Episode 2.1: Alice Sheppard (with Cassandra Hartblay) - Show Notes and Transcript

Simple English summary:

How do disability culture and design practices shape contemporary disability art? In this episode of Contra*, Critical Design Lab member Cassandra Hartblay and I talk to disability dancer Alice Sheppard about her project, DESCENT, which includes choreography, spatial design, and technology design.

Themes:

Disability culture informs every part of the experience of DESCENT. This includes the performance but also everything around it, like the length of the intermission
Disability arts are actively imagining different, alternative, better, accessible worlds
Design can maximize the beauty of impairment instead of minimizing it
It is important for disabled people to create an arts culture in order to facilitate complex art and discussion about disabled people's experiences

Introduction Description:

The podcast introductory segment is composed to evoke friction. It begins with sounds of a wheelchair rhythmically banging down metal steps, the putter of an elevator arriving at a person’s level, and an elevator voice saying “Floor two, Floor three.” Voices begin to define Contra*. Layered voices say “Contra is friction…Contra is…Contra is nuanced…Contra is transgressive…Contra is good trouble…Contra is collaborative…Contra is a podcast!…Contra is a space for thinking about design critically…Contra is subversive…Contra is texture…”

An electric guitar plays a single note to blend out the sound.

The rhythmic beat of an electronic drum begins and fades into the podcast introduction.

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Episode Introduction:

Welcome to Contra*: the podcast about disability, design justice, and the lifeworld. This show is about the politics of accessible and critical design—broadly conceived—and how accessibility can be more than just functional or assistive. It can be conceptual, artful, and world-changing.

I’m your host, Aimi Hamraie . I am a professor at Vanderbilt University, a designer and design researcher, and the director of the Critical Design Lab, a multi-institution collaborative focused on disability, technology, and critical theory. Members of the lab collaborate on a number of projects focused on hacking ableism, speaking back to inaccessible public infrastructures, and redesigning the methods of participatory design—all using a disability culture framework. This podcast provides a window into the kinds of discussions we have within the lab, as well as the conversations we are interested in putting into motion. So in coming episodes, you’ll also hear from myself and the other designers and researchers in the lab, and we encourage you to get in touch with us via our website, www.mapping-access.com or on Twitter at @criticaldesignl

Interview Transcript:

Aimi Hamraie:

Hi everyone, this is Aimi Hamraie. I'm so excited to be here today with Alice Sheppard and also with Cassandra Hartley, who's a member of the Critical Design Lab. Welcome Alice.

Alice Sheppard:

So I just want to like, let's start by saying I am in Prague with the, we are the design and the ramps and everything is part of the Prague Quadrennial and we are part of the US pavilion for the Prague Quadrennial in set and stage design. I'm like, "Holy moly, this is out of control brilliant". So-

Aimi Hamraie:

That's so exciting.

Alice Sheppard:

It is. It's awesome to be doing that and to have this moment of being like, this is what I'm here to do and talking to you at the same time. So I'm thrilled tonight and everything and to be recognized and seen in this way.

Aimi Hamraie:

So the ramp that you're referring to as part of your performance called Descent, and I wonder if we could just start out by talking about Descent as a project, any elements, design elements that you want to discuss, and how it relates to disability culture.

Alice Sheppard:

So DESCENT, it's a dance. That's what I usually begin with. It's an evening length dance work performed by two disabled artists that tells the love story, or invents a love story, for the mythical figures, Venus and Andromeda, coming out of a dance sculpture, the Twilight of Innocent Andromeda, and it is set on this incredible stage set that we call the ramp, which of course is basically, it's also we would think of as ramp porn. It's an incredible cross between a kind of like a velodrome on the side of a cycle thing, and a half point, and the underworld deck and cave, and the peaky bit to sit on, and it's a ramp, but it's like no other wheelchair access ramp. It is what you would want if a ramp was a work of art, and that is exactly what it is.

Alice Sheppard:

So DESCENT is a dance set on a ramp, is the four word version of it, but in other language, it's just this incredible exploration of intersectional disability culture, engaging specifically with questions of gender identity, queerness, race and interracial relationships and sexuality. Love making intimacy, power and strength between two disabled women. At a ramp, which is really the third partner.

Alice Sheppard:

And we are lit by Michael Maag, who is also a disabled artist, one of maybe the only wheelchair using lighting video projection designer right now. And he is telling a story of us and the two dancers, but also of the sculptures and the Rodin's mythical world in projections. And everything about this show is lit from a wheelchair user's sort of ideal perspective, because Michael is a wheelchair user, and so he lights for the disabled body to highlight the disabled body. It's not just sort of incidental, it's... Yeah, it's an incredible moment. It is. I think it is a massive work of disability culture in so many different ways. So many different ways. Yep.

Aimi Hamraie:

That's wonderful. And I've heard so many good things about this performance. It's received tons of acclaim and one of the most interesting and creative design elements based on what I've heard has been the audio description tracks. So I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about what audio description means in this case for a dance performance and how you and your team went about creating the audio descriptions for folks who are there on site during the performance?

Alice Sheppard:

So yeah, this is also part of a story. I worked with a live describer at a kind of preview showing, to create some description, and I checked in with Georgina Kleege, and Georgina was like, yeah, just make sure that it has some kind of like artistic merit to it. And we did that, we thought.

Alice Sheppard:

But as it turned out, the whole question of what a description is so much more complicated, so much more complicated. So, when the actual experience happened, Georgina and Josh really said, yeah, we know you did better than the industry standard, but this is not it. We were like, okay, so what is it? What is it? And here's what we're learning. And we don't have the answers to everything yet. So here's what we're learning. We are learning that if you simply describe... most audio description for dance, is a description of the action on stage. She turned left, she turned right. She did this, she did that, she did it. And it's supposedly narrated is objective voice.

Alice Sheppard:

And so we are learning two things about that. Three things about that in that fact. One is that this is a discipline, this places it in counter with the work. If you're getting a description of the art. You're not getting the art. So the first thing we decided to do is think about like, well what is dance when it is not a visual art form, and it's a Sonic art form? So we tried to think about how do we, how does Descent register as sound? So there's poetry written by Eli Clare, that poetry is set to a soundscape made by Dylan Keefe from Radiolab. We commissioned David Linton who also wrote a kind of dramatic dialogue. We recorded the sounds of the set, and we recorded some of the dancers' sounds, like the breath and the bumps and that, and so we really decided to think through the physicality of it, so that you could get a full sense of the dance as sound in many, many different ways.

Alice Sheppard:

But then we went back and we realized that we'd hit yet another layer of learning, and that is dance is about a movement as body, but at some level there are groups of people, who, like me and other dancers, have very strong kinesthetic mirroring patterns, and so we are people who can understand quickly and process. You know she turned left, she stretched her arms, she dee dee dee, and we got an artistic experience from that. But part of that depends on having already had either a physical experience of dance, or having had a lot of sight, sort of ocular centric information about what that might look like.

Alice Sheppard:

And so part of me realizes that we're at that next level of learning is, we don't want to cut out the notion that dance is about the moving body, but we also recognize that we haven't found ways to artistically and meaningfully describe the moving body in words. And so we're still looking at that, still working on that. Still trying to figure out like what is it that we need to do, because you know, dance is an art form of the moving body, but it has to be a verbal art form of the moving body, or is a verbal art form of the moving body.

Alice Sheppard:

And I think here's another point of learning is that, for the moment, because description for dance hasn't been widely available, we do not have audiences who are skilled or familiar with the interpretive practice of "you stretched your arm". And so do you see what I mean? That there's both an experience and familiarity level as well as an artistic encounter level. So we are really asking these questions and stripping it back and learning it again and again and again and again and again. All I can say for certain is that whatever happens, it is not one thing.

Alice Sheppard:

Whatever description is for dance, it is not a single description for dance.

Aimi Hamraie:

And so does the audience receive the descriptions through a mobile device or an app?

Alice Sheppard:

Laurel Lawson who an engineer and UI optic [inaudible 00:09:33] came back and said I have a technical solution, and so she has come up with an app that is currently in alpha testing for internal performance, and we'll eventually be able to develop it for open source release to all. So no one has any excuse for dance not being accessible. And the basic deal is, you download the app when you arrive, and you get your pre-show content, like the programs and [inaudible 00:10:04] on the collaboration was Sara Hendren, and the students at Olin College and the ramp, and you get like the story and the plot and the background information and the sculptures and the characters.

Alice Sheppard:

And so you get oriented to the world, the dance. Then it goes into show mode. And essentially what happens is all of these different tracks are synced together. And you know with the music and the dance on stage. And so you can, through the app, choose to listen to just one track. Like if you are, say you are a non visual audience member who is basically only able to comprehend one set of soundtracks, to listen to the poetry, which is set to a soundtrack. And it comes like this into an hour long symphony, you know and that is a beautiful experience.

Alice Sheppard:

If you are a skilled listener and you are much more oriented to sonic and audio worlds, you might what we've been calling for a short hand DJ your way through the experience, because that's the thing, you can basically switch between any of these tracks at any point and it will more or less pick up at the same place so you get a simultaneous experience. And that's really important because a sighted person chooses what they look at, and chooses what part of the show they see. Whereas usually describers for dance just get this long monologue voice of one person's objective and no choice.

Alice Sheppard:

And if you are a member of what we're calling expert listeners, you can process two tracks at once. And those were just kind of like, "Oh, maybe we'll put like the description of the movement in one ear, and the poetry in another ear", and you can do that. So that's the experience and we're not done. It's not [inaudible 00:12:18]. The thing about it is, because there's no gold standard yet, we're not done. And we basically sat down with Georgina afterwards and said, "what's going to be up with this? How can we work with you to build a world that makes sense in sound?". So Georgina said she would come and play on the ramp, and she came and she learned some of the dance within itself and she checked in on some of the tracks and that we were making, and I worked with Eli and David and the recording people for the body sounds and there it was.

Aimi Hamraie:

This raises an interesting question about whether audio description in relation to dance is its own aesthetic form, or whether it's some sort of translation of one aesthetic form into another. And I think that this question also gets at broader discussions that we have within the theory of accessibility about whether there ought to be kind of like an original form that gets translated through some sort of like accommodation or adaptation or retrofit, or whether accessibility should be built into the things that we are creating, whether it's a building or a dance. So I wonder what you think about that?

Alice Sheppard:

Can I back into that and say, I think those are the wrong questions, frankly. What it means to translate an accessible... if you're in the space of translation, you're already dead in the water. You're already dead. It's over. Because, I mean even despite or what it was, if it was 10 to 15 years ago, the rise of translation theory, in which it theorized that you could in fact have two equal works of art where one was the translation of the other and that we could move towards that, by the time you have got to the point of thinking about, "Oh gosh, I've got to translate this", you're done. It's already set in a way that makes no sense.

Aimi Hamraie:

Can you say more about that?

Alice Sheppard:

I mean the problem is the hierarchy of the original and the translated version. There's always going to be a presume that the real thing, the thing that the artist created, was this, and the adapted thing was this, or the translated thing, or the whatever it was thing, it's just one step removed. So the question has become at this point in the learning, it's not how do you create access retroactively, too late. The question has been, what does it mean to think about access in the process in the moment as you do it.

Alice Sheppard:

So for example, I'm talking to blind artist Bojana Coklyat from NYU. And Bojana was just like, "I don't have a sense of why any of the movement is happening. You can describe the movement to me, but I have no sense of why the movement is happening."

Alice Sheppard:

And in addition, that's one of those questions or, in dance we often say the movement alone is enough, it is, the movement is alone, it's just glorious and beautiful. And we drink that up. But if you're coming from a perspective where you don't necessarily have the experience for all of that, or you are coming from a perspective where in fact, even if you were sighted the movement alone would not be enough, which is also, I mean I just don't think you can exclude one the multiplicity of an experience. So Bojana's point is, what if there were narrative, what if, if everything that you do presumes some kind of arc, in which the rationale for the movement description is...

Alice Sheppard:

Anyway, sorry. My response to Bojana is to think about maybe that means that everything we do has some kind of arc, if not a grand narrative, that there's some kind of clear narrative arc. And then the narrative is part of a non visual aesthetic, even if there's no story being told. And that's simply what it means as an artist to create in a non visual way, perhaps. And that's one stage of learning that we would do and test and someone will tell us it worked for them, and someone else would tell us it sucked. And that's okay.

Alice Sheppard:

But I think the point is to work into these questions as the work gets made, not to try and deal with it after the work is done.

Aimi Hamraie:

This reminds me of a similar conversation that we have around accessibility theory and architecture, about the idea that a building shouldn't have to be retrofitted to be accessible. That accessibility should be built in from the beginning. Do you think that there is a parallel concept for creative work that is not architectural work, for example, like dance performances?

Alice Sheppard:

I mean it's a little more complicated than that, right? I mean, in theory that's the direction that Kinetic Light is heading. And I am developing into my artistic practice. But I think that the problem with that is that, if you go to a non-disabled artist and say, "Hey, you were pressed to be accessible and actually it's not the venue, the presenter or the gallerist or the curator's problem to make it accessible, it's your accessibility, it's your problem". You're reaching into the notion of what is creativity, and what is artistic process, and you're really kind of butting into that space where an artist may feel that their creative process doesn't work in an accessible way.

Alice Sheppard:

And so then the clue challenge is about what is creation and what is creativity, and what are the responsibilities of the creative process. And you could make an argument that a quarter of your audience might be disabled in some way. And you could also make a recording the argument as well, three quarters of my audience isn't, therefore I could hire on creative genius and let it go. So I think we are not, we are not yet in the context to handle those discussions, but I hope that they will be happening pretty soon.

Cassandra:

If I could add something here, this is Cassandra. As someone who's kind of working in interesting way, kind of between both of you, as an anthropologist who's worked both in terms of how people with disabilities move through the city, but then also in performance spaces, one of the things that I've really noticed is that when we're talking about artworks, the process and the making of the work is so much a part of the contemporary conversation around the arts, that I think Aimi, going back to the design and the architecture, the kind of concept of accessibility as an aesthetic that's woven into the process of building the work that Alice is talking about would, if you were to reflect that into architecture, that would look more like they're disabled people participating in the design process of the building, rather than the final product of an architectural work being the building itself and the final product of an artistic work being going to the theater and seeing the show.

Cassandra:

But when you're talking about accessibility being woven into the process so that it builds the aesthetic of the work, not only, it's not like, "Oh, we called the ASL interpreter to come to the performance", or "we called the audio describer to come to the performance and they came to two rehearsals". It's like the entire aesthetic of the work is already through the process, engaged with those conversations and led by those collaborators. So I feel like there's a nuance to process versus product that's really important. The way that aesthetic comes into being here.

Alice Sheppard:

Right? I mean, it takes out authorship. It just takes out authorship, and maybe in disability community we are like that because it's an artistic version of interdependence, but it does take out authorship in some really complicated and challenging ways. And that's an open question too.

Aimi Hamraie:

Do you think that there's something in that, that could be instructive for design at other scales like architecture? For example, in architecture there's this concept of the parti, which is the argument that a building makes, and that is theoretically supposed to be woven through everything from the structure and the form to all the functional and aesthetic and experiential aspects.

Alice Sheppard:

I mean in the end, Descent is an experience that is choreographed from the moment you hear about the show and try to buy a ticket. We have choreographed that experience, with greater or with certain degrees of control, right? I mean I cannot choreograph public transit, and I cannot choreograph the inaccessible taxi situation in New York, or wherever you happen to live, but I can and do choreograph everything that happens from the moment you enter the building, and I choreograph who you see, and it is a thing that is an experience, that to use your architectural term, does have its own parti. I mean it matters that a disabled person hands you your program or disabled person takes you to your seat. It matters that a disabled person set the lights at a certain height and in a certain way.

Alice Sheppard:

So it is one smooth experience, I mean it's one focused immersive experience from top to bottom, with careful prioritization and careful coordination among different aspects of the experience. We even for example, choreograph the pee break in intermission depending on how many accessible stalls there are. So you know, we've thought very carefully about how long it's going to take a bunch of wheelchair users and disabled folks to get to the bathroom. So that affects how long the intermission is, which affects how long the show is. The whole thing is structured, I mean maybe not correctly, maybe not equitably, but wholly intentionally. So it's not, the performance is never just what's on stage.

Aimi Hamraie:

Something that's really important about what you're arguing is that all of these taken for granted parts of a performance experience, including the space, including how we receive sensory information, how we make time to go to the bathroom. All of these things are designed sites that we can think about through a disability culture framework. So I just want to highlight that that is a major contribution of the work that you are doing.

Alice Sheppard:

But it's not, yes, I think so. And it's not just me. Like I was part of, I Wanna Be With You Everywhere, on the student committee for that. And that was maybe New York City's first like interdisciplinary discipline in the Art Festival, and it was an incredible experience where access was, I mean it was art by disabled people that for the most part, imagined people, disabled people, literate in their own culture, as the primary audience. And I want to talk about that for a second. I don't want to come back at that because those are two important distinctions. But also to say that it was really, it was one of the most accessible places I've been to, yet not quite scent free, but scent free mostly, and a quiet room, economic reimbursement no questions asked, for travel.

Alice Sheppard:

Just, different kinds of seating, a 30 minute intermission in between pieces, so that people can get up and pee, even if the thing is only 30 minutes long, a 30 minute intermission and changeover and brain break time, and so it's not just me. It is that within, and I think this is an important moment for academia to sit up and take notice, because there's a way in which disability arts and the disabled artists who have been marginalized for so long, are actually creating worlds that you all don't know about yet. And we're doing work that is, yeah, that hasn't reached "you", quote unquote to theorize or study it. But that doesn't mean that it isn't happening. And I think it's, we the artists are pushing things forward in very, very interesting ways and I believe that the aesthetics and culture language that is will be the next set of languages that academia kind of fights over or prioritizes. But we worked it out, and artistry for a long while prior to that. And that is visible in the work and it is visible in our audience literacy.

Cassandra:

Yeah. I was just going to say that in another episode I'm working on for this series or season of the podcast I interview, Lindsay Fischer and Eliza Chandler and Sean Lee in Toronto about their disability arts festival, which has a lot of the same themes coming up in terms of the ideas about disability leadership and accessibility aesthetics coming through in the arts.

Cassandra:

And that was a really exciting space because it was one of the first spaces that I've seen as an ethnographer who is trying to capture these developments in real time. You know, maybe as you say, they're not fully integrated into the Academy at this moment and spellers are kind of watching what's happening in the arts and to get to see those spaces coming together was really interesting. But I actually wanted to go back to something that you both have kind of been talking about in terms of questions about what is design practice and what is arts-based practice. And of course those two things overlap.

Cassandra:

And I was sort of thinking about the ramp itself in the Descent piece, and the kind of practice of how, I know from reading your piece in the recent issue of Catalyst that Alice that, that you know, you worked with Sarah Hendren and that it was a really interesting process. And I think one of the things that is really interesting to me as someone who from outside looks at how designers think about access, and I'm trying to track how access gets mobilized as a concept in different communities of practice, right? Whether artists or wheelchair users in Russia or designers.

Cassandra:

And I find that a lot of times in sort of normative design and engineering thinking, you end up in this space where it's problem based thinking, right? And so the way the engineers are trained is to come up with a solution to a problem as quickly as possible. And that involves defining something as a problem first. So I was wondering if you could talk Alice a little bit about how you and Sara and I understand her students as well, got into the work of designing a ramp that was a work of art, rather than a solution to a problem.

Alice Sheppard:

Yeah, I actually feel kind of sorry for those students, because they were first year students for the most part, and some second year students, basically talking engineering students in the middle of a physics course who were talking to me and my first word was, "Oh, it's got to be beautiful". Which is really not a helpful engineering design spec. It's just not a helpful engineering design spec. "It's beautiful, it's got to be sexy, it's got to be fun". These are not helpful engineering design specs. And yet those students were brilliant, because that's what they went with. They hung in the space of what kind of movement is possible. What kinds of things does Alice like to do in her chair? How steep can slopes be if we do it this way? Does it need to be a plane? Can it be curved? Like they hung in the space for over half the semester of just asking those questions.

Alice Sheppard:

They hung in the space of gender. Like we had a fallopian tube version. They had, well, because you know, so we were deeply in the organics of the body. They hung, I mean I don't know if engineers usually design like that, but I'm not an engineer, so the language they had to work with was my language, and they hung in that space for a long time before hitting the numbers. And they realized that you can send me drawings, which they did, and sketches, but that actually asking me to make Sculpey on Skype was a better way to get the engineering across and into my body.

Alice Sheppard:

Because you know, I've been through a number of design processes in the homes I live in, but I didn't want, I knew that I wanted to be able to feel better, than imagine it. And so feeling it meant I had to have something to feel, so I was actually just kind of like Sculpeying these things that they would send me, and trying to imagine what it would feel like to be on it, versus like, this is that raise, this is that height, this is going to be impossible to do in that. So it was a design process that was very much asking different kinds of questions of the ramp.

Alice Sheppard:

And you know, I'm not a student of architecture right? But I do know something about the history of ramps, and you know, I do even just sort of thinking through like late 19th century buildings, early 20th century buildings, the history of the ramp was a piece of architecture. These things were gorgeous. They're really, really gorgeous. And I love the idea of that Le Corbusier quote that just says "stairs separate, ramps connect" and that is, you have a world in which the ramp is already known to be a device of architectural beauty. It's only when it's designed for disability that we end up with these pieces of crap, excuse my language. But so the thing that I wanted was going to be very different, and so the students designed that way.

Alice Sheppard:

And they made, we used as research ramps, some of the ramps that Sara had been using for her play project where she had been designing play scapes and making interventions for these one-step ramps to cover like one step in accessibility. We use those as research ramps, and then we kind of make ramps that were like, "how steep can Alice go? Oh yes, we'll use that". And is it flat or is it curved or, yeah, we had a bunch of like really interesting play dates around slopes and curves and ramps.

Aimi Hamraie:

I wonder if this would be a good time to pivot a bit and talk about your piece and the recent special issue of Catalyst on Crip Technoscience. Just a couple months ago in May at NYU we had a big lunch party for the special issue, and you read from your piece on cultural aesthetic disability Technoscience, and also showed a lot of great images and gifs and things like that. So where has this concept been taking you since you wrote that piece?

Alice Sheppard:

I think primarily where I am with that is working through the necessity of the aesthetic, as a way of getting us past individualistic design that is, you know, I don't think it is good design if I can choose what color I paint my wheelchair.

Alice Sheppard:

So I want to be able to push the notion of designing my body, in a way that's kind of like around the aesthetic, it's like these cultural practices of understanding, what is the body? What does the body do? Why must I design movement and my movement capacity to be basically as functional as possible, and I mean pedestrianally functional, as in like moving around, why can't I design for extreme movement? Or why can't I push into, like what happens when the mobility technologies are aesthetic and nonfunctional for their presiding use. And really, I think that we've been asking the wrong questions, because the kinds of design that we are encountering are basically designs that restore the body to normative function as close as possible.

Alice Sheppard:

And that's not what I want. You know, I want to be able to figure out what is the maximum expression of my impairment. So for example, I love my crutches. They have rotating, articulating feet, which are great, they're great. They're carbon fiber, they have rotating, articulating feet, and they are designed that way to enable normative, as much normative walking as possible, and minimum wear and tear on the joint. But I want to ask the question is like what is the aesthetic of that, when it becomes an arm, like a dance arm? What kinds of cultural practices do I, can I gather information about, about movement? Like you know, is it have to be walking, can it be skiing, can it be twirling? Can it be whatever it is? And have those kinds of questions lead the design process more clearly than "what does it take for Alice to be able to walk?".

Alice Sheppard:

So I've gone beyond the question of, this is a replica, this is an assistive technology, to this is a cultural technology. This is an aesthetic technology. It has to look good, but it's looking good as an arm versus a leg or it's looking good. Laurel Lawson together with Paul Schulte from Invacare designed a wheelchair for us that you know, is backless. And you get to see the spine in a way, that you've never seen in a wheelchair before. And it moves in a different way because it's designed by this... Anyway. Do you get what I'm saying, it's not this way in which we're looking at technology as a kind of practical outcome based. We're looking for expressions of impairment versus the incidentality of the impairment, and once you get the expression of your impairment you can really engage it with disability culture.

Aimi Hamraie:

So speaking of disability culture, I wonder what your thoughts are about the idea that disability arts should be for disabled people as the primary audience, and not non-disabled people?

Alice Sheppard:

Well I'm going to, I've had some big fights about this one since I spoke to you last. So I'm going to go put my sticks down in different places. I am tired of going to performances, or pieces of art, that explain disabled life mainly to non disabled people, with the point of arguing for social justice or equality at the end. Now that's a controversial statement, because some disabled people are not familiar with our culture. And this is one of the ways in which we learn our culture, is that we encounter it in art. And that we encounter these ideas in literature. And that's how we learn. And how we get embedded, and how we are invited into our world.

Alice Sheppard:

But I'm also like, I don't need that. I don't want that. And disability culture is more than the constant arguing for justice and the constant explaining of a disabled life. And I usually get around this by quoting Toni Morrison at people, and this is the incorrect quote, but you'll get the picture. Basically Toni Morrison says, in an essay that is great on racism and bad on disability, the function of racism, the very true function of racism is it keeps you from doing your work, and it keeps you explaining that you have no history. So you find your history exists as you have no science, you find your science, it says that your head's the wrong shape. So you prove your scientists spend time doing that. It says you have no language or culture. So you spend your time proving that. None of this matters. There will always be one more thing. And that for me was just like a turning point. It expressed for me exactly that thing that had been so frustrating about every disability arts event that I'd been to for 10 freaking years, it was like, ouch, no, not that.

Alice Sheppard:

Well who are we when we're not justifying our humanity to others? Who are we when we are not explaining to others that we have a right to be in this world? Who and what are we, what is our aesthetic? And really, what is our culture? And I don't mean culture as in terms of like cultural practices where we are at each other and what we believe, but like, how do our works affect each other? What is the legacy of tradition, innovation and influence? How does Riva Lehrer show up in somebody else's work? What are the resonances of Leah's work in, what conversations could be had between... so those larger questions.

Alice Sheppard:

Yeah, how do we connect the dots among us? How do we learn from each other instead of this constant working in isolation? I guess the other part of this is, what is work when it is not an exploration of an individual impairment? Not that you can't do that, but that is not the only way of making it work. Right? So for me, like when I'm doing a lot of stuff, looking at the connection between those crutches of my wheels on one body, I'm thinking about Lisa Bufano, whose use of prosthetics is magical. But I'm also thinking about Sunny Taylor's work and her portrait of herself, and her book on disability liberation, right? So I am embedded in what I'm calling disability culture, disability aesthetics. I'm not trying to explain to somebody that it's difficult to move through the world in a wheelchair.

Alice Sheppard:

Does this make any sense to you?

Aimi Hamraie:

Yes, definitely. And I think that this is a really important point that we need to reinforce not only with non-disabled people but within our own disability communities. That so much of the work that we do, going back to that translation concept we discussed earlier, is about explaining in a really basic disability one-oh-one way, what is able-ist and what ableism is. I've written a little bit in the context of architecture about how this has really confined our theories of accessibility, because we're always explaining to non-disabled people or people who don't think that they need or benefit from access, what access is, but actually we need to get a little bit more in depth within our internal discourses and communities about what counts as good access, and different ways of thinking about the problems that arise around access, so that we can be intersectional, so that we can be critical...

Aimi Hamraie:

And these are discussions that just don't happen or that we don't always have energy for. If all we're doing is assuming an audience that's beginning in a different place, then we can have much more nuanced internal discussions about these things. So I think what you're saying is extremely important.

Alice Sheppard:

Right? I mean, just take the basic concept of care. Leah's book on care is utterly gorgeous.

Aimi Hamraie:

Yes. It's so amazing.

Alice Sheppard:

Right? But it is controversial if you think about the ways in which that connects to other philosophies of care and interdependence that have been articulated. And it's like who was going to talk about those perspectives, as writers, as makers of culture, as makers of art? That's, you know, maybe people will read one book, and not recognize the internal debate that's happening in that book.

Alice Sheppard:

Yeah, go ahead.

Cassandra:

I was going to say one thing that I really loved in Leah's book that also comes up in the interview with Sean and Eliza and Lindsey, is this idea of a generational culture, right? I think there's this sort of a longstanding idea that disability, quote unquote doesn't get passed down, right? So it's not a kind of cultural heritage, but what Leah is arguing is that there have always been disabled folks among us and that the kinds of strategies for access and care that have been developed over generations and then passed down through disability communities actually are inherited.

Cassandra:

And there is a kind of knowledge base that grows and builds upon past communities. And that this kind of idea that we're starting from the beginning with every new generation, and we're starting from the beginning as you're saying with the artworks, I think this is the way that Sean put it, that like, "Oh, every disability, our work has to start from square one to explain what disability is, what ableism is". And as Aimi was saying, kind of reproduce disabilities one-oh-one. Then you actually lose sight of the kind of richness of disability culture and the historical knowledge, and the kind of collaborative world-building that's happening. So yeah, I think this is really resonant.

Alice Sheppard:

Right. Or you could like say that there's a particular Western white way of thinking about it, and that's one of the ways in which those philosophies of care, like who, who are the culture bearers, who are the, who are the memory holders, who are the, what lineage are we looking at? And so not recognizing that, is, I think, it is a consequence of not being, sometimes, it's complicated because not every disabled person wants to be in that culture, and not every disabled person who might want to be in that culture has access to that culture.

Alice Sheppard:

And that's one of the beautiful things that Mia [inaudible 00:48:13] gave Leah. Gave her a really rich address dish with Sandy, organized by Sandy this year. And to Mia's keynote, it was all about having the choice to belong or not. Well, not all about, it was in part about who has access to this room, who has access to the culture, who has access to the history and the culture and the connections. And the implications for that for art making a really, really, really complicated, if you are not connected to community. Maybe you don't want to be, but maybe you do. And that means that you don't necessarily get access to making complex work that isn't about your personal experience of impairment that you explain to someone.

Alice Sheppard:

I don't know. And so I want to be really careful of reproducing elitist hierarchies around our own culture.

Introducing Crip Ritual:

All cultures have rituals. Rituals can be ways to change material circumstances, politics, lived experience, or even spiritual realities. So rituals are a method for designing a better world. In disability culture, we often use rituals as ways of designing and anticipating a more accessible future. What role does ritual play in your life, and what rituals could you imagine designing to ensure a better future for you and other members of disability culture and community? The Critical Design Lab invites submissions to an art exhibition called Crip Ritual, which will be on display in Spring 2021. You can submit your artworks to the exhibition for consideration via our website, www.cripritual.com, or participate on social media using #cripritual.

Outro:

You’ve been listening to Contra*: a podcast about disability, design justice, and the lifeworld. Contra* is a production of the Critical Design Lab. Learn more about our projects at mapping-access.com., and be sure to follow us on Instagram and Twitter.

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Episode 2.1: Alice Sheppard (with Cassandra Hartblay) - Show Notes and Transcript

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More information about the ramp in DESCENT:

Introduction Description:

Episode Introduction:

Interview Transcript:

Introducing Crip Ritual:

Outro: