance to fascism March 4, 2005
The social model of disability: thirty years on
This year marks exactly 30 years since I published a book introducing the social model of disability onto an unsuspecting world and yet, despite the impact this model has had, all we now seem to do...
The social model of disability: thirty years on
This year marks exactly 30 years since I published a book introducing the social model of disability onto an unsuspecting world and yet, despite the impact this model has had, all we now seem to do...
Ask Disabled People What They Want. It’s Not Always Technology.
While our lives are deeply entangled with technologies of all kinds, disabled people are almost never included in discussions about technology.
The Communist and the Caricature: The Missed Opportunity in August Nimtz and Kyle Edwards' "The Communist and the Revolutionary Liberal in the Second American Revolution"
Nimtz and Edwards offer caricatures where a fascinating and nuanced reality was available.
