Disability Blog Carnival

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Often likened to a traveling blog, blog carnivals typically host links and summaries of blog posts related to a specific topic. A prominent disability blog carnival, for example, is Blogging Against Disablism Day (BADD), in which bloggers write on topics relating to disability discrimination and social justice. Modeled after BADD, the disability blog carnival assignment asks students to choose a disability-related topic, research an allied set of disability rights blogs, and compose a longform blog post that synthesizes key strands among 6–8 blog posts related to their chosen topic. Student carnivals, for example, might include topics such as Latinx disability rights, neuroqueer activism, psychiatric survivorship, or capitalism and disability. In the broader spirit of accessibility, students are also tasked with creating visual maps that summarize or supplement the overall findings within their carnival. Blogs that students typically find useful as starting points for their research include Krip-Hop Nation, Autistic Hoya, Disability Studies at Temple, Intersected, Disability in KidLit, and NeuroQueer

Multimedia Composition: Inclusion in a Digital Age

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Amy Vidali’s upper-level undergraduate seminar employs inclusivity as a lens through which to reassess common methods in multimodal composing: visual rhetoric, auditory rhetoric, and hypertextual rhetoric. For instance, Vidali asks students to consider how Temple Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures complicates some of the common assumptions that visual rhetoric scholarship imparts about seeing and knowing. The curriculum is structured evenly across texts from digital rhetoric and disability studies, with works from each field spanning genre and mode. In keeping with the diversity of course texts, Vidali asks students to compose broadly. Assignments include analyzing a personal experience in comic form; a musical genre analysis, in which students present their findings through podcasts; and an accessibly designed hypertext. Instructors will find Vidali’s syllabus a useful launching point for assignment and reading ideas, but perhaps most notable is the syllabus’s attention to accessibility (see, for example, the disability inclusion statement) as well as its embedded links to the course blog, which features student writing

Re-storying autism: a body becoming disability studies in education approach

This paper presents and analyzes six short first-person films produced through a collaborative multimedia storytelling workshop series focused on experiences of autism, education and inclusion. The aim of the project is to co-create new understandings of autism beyond functionalist and biomedical ones that reify autism as a problem of disordered brains and underpin special education. We fashion a body becoming disability studies in education approach to proliferate stories of autism outside received cultural scripts – autism as biomedical disorder, brain-based difference, otherworldliness, lost or stolen child and more. Our approach keeps the meaning of autism moving, always emerging, resisting, fading away and becoming again in relation to context, time, space, material oppressions, cultural scripts, intersecting differences, surprising bodies and interpretative engagement. We argue that the films we present and analyse not only significantly change and critique traditional special education approaches based on assumptions of the normative human as non-autistic, they also enact ‘autism’ as a becoming process and relation with implications for inclusive educators. By this we mean that the stories shift what autism might be and become, and open space for a proliferation of representations and practices of difference in and beyond educational contexts that support flourishing for all

Disability Rights Organizations and Collectives

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Structured across one or more class periods, this activity rotates between small group discussion, Web research, and digital reporting of findings through a short presentation in class. In teams of two or four, students investigate a disability rights organization or a grassroots collective and research its history, initiatives, and representations of disability (visually, textually, and aurally). Discussion questions prompt students not only to learn the missions of an organization but also critically examine how the collective imagines disability in the context of broader intersectional discourses on oppression, identity, and civil rights. Typically, this exercise follows an earlier activity in which students examine and present findings on disability charities, which are overwhelmingly white and affluent in the makeup of board members as well as people depicted on Web sites. Notably, the charities from the first exercise tend to be rehabilitative and corporate in approach, which is a radical divergence from the groups students encounter in this exercise. The organizations in this exercise include nonprofits, archival projects, performance collectives, and virtually-based grassroots groups. Students report their findings through a shared blog space, taking care to make all material created accessible to a broad audience within and beyond the class

Clinically Significant Disturbance: On Theorists Who Theorize Theory of Mind

This essay is an autie-ethnographic narrative that traces the problems with and limits of theory of mind (ToM) as it is currently constructed in psychology and cognitive studies. In particular, I examine the role of the body in ToM—or rather, the ways in which autistic people are disembodied in theories about ToM. I argue that theories about ToM deny autistic people agency by calling into question their very humanity and, in doing so, wreak violence on autistic bodies. I suggest, furthermore, that feminist rhetorical studies represent one potential location for dismantling the complex web of oppression that ToM has come to signify.Keywords: theory of mind; autism; rhetoric; violence; embodiment

Circle Wars: Reshaping the Typical Autism Essay

This piece investigates “typical autism essays” and their rhetorical commonplaces, their largely neurotypical discourse conventions. In the field of rhetoric and composition, circular metaphors in discourse community theory resemble popular representations of autism as a low-functioning/high-functioning binary. Each field-specific conversation attempts to define groups of people (student writers, autistics) as though there are hard and fast boundaries to one’s identity. I posit that typical autism essays obscure issues of power as well as their neurotypically-defined genre conventions, effectively denying autistic self-advocates a place in the conversations that concern them.  Keywords:Autism; autistics; circles; cognitivism; discourse communities; essays; genre theory; neurodiversity; neurotypicality; rhetoric and composition; spectru

Recognizing Disability Studies

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Recognizing Disability Studies is a graduate-level seminar that examines the histories, turns, and challenges within disability studies as a field. Structured around elisions and potential futures, the course features units dedicated to bioethics, critical race theory, mental disability, crip theory, and materiality. Accessibility thematically structures all course projects. In particular, Price encourages students to compose in a modality of their choosing (i.e., through forms most accessible to students), while also requiring students to craft accessibly designed projects (i.e., creating projects accessible to broad audiences). Course projects include reading responses and participation in the class discussion forum, a collaborative presentation of supplemental course readings, and a final project composed in a genre or mode relevant to students’ home fields

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(Disability) Persona

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: An assignment for Allison Hitt’s undergraduate Writing as Information Design class, the disability persona project asks students to profile an imaginary disabled student at the University of Central Arkansas. Students are tasked with conducting demographic research, learning about a disability of their choosing, and conceptualizing their imagined student’s needs and abilities when engaging texts across mode and platform. Hitt instructs students to avoid stereotyping disabled people and suggests they learn about disability from first-person blogs and life writing, while also attending to intersecting aspects of identity, such as nationality, race, gender, and class. Importantly, this assignment is the first in a larger sequence of accessibility protocols and user testing projects in the class. In the prompt, Hitt notes that conducting user research with this level of specificity is key to thinking about accessible design and thinking critically about disability