"Can't" is Actually Important

All these thoughts were brought up again in the context of sports, because one of the coaches for my ultimate team said that we weren't ever supposed to say "I can't," at practice. I'm fairly sure that was supposed to be empowering, and I'm just as sure that for me (and probably for a whole lot of other disabled people) it's actually terrifying. Thankfully, I was able to explain to the coach and have her understand why no, I really do need that sentence in my vocabulary, and I need it taken seriously when I use it. Bad things happen otherwise.

Part the first: What I find easy vs. hard vs. impossible doesn't line up very well with what most people find easy vs. hard vs. impossible.

This is the part where "differently abled" is a technically accurate description of my abilities, and the existence of societal factors putting values and expectations on certain abilities is why I still refuse to call myself differently abled. I wrote a post about that a while back.

However, this is mostly the part where the failure of my easy, hard, and impossible to line up with that of anyone else means that my abilities are apparently incomprehensible to a significant portion of the world. The idea that I can do calculus but not organize my own locker (not actually related skills in any way, shape, or form) or that I can be decent at Ultimate but not able to jump such that my feet leave the ground together and land together (therefore not actually a prerequisite skill, but I can at least understand why people assume so) is apparently incomprehensible.

This means that when I say I can do one thing, but not another, people are too busy being confused to accept this, and cognitive dissonance leads to my can't getting ignored.

Part the second: What I find easy vs. hard vs. impossible doesn't even always line up with what I find easy vs. hard vs. impossible.

That is, my abilities vary over time, and hugely so. Speech is the big example here, that on my best day I can win a face to face debate in class without preparation by explaining why my opponents evidence actually supports the position I was assigned, and then there are also times when I can not speak at all. There's also a huge amount of middle ground, where I spend most of my time. That middle ground includes things like how much I can say that's not scripted, how quickly I can get words from my head to my mouth, how obvious it is that my prosody is weird, and whether or not I can initiate a conversation.

The way my abilities get prioritized also doesn't match with that of most people, so the way my ability variation happens can confuse people. For most of my classmates, the ability to concentrate on graph theory homework or measure theory assignments would go long before speech did. For me, I have repeated evidence that speech goes long before my ability to pay attention in class, write papers, or do homework does.

Part the third: Not recognizing "I can't" is used to deny access needs.

This one is common. A person has an access need. I have an access need. We all have them, but sometimes when they're statistically less common, the fact that it is a need is ignored. No, I can't depend on always being able to speak. That's why I carry pen and paper, and that's why I carry the iPad. No, I can't tell people apart by their faces. That's why it takes me so much longer to learn people's names. No, I can't organize my own locker or desk or room independently. That's why I need help organizing my space. No, I can't consistently remember to eat three meals a day without reminders. That's why I need some sort of reminder system.

For some of these "can't"s the access need is that I have a work-around and just need people to get out of the way while I use it. However, when the people or institutions around me refuse to recognize the "I can't" as legitimate, either because can't is generally not accepted (hi, sports coach who had no clue what kind of disability issues sat around the issue of "can't") or because the specific inability is one that I'm not allowed to have for some reason.

Part the fourth: Deciding that a "can't" is actually a "won't" leads to very ineffective and very scary discipline.

When I was in school, some of my teachers recognized that I actually couldn't independently keep my locker organized and not full of piles of papers. So, once in a while, they'd pull the trash and recycling bins from their classrooms after school, sit down with me next to my locker, and help me deal with the mess. Together, we were able to get my locker back to a semblance of order.

I also had teachers who thought I just didn't care, and if they were smart about choosing the consequences I'd magically get my locker clean. This ranged from sitting me down and telling me I couldn't leave until it was done (ended with my crying in the middle of a pile of my stuff in the hall until one of the teachers who had figured out it was a couldn't found me) to having my enrollment in an appropriate math class held hostage to my "getting organized." That one ended when my eighth grade teacher finally realized that this clearly wasn't working, and that this was not an acceptable consequence to use anyways. It turned out that there actually was no appropriate class to enroll me in at the middle school, so they gave me an independent study that year. The idea was that I'd use the independent study to learn what was left of geometry and to do whatever math-related things caught my interest, and that I'd test out of ninth grade geometry when I got to the high school, taking Algebra II with the tenth graders instead. I actually tested out of two years of math and took Precalculus with the eleventh graders -- even when they realized that an appropriate math class meant grade-skipping me, they underestimated how far ahead I really was.

And remember, this is me getting off easy. No one hit me. No one tried to prevent me from accessing the mainstream curriculum (the mainstream just happened not to be appropriate for me in one subject.) No one decided I wasn't really ready to be a legal adult. I was "only" left to cry it out and I "only" had the stuff I could do held hostage to the stuff I couldn't do.

Back to School

I'm now a (partial) week into the fall semester, taking three classes, teaching one, playing Ultimate, and applying to doctorate programs. Since I'm wanting to combine disability studies (already an interdisciplinary field, though mostly humanities) with engineering, finding one department I can apply to is tricky. I expect finding an adviser is also going to be tricky, for similar reasons (I have some ideas of who I might like to work with, but they tend to be in departments I can't realistically get into, so even if I'm working with them, they're unlikely to be my on-paper adviser...)

Still, this is probably the lightest workload I've ever had for a semester. I have Monday and Wednesday mornings off, and Ultimate practice is literally my only Friday obligation most weeks. That means I can actually wear my disability scholar hat during the semester, which I wasn't able to do last year, and it means that I have time to have things go in unexpected directions without everything falling apart in new and interesting ways.

As far as teaching goes, I have one section of basic algebra and trigonometry. It's a different class from last semester, so I need to do new lesson plans, and I'm teaching Tuesdays and Thursdays rather than Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, which means longer classes but fewer of them per week. So far we've met once, and I've gotten the online math homework set up for the first chapter. I also had trouble getting the door open for the first day of class because we meet in the building with weird doors that have twisty handles that then don't actually twist even when the door is unlocked. It's also literally across the street from my dorm so I have the shortest walk of anyone to go to class, which is convenient.

On the student side, I'm taking measure theory, which has something to do with Lebesque integration and integrating badly discontinuous functions. It's also got something to do with ideas of size for weird sets that don't really have length, like apparently the Cantor middle-third set is uncountably infinite but also has measure zero. That is weird to me. That one was originally going to be Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for 50 minutes each meeting but is instead going to be 75 minute meetings on Mondays and Wednesdays. I'm happy because that means I will get to slightly more of Ultimate practice this week when I can start walking before practice starts instead of from class an hour into practice.

I'm also taking a graduate level probability class that will use some measure theory things -- I think most of my classmates for that class have either already taken measure theory or are in measure theory with me now. I've taken probability classes before that involve calculus, even multi-variable calculus, but they were a while ago (Fall 2010,) comparatively light on the proofs, and different from measure theory, so I suspect I'll be learning a lot in this class. It's a Tuesday and Thursday class, and I generally have something else going on about half an hour after this class so I have a break but am not done for the day.

The last class I'm taking is programming for scientists. I've got more of a computer science background than is strictly expected for this class, but I also don't have enough to reasonably go into anything that has programming ability as a prerequisite, so this should be a comparatively easier class. It meets once a week, on Tuesdays.

Programming is not the class I was originally planning to take as my third, though. I was planning to take multicultural psychology, but I've heard that the teacher for the section of that class I'd signed up for is not great about anyone who is "different," and that there have been issues in the past. I was tempted to take the class anyways and be the pain in her ass who makes her deal with accommodations, but I did that at Tianjin Normal University all of the '13-'14 academic year and I don't particularly want to do that again this semester while also applying to graduate programs. I might be willing to get into fights over basic and important stuff like my being able to type or write and have a person or computer speak my writing for me when I need to, but I can't actually deal with everything ever at once so someone else can have that battle if they want it.

I turned in my submission for the Spoon Knife Anthology from Autonomous Press, claimed a pinch hitting assignment for the Autistic Exchange, and I'm trying to edit a paper of mine for a journal submission but it's kind of scary. I'm also working on a chapter for a book, plus fiction stuff. Maybe I'll even give NaNoWriMo another shot come November, since I have such a light course load and all the writing stuff I have going on is either due by the end of September or doesn't have a specific due date at all. 

In which summer involves doing things

Many things. This post is going to mostly be updates about "I did X, Y, and Z" this summer.

I went to the Computers and Writing annual conference in May, as you might be able to guess from the fact that the last post on here is my notes for one of the sessions. While there, I participated in the digital rhetoric collaboratives wiki quest, and I was one of the winners from that. As such, I got a book! Yay, books! I also reviewed two sessions for the collaborative: D5: Disability and universal access, where I got to watch Sam Harvey be awesome about demolishing the nonsense that is most applications of theory of mind. I've written a little bit about turning the concept inside out, a while back, when I asked if Autistic people might spend more time and effort guessing the mental states of others than neurotypical people do, and Sam seemed to be focusing on the ways the concept and rhetoric around it get applied as an oppressive force. I also got to meet Dani, another autistic academic, who then proceeded to write about me as the "Friend." That was cool too.

The other session I reviewed was F8: Refashioning and reimagining community identities: Performance and online spaces. That was cool because both panelists were members of the communities they were doing research about, and they got to talk about issues related to that, plus they just had really interesting projects to talk about.

I also presented about plainer language in calls for participation as an important thing- the idea of nothing about us without us includes making it so we can understand the questions being asked and therefore know what even to contribute! And then I chaired a panel after that, which was cool. Back to back panels on the last day of the conference for the win!

Shortly thereafter, I went to the Society for Disability Studies (SDS) annual conference. I was on the Digital Access Facilitation Team (DAFT) which was fun and worthwhile but also exhausting. And, just like at Computers and Writing, I was on back to back panels on the last day of the conference (this time immediately followed by tweeting two panels in a row for DAFT.) Here, one panel was on my more scholarly stuff, wanting to create software based around treating disability related language issues as a translation problem rather than something that the disabled person is 100% responsible for "fixing." The other was more on the activisty side of my stuff, talking about some experiences with disclosure on a panel with a pile of other autistic people.

Also at the SDS conference, we got to see Autonomous Press launch. I was at the launch party reminding everyone ever that I did the cover art for Typed Words, Loud Voices. On that note, did I mention that I did said cover art? It's a good book. Since my birthday is coming up, I will say that people who want to do a thing for my birthday are more than welcome to go get a copy for themselves or to donate to a library that will put it on their shelves. Given the funding structure for the upcoming Spoon Knife anthology and my plans to submit to it, this is even a semi-directly self-interested idea for what you can do! (Yeah, if I get a piece into Spoon Knife, I get more for it if more people buy Typed Words. I have a vested interest in people getting it, beyond also honestly wanting more people to read it.)

I wrote an abstract and submitted a piece for the INSPIRe annual virtual conference, entitled "Democratizing Disability Innovation." I plan to edit that piece and send it... somewhere. Not sure where yet, but I think it's worth sending somewhere. I started working on my piece for Spoon Knife. I did some editing on my piece on the translation (or cognitive interpretation, since that's a word that some autistic people use for it when they get a handy dandy friend to do this translation and support for them, see Kassiane's piece,) in the hopes of getting it into a journal. I really need to transcript the presentations I gave at the conferences, but ugh auditory processing issues are a thing. Making transcripts of my own talks, even with good recordings, is not easy, and I suspect that I actually have meh recordings. Oh well, it needs done so I will get it done. And then I'll post about it when it happens, since I'm pretty sure this is where said transcripts are going. At the least, it's one of the places.

In the last few days, Kerima made an important post about appropriation and erasure in activism, with a good bit of the focus on two good friends of mine, Lydia and Kassiane, because they are Autistic people of color, Lydia genderqueer and Kassiane a woman. This is relevant to "what Alyssa did this summer" because Lydia and Kassiane are friends, but also because Kerima linked to a post of mine for documentation and explanation on one of the issues, which means "got linked in an important post" is a literal partial answer to the question.

Computers and Writing Session D5, Friday May 29 3:00-4:15pm, Disability and Universal Access.

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.

Yes, That Too Acceptance. Love, and Self-care: #AutismPositivity2015

I have been writing less on my blog since... well, ever since I left for China at the end of August 2013. Spending an academic year at a university that really, really did not want me to be there was extremely draining, and I've already written a lot of things on this blog. I'm not really out of things to say, because there are always new ideas and new connections and new events, but I'm low on energy to say them here, so I am posting less often than I used to. (I used to post every day, sometimes multiple times a day, and that hasn't been the case since 2013.) 

That's OK, and deciding that it's OK is part of my accepting my limits and taking care of myself, which is this year's theme.

I've also been using some of what I write for academic purposes. I've done some short fiction, and this past year I was in a capstone engineering course that involved 50+ page reports at the end of each semester. That's a good bit of writing. I've also been working on a chapter for a book, which is currently at 30+ pages, and conference presentations, and I've been reading and taking notes for multiple projects. I've got papers and chapters to write, and will continue to, and if I want to be making a living, I'll need to be using my writing for places that help with that goal. 

In a very literal and physical sense, earning a living is required in the current system (and that's not an endorsement of the system, just an acknowledgement that to survive, I need to exist in it) so prioritizing placement of my writing in places where I get compensation is kind of self-care, in a physical and pragmatic way. 

Not so much choosing to write things that would be palatable to the mainstream. I don't do that so much, because writing things I disagree with to survive is survival but not self-care. Ensuring that I have the resources I need to live through placement is a different thing than getting resources by silencing myself or others, and only one of those am I talking about here.

And you want to know what else is self-care? Using my AAC device when I'm tired and find it easier to type than to speak, not just when speech is completely gone. That's self-care, and it's something I've been doing, with friends and at school. I'm glad I'm doing it. Pushing for normalcy for the sake of normalcy is kind of the opposite of self-care, and I've had enough of it.