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 analysi