Kestrell

From the newsletter of the Cambridge Commission of Persons with Disabilities:
December 2022

City Manager Seeks Applicants
for CCPD Advisory Board
by December 28!

Cambridge City Manager Yi-An Huang is seeking to fill vacancies on the Cambridge Commission for Persons with Disabilities (CCPD) Advisory Board.

CCPD works to increase access to all aspects of Cambridge community life for people with disabilities. CCPD raises awareness of disability issues and promotes equal opportunity for people with a range of abilities, including physical, mental, and sensory. CCPD also provides information, referrals, guidance, and technical assistance to individuals and their families, employers, public agencies, businesses and private non-profit organizations.

Duties, Responsibilities, and Minimum Requirements include:
• Must be Cambridge residents representing different disabilities, diverse cultures and races, and all areas of Cambridge.
• Attend monthly meetings, currently held virtually on the second Thursday of every month at 5:30 p.m.
• Take part in Working Groups and work on projects as needed.
• Work with other members and the office staff to carry out the CCPD Ordinance (Cambridge Municipal Code Chapter 2.96).

The City of Cambridge is committed to advancing a culture of antiracism, diversity, equity, and inclusion. All board and commission members in Cambridge must have the ability to work and interact effectively with individuals and groups with a variety of identities, cultures, backgrounds, and ideologies. Women, minorities, veterans, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and persons with disabilities are encouraged to apply.

Applications can be submitted to the City Manager’s Office using the City’s online application system at Cambridgema.gov/apply. A cover letter, resume or applicable experience can be submitted during the online application process. Paper applications are available in the City Manager’s Office at Cambridge City Hall, 795 Massachusetts Avenue.
Applications are due by Wednesday, December 28.

Learn More & Apply
https://www.cambridgema.gov/DHSP/newsandevents/News/2022/11/cambridgecommissionforpersonswithdisabilitiesadvisoryboardvacancies.aspx

A scathingly detailed article countering the President's statement that the pandemic is over with numbers, studies, facts, and science, for those of us who believe in science. I suggest that you keep this article handy for anytime someone tells you that you are being paranoid for maintaining pandemic precautions.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/09/covid-pandemic-exposes-americas-failing-systems-future-epidemics/671608/

Excerpt

block quote begin
In the late 19th century, many scholars realized that epidemics were social problems, whose spread and toll are influenced by poverty, inequality, overcrowding, hazardous working conditions, poor sanitation, and political negligence. But after the advent of germ theory, this social model was displaced by a biomedical and militaristic one, in which diseases were simple battles between hosts and pathogens, playing out within individual bodies. This paradigm conveniently allowed people to ignore the social context of disease. Instead of tackling intractable social problems, scientists focused on fighting microscopic enemies with drugs, vaccines, and other products of scientific research—an approach that sat easily with America’s abiding fixation on technology as a panacea.....

Technological solutions also tend to rise into society’s penthouses, while epidemics seep into its cracks. Cures, vaccines, and diagnostics first go to people with power, wealth, and education, who then move on, leaving the communities most affected by diseases to continue shouldering their burden. This dynamic explains why the same health inequities linger across the decades even as pathogens come and go, and why the U.S. has now normalized an appalling level of COVID death and disability. Such suffering is concentrated among elderly, immunocompromised, working-class, and minority communities—groups that are underrepresented among political decision makers and the media, who get to declare the pandemic over. Even when inequities are highlighted, knowledge seems to suppress action: In one study, white Americans felt less empathy for vulnerable communities and were less supportive of safety precautions after learning about COVID’s racial disparities. This attitude is self-destructive and limits the advantage that even the most privileged Americans enjoy. Measures that would flatten social inequities, such as universal health care and better ventilation, would benefit everyone—and their absence harms everyone, too. In 2021, young white Americans died at lower rates than Black and Indigenous Americans, but still at three times the rate of their counterparts in other wealthy countries.
block quote end

Kes: I totally fangirl for Hugh Herr and, if you are interested in prosthetics, I encourage you to go read the rest of this article, and then go read more about Hugh Herr's work.

excerpt

Interdisciplinary research center funded by philanthropist Lisa Yang aims to mitigate disability through technologies that marry human physiology with electromechanics.
September 23, 2021
https://news.mit.edu/2021/new-bionics-center-established-mit-24-million-gift-0923

With the establishment of the new K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics, MIT is pushing forward the development and deployment of enabling technologies that communicate directly with the nervous system to mitigate a broad range of disabilities. The center’s scientists, clinicians, and engineers will work together to create, test, and disseminate bionic technologies that integrate with both the body and mind.

The center is funded by a $24 million gift to MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research from philanthropist Lisa Yang, a former investment banker committed to advocacy for individuals with visible and invisible disabilities. Her previous gifts to MIT have also enabled the establishment of the K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics in Neuroscience, Hock E. Tan and K. Lisa Yang Center for Autism Research, Y. Eva Tan Professorship in Neurotechnology, and the endowed K. Lisa Yang Post-Baccalaureate Program.

....To develop prosthetic limbs that move as the brain commands or optical devices that bypass an injured spinal cord to stimulate muscles, bionic developers must integrate knowledge from a diverse array of fields — from robotics and artificial intelligence to surgery, biomechanics, and design. The K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics will be deeply interdisciplinary, uniting experts from three MIT schools: Science, Engineering, and Architecture and Planning. With clinical and surgical collaborators at Harvard Medical School, the center will ensure that research advances are tested rapidly and reach people in need, including those in traditionally underserved communities.

To support ongoing efforts to move toward a future without disability, the center will also provide four endowed fellowships for MIT graduate students working in bionics or other research areas focused on improving the lives of individuals who experience disability.

The center will be led by Hugh Herr,
https://www.media.mit.edu/people/hherr/overview/
a professor of media arts and sciences at MIT’s Media Lab, and
Ed Boyden,
https://mcgovern.mit.edu/profile/ed-boyden/
the Y. Eva Tan Professor of Neurotechnology at MIT, a professor of biological engineering, brain and cognitive sciences, and media arts and sciences, and an investigator at MIT’s McGovern Institute and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
A double amputee himself, Herr is a pioneer in the development of bionic limbs to improve mobility for those with physical disabilities.“The world profoundly needs relief from the disabilities imposed by today’s nonexistent or broken technologies. We must continually strive towards a technological future in which disability is no longer a common life experience,” says Herr. “I am thrilled that the Yang Center for Bionics will help to measurably improve the human experience for so many.”
Boyden, who is a renowned creator of tools to analyze and control the brain, will play a key role in merging bionics technologies with the nervous system. “The Yang Center for Bionics will be a research center unlike any other in the world,” he says. “A deep understanding of complex biological systems, coupled with rapid advances in human-machine bionic interfaces, mean we will soon have the capability to offer entirely new strategies for individuals who experience disability. It is an honor to be part of the center’s founding team.”

From the LibroFM website, a quiz developed by the Women and Children First bookstore in Chicago that will help you find books by authors with disabilities
https://blog.libro.fm/quiz-author-with-a-disability/

I've had this rather lackluster relationship with Twitter for awhile, but a number of disability-related projects that I'm currently participating in, such as the Disability Readathon, are happening on Twitter, so for teh next couple of weeks at least, I'll be posting on Twitter, where my handle is #kestrell13.

In part, this is also prompted by the fact that, lately, I've been feeling really exhausted all the time, and I'm hoping that the shorter form will prompt me to post a little more often, though it does seem to inspire more swearing.

The Disability Readathon begins today and continues throughout the entire month of April.

Note: I'm working on a disability fanfic for Naomi Novik's _A Deadly Education_, but I will also be posting abut some of my favorite fiction and nonfiction books that relate to disability.

You can find the Disability Readathon on most of the social media platforms or just do a web search for "Disability Readaton"

Here is a brief description and some links from the website:

We are asking participants of the readathon to share their reading experiences with us via social media to encourage disability inclusion and representation in books and oral or signed storytelling.
https://www.disabilityreadathon.com/

Please head over to "How To Join In" to learn more about the readathon, and check us out on Twitter and Instagram for more bookish content.
How to join in
https://www.disabilityreadathon.com/how-to-join-in

BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS
https://www.disabilityreadathon.com/book-recommendations

Twitter
https://twitter.com/DisabilityRead

This is the longest blues song ever.

But it is now at the point where, like the old joke "The Aristocrats," sometimes I just start cracking up.

Accessibility Devices at CES 2021 Reflect Growing Focus on Inclusive Tech
https://www.cnet.com/health/accessibility-devices-at-ces-2021-reflect-growing-focus-on-inclusive-tech/#ftag=CAD590a51e

Podcast | Blind Tech Guys | CES 2021, BBC Apps And How To Utilise Gestures
January 19th 2021
On episode 69 of the Blind Tech Guys, they went through all that happened at CES 2021, Marco demonstrated two BBC apps and Nimer showed us how to go about setting up and utilising gestures on Android and iOS.
https://www.blindtechguys.com/69

The Intersectionality of Identities with Disability
This resource comes to us from the National Center for College Students with Disabilities (NCCSD), a federally-funded project under the U.S. Department of Education, and provides a range of disability resources for people of different races, ethnicities, cultures, LGBTQI identities, and religions (listed in no particular order). Also includes a collection of self-care and identity resources:
https://www.nccsdclearinghouse.org/intersectionality-of-
identities.html

( more below the cut )

Yesterday I was browsing the MIT IAP schedule of courses, I found this

Alt-Text as Poetry Workshop

Bojana Coklyat and Shannon Finnegan will lead a group work session to dig into our collective backlog of alt-text writing for websites or social media. We can share what were working on, ask questions, and learn from each other.

If you are brand new to writing alt-text, we recommend reading Section 2 of Bojana and Shannon's workbook (available on their website https://alt-text-as-poetry.net/ ).

Alt-text is an essential part of web accessibility, making visual content accessible through short textual descriptions for blind and low-vision people who use screen reading software to access digital content. Alt-text is often overlooked altogether or understood through the lens of compliance, as an unwelcome burden to be met with minimum effort.
How can we instead approach alt-text thoughtfully and creatively, while still prioritizing alt-text as an accessibility practice?
In this workshop, led by Bojana Coklyat and Shannon Finnegan, we will reframe alt-text as a type of poetry and practice writing it together. We will look at examples of poetic and creative approaches to alt-text, then do several writing exercises designed to focus on issues that often come up in alt-text, including attention to language and word economy, alt-text as translation, structuring and prioritizing, subjectivity, identity, and representation.

You can find more information on what alt-text is, and how we can practice it as poetry, on Bojana and Shannon's website
https://alt-text-as-poetry.net/

Kes: note that this project is a collaboration between artists Bojana Coklyat and Shannon Finnegan, supported by Eyebeam and the Disability Visibility Project.

“
Here is an online recording of one of their workshops:
Alt-text as Poetry” workshop (ASL accessible) on Vimeo
https://vimeo.com/419009970

Lastly, here is a great interview which describes some of their art installations which address the the inaccessibility of art and museum space.

Accessibility in Inaccessible Spaces: An Interview with Shannon Finnegan
by Emily McDermott // Nov. 10, 2020
Berlin Art ONLINE MAGAZINE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART
http://www.berlinartlink.com/2020/11/10/accessibility-interview-shannon-finnegan/

Excerpt:

Most recently, the artist began addressing accessibility in digital space through a series of creative workshops about alt-text (text entered into the backend of websites or on social media platforms to enable screen-readers to access visually-driven content) created in collaboration with artist, activist and scholar Bojana Coklyat. To a disabled audience, some of Finnegan’s subject matter might seem like old news, but they see their work as a building block within a much larger ecosystem. Their work, they say, “is interdependent with work by many other disabled artists and thinkers. It is part of a specific network and lineage.” In this interview, Finnegan speaks about this ecosystem, their disability-centering practice and how artists and institutions can--and should--change the ways they think about accessibility.

I just read this post on images of disability in the recently released remake of "The Witches"https://themighty.com/2020/12/the-witches-ectrodactyly-disability/
and it expresses something I've been feeling lately.

Alexx has been reading me a relatively recent issue of Hellboy, and this particular story is set in approximately 1950s Appalachia, and involves Hellboy taking on a group of witches.

Most of the witches are portrayed as old and extremely ugly and possessing disabled bodies, except for the one sexy one who, of course, is totally to blame for one of the male characters having made a pact with the devil.

I don't mean there is just one or two images of these witches and having disabled bodies: the images occur over and over again, the same way that Frank Miller's negative images of people of color, of queer people, of people with disabilities, repeat over and over.

One might say, these images occur so often as to be obsessive: the artists must have spent *days* drawing this many only slight variations of the same thing.

When I was a kid, and still sighted, I used to draw horses all the time. I had never ridden a horse, or even seen one close up, but I was still really good at drawing these horses in hte same two or three poses, and other kids (especially girls--what is it with girls and horses?) really liked them and were always asking me to draw more. Most of those kids had never seen a real horse, either.

So, this is my ultimate criticism of using one's creativity to reproduce cliches: it's not actually creative. Creative people thrive on the same things scientists do: new ideas, observation of the real world, and personal experience with the world.

The cliche of the ugly deformed witch that equates disability with evil isn't the least tiny bit creative: it's just a worn out placemarker that someone puts in that space instead of creating something they've actually thought about and are using to add further meaning to the story.

In other words, it's intellectually and creatively lazy, and it's often this laziness that bothers me more than the stereotype itself, because it expresses a certain disdain, or condensation, of the creator toward their audience. It says, Oh, I can skive off here, no one will be able to tell the difference, no one will notice that I didn't really think a lot about what I put here.

Images used in creative works are supposd to *mean* something, to work with the rest of the story in saying something of significance, and there are many artists who have taken a cliche, an empty skin, as it were, and invested it with new life, new meaning.

This is one of the reasons I love Alan Moore's Swamp Thing: I don't just love the character, I love the fact that Moore took what was basically a rubber suit-type monster and transformed it into a Green Man. Then Moore went even further and used that first transformation to create a complicated narrative about how we all have the potential to transform ourselves, whether it is into heroes or into monsters, and how we can transform the world around us into fertile places full of life and joy, or hellish barren landscapes that reflect our own inner barrenness.

Think about the things you create before you send them out into the world: do you want them to be empty skins, mere "bags of bones," or do you want them to be something unique, something of significance?