How and why have some human bodies and minds been regarded as incompatible with full participation in social-cultural life or competent citizenship? Through wide-ranging readings, screenings, conversations, writing and creative work this hybrid seminar with studio practice elements, we will explore and unsettle societal constructions of ability and disability. Placing focus on the arts and visual culture, we’ll consider such questions as, which bodies and minds have access to representation, education, reception and creative work itself? How are our habits of both looking and making conditioned by norms of ableism and associated qualities including “skill,” “stamina,” “beauty” and “criticality”? We will examine deep intersections between disability justice and social struggles in the areas of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and class; as well as urgent issues of the environment, labor, and poverty. For help engaging these themes, we’ll delve into practices of artists and designers, who take them on with passion, humor, irony and radical imagination from within the lived experience of disability. Underlying our work this semester is a challenge raised by artists with disabilities and cultural workers to understand disability not simply as a form of living to be accommodated by normative, so-called abled-bodied society , but an embodied form of knowledge offering unique insights into the vast diversity of body-minds inhabiting the world, including our own.

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