Defining Ourselves and Our Community

The topic of this post came from meeting a really interesting group of students this week who worked on a project for their class that created tools to support independence for disabled folk when doing household tasks. They had prototyped a few tools and the whole project was really great and we need more of these kinds tactile outcomes from course pedagogies that highlight disabled lived experience. 

In that conversation there was one student who was visibly disabled and identified as disabled and as having disabled family members, the others did not identify their positionality during the conversation. What gave me pause in the conversation were points where judgment or misleading terminologies were used like "wheel-chair bound" and "confined" and it made me think about how the way folk identify themselves or the communities they are a part of can be in conflict with the kinds of terminology they use. 

It had me thinking about how important that linguistic analysis piece is to projects like this, over and beyond the creation of prototypes, and how that can be part of the assessment design of the project and the pedagogical guidance provided during the course. It also had me thinking about how the spaces that one frequents on a regular basis inform the kinds of words, scope, and ways we identify and define ourselves and our community. This is of course because of comparisons that folk do either implicitly or explicitly. 

Before I started writing this post, I finished reading a chapter of Eli Clare's Exile and Pride that the disability reading group that I am a part of is reading this week. In the chapter Clare was speaking to the origins of words that folk use and how some words are reclaimed as a form of resistance to oppressive structures and systems like queer or crip. I'm someone who always defaults to etymology when exploring a particular word or contextual terminology, I feel like this is a meaningful way to explore equity in my analysis. I always ask myself where do these words come from? Why do we use this word in this way?

There is a possibility of embedding this practice in assessment asks, or as part of content delivery in modules and classes. I feel there has been a movement towards having folk think about their positionality and express that positionality in ways that are meaningful to them. I know that the words that I use to express my positionality have shifted over the years, and I am still in a bit of flux in terms of how to define myself in relation to the new community I find myself in geographically, in macro and micro ways. As a pedagogical practice, having learners identify and analyze the words one uses to identify themselves or others is one way to expose power and privilege dynamics. This opens space for conversations that are more inclusive and respectful.

I wish I would have had an opportunity to ask the group about the language choices they made in presenting their project. The problem with that is, if that analysis was not part of the project itself, a question like that could be read as a critique of the awesome work the project was doing, instead of a way to bring up modelling inclusive language practices. Words end up doing the work of selling ideas, and so misalignment of words and ideas can create doubts about the intentions of projects. And in some ways folk tell you who they feel they are in community with already by any othering or misrepresentation that happens in their communications. The lateral violence that happens within communities is very real, and having an opportunity to explore that within the context of an assignment along with the other outcomes and objectives, can make the assessment itself more equitable.