I attended the Computers and Writing conference at University of Wisconsin-Stout. One of the panels where I took pretty good notes was session D5, Friday May 29 3:00-4:15pm, Disability and Universal Access. I'm now posting my write-up of the panel and my notes.
Here's the nicer write-up, which I also added to the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative's Wiki. Maybe someone else will edit it with additional information, so that may not remain the same as what's below.
This panel began with Steven Hammer of
Saint Joseph's University presenting on “The Sounds of Access:
Disability, Art, and Open Source DIT (do-it-together) Interventions.”
Hammer's presentation is concerned with Western art history and
multimedia writing's tendency to ignore the perspectives and
contributions of disabled people, and with the tendency towards a
deficit model. He notes that after a diagnosis, there is a prognosis,
which rather than simply describing what life will or could be like,
it uses a presumed (and now unavailable) norm as a basis and
describes how life will be different
from that norm due to the diagnosis.
He
suggests, rather than asking about how only certain people with
certain diagnoses have bodies which are failing or considering how
all bodies will eventually fail, asking “how are you failing right
now?” He proposes that we consider the medicines we are taking to
keep our bodies running every day.
With
this question, however, Hammer mentions the risk that people will
presume their experiences of bodily failure is equivalent to that of
people with disabilities, who face oppression and marginalization
based on their abilities in addition to the primarily practical
concerns of keeping their bodyminds running.
Hammer
then spoke about projects done together which use open source and
glitch-theory methods to increase the accessibility of artistic
production. One such project was his work on instruments for Arduino.
Hammer
also drew a connection between Alexei Kruchenykh's idea of developing
a language with no fixed meanings and his communication with his son,
where the sounds are not words and the meanings might change from day
to day.
After
Hammer's talk, Samuel Harvey from Saint Cloud State University spoke
on “Autism, Neurodiversity, and Identity Formation Through the
Internet.” Harvey's talk covered the history of work on identity
formation and on theory of mind, including the relations of these
issues to autistic people. Noting that work on identity formation
presumes that identity formation rests upon social interaction and
the ability to understand what others are thinking (Theory of Mind,)
and that autism comes with difficulties in social interaction, he
asks what this would mean for identity formation in autistic people.
From
there, he continues on to enthymemic dehumanization of people,
particularly autistic people, where statements about identity
formation, humanity, and theory of mind are made which logically lead
to (never explicitly stated) denial of identity or humanity to
marginalized people. The two primary examples Harvey notes are: 1) If
identity formation depends on an understanding of what others think,
or a theory of mind, and autistic people lack a theory of mind, then
autistic people would be unable to develop an identity, and 2) If
theory of mind is innate to humans, and certain groups are found not
to have a theory of mind, that members of those groups are not human.
Harvey
also notes issues with the current methods of testing theory of mind,
primarily the Sally-Anne test, in that passing these tests depends on
linguistic ability and upon cultural factors. He finds that rather
than being innate to humans, theory of mind is innate to dominant
groups, who use it as a tool of oppression to rob people of identity,
agency, and personhood.
The
third planned speaker for the panel, Annika Konrad of University of
Wisconsin-- Madison, did not appear to speak on “Visually
Communicating Visual Impairments.”
Liberty
Kohn of Winona State University spoke third, on “Sound Pedagogy:
Sound Art as Rhetoric, Poetic, and a Voice in the Composition
Classroom.” He explored audio assignments, noting that while it is
common to assign students to read
multiple kinds of media, if students are not also writing
multiple kinds of media they are not participating in a fully
multimedia experience. He spoke about meta-language, and having
students make versions of audio both including and excluding the
meta-language in their assignments, and of the rhetoric of these
choices.
In
addition, he covered the idea of teaching non-musicians to produce
audio in the classroom, as audio assignments are currently primarily
the domain of people whose areas of study relate directly to audio.
___________________________________________________________________________
Now for the less polished notes I took during the session:
Session D5: Friday May 29, 2015,
3:00-4:15, Disability and Universal Access themed panel.
Steven Hammer, “The Sounds of Access:
Disability, Art, and Open Source DIT (do-it-together) Interventions”
Diagnosis, puts a thing on us.
Prognosis. Based on knowing that a
person has a given thing. “What's life like based on what it could
have been before.”
What does “no significant
development” mean?
Asks, “How can we get beyond a
deficit model?”
Amundon, 2000 “normal/abnormal is the
basis of the deficit model.”
“human variation rather than
pathology” Reid & Valle, 2004.
“[the] non-neutrality of
techno-social artifacts and contexts... they are embedded... theya re
not sterile, they're imperfect...” Cates 2014.
“from temporarily able bodies to
always-already malfunctioning bodies” is on the presentation and he
said it and I think that's original wording to Hammer. Also I like
this wording.
Asking “how are you failing right
now?” rather than the thought of this as “someday” your body
will fail, think about the medicines you're taking.
Of course, we need to make sure people
aren't concluding that they belong in disabled people's spaces
because they have a headache or some such because that'd be fucked
up.
Draws a parallel between Alexei
Kruchenykh's idea of developing a language with no fixed meanings and
his communication with his son, where the sounds are not words and
the meanings might change from day to day.
The world is built for people who have
an identity that is fucking fictional!
Samuel Harvey, “Autism,
Neurodiversity, and Identity Formation Through the Internet”
Henderson, Davidson, Hemsworth, and
Edwards 504?? Something Sam's citing.
“If identity is formed through
communicating with others, and autistic people struggle with
communicating with others...” [Ask Sam if I can see his slides
after?]
Samuel brings up the possibility of
written language as a discourse where autistic people could develop
their identities.
Davidson 796. “NT conversations have
a very fast-paces rhythym...”
Erikson+Cohen=> identity is formed
by having a theory of mind.
First two publications of theory of
mind, the titles are Does the X have a “Theory of Mind”?, with
Chimpanzee and then Autistic Child. Erm erm erm.
Enthymemic dehumanization, leads to
Autistic people not being able to have identities because we lack a
theory of mind... yup.
Theory of mind innate in humans, bunch
of folks don't, therefore those groups aren't human.
Yeargeau+Heilker state that autistic
people have our own rhetoric and language, oh hey, that fucks up our
test results in the area of language.
Halle and Tager Flusberg (2003), Lohman
and Tomasello (2003) as cited in Miller.
Folks like to claim that language has
no impact on the results of the test, which 1) Wrong, and 2) claims
the test is arhetorical.
Tons of other factors wind up actually
messing with theory of mind results. Whoops. Cultural stuff,
socioeconomic stuff, linguistic stuff, and also quite a few kinds of
neurodivergence.
Theory of mind is (maybe) innate in
dominant groups, used to fuck
over the disadvantaged groups.
“Theory
of mind is innate in dominant groups, it is a tool of oppression
meant to rob people (mostly autistics) of identity, agency, and even
personhood.”
Harvey thinks theory of mind is a
theory of the minds of dominant group members.
That is, the folks who have a theory of mind don't actually have it
about members of the groups said to “lack” a theory of mind.