May 11, 2016 - 19:08
Our placement at CCW was, by far, the most meaningful part of this course for me, and the site of my most profound learning experiences. I usually struggle to situate myself in placements for classes, grappling with what it really means to have a “real life example” of the theories brought up in class. I hate feeling like I have to study people, to seek out which theories apply to which people I meet. For some reason--maybe because we spent very little time studying institutions like CCW, and maybe because we structured our time at the center around unique and complex projects unrelated to the course’s topic itself--I didn’t find myself having to face this struggle at all. With the BioArt project, the tree project, and working together in the woodshop to make boxes, I felt like my time at CCW was completely authentic. I looked forward to going every week, and knew that I could interact with all of the artists as people, not fearing I would reduce them to test subjects for my academic pursuits.
My other most notable learning experiences happened in the making of my midterm and final projects. Entering the class, I intended for my focus to be on gender and sexuality, and their intersections with disability. Though most of the course readings, with the exception of a week, were not centered specifically around issues of gender, I am practiced in drawing out themes of gender from most writing, simply because it is an almost universal experience. When I spoke throughout the semester about matters of identity that other people in the class were less familiar with, my ideas were always welcomed, and I never felt inclined to “lecture” on my personal course of study--rather, my thoughts were engaged with actively, which meant that class never seemed to deteriorate into a collection of heads, offering mini personal lectures in succession. I have to say that there was something special about the way that I was able to work through gender as it intersected with disability this semester--while I gained so much on the medical side of disability because I had never engaged with it directly before, I also made huge strides on understanding an intersection which I have been working on for several semesters. I see these identities and intersectionality as a whole in an entirely new light, and I would say this has to be one of the most remarkable ways in which my understanding of disability has expanded.
I think this development came, in part, from the make-up of the class--because we were all from different disciplines, I approached the topic of intersectionality differently than I would have with a group of students who were all studying matters of identity. I learned different styles of communication, both in speaking and in writing, and learned to listen differently when people spoke--both because their interests were different than those I was used to hearing about in classes, and because communication styles differ in subtle ways across disciplines.
Some of my most striking moments occurred in the sessions we shared preparing for the midterm and final projects. There, the engagement I saw was inspirational, which seemed to indicate a shared curiosity and humbleness on the part of everyone there--we were all in the class because we wanted to learn from one another what we didn’t already know, and offer anything we could of what we already did. In these moments, and in the moments of planning and preparation leading up to the exhibition, class felt truly like a community. Perhaps because disability studies is still such a new field, and because not much is in the public eye about it, it really felt like our contributions in these moments mattered, and that we were unearthing topics and questions that hadn’t been unearthed before, or at least given the credence that our academic investment in them provided.
Seeing how well this multidisciplinary community came together, I’m incredibly driven to keep pushing myself into similar spaces--it’s a space of growth for me, and one that I think is essential if we want to see change in the way society understands and responds to disability. I also want to enter more spaces of intersectionality intentionally--Natalie let me know about some LGBTQ centers for adults with intellectual disabilities, and I can absolutely imagine myself working in such environments in my future.
I want to thank the whole class for offering me the space to lead my listening activity so early on in the semester, even before we had become really comfortable with one another. For me, it was an important moment to offer a part of myself to the structure of the class, and in the way people listened to one another over the course of the rest of the semester, some of the ideas and practices behind it really seemed to make a mark (though we mostly agreed to abandon the idea of no noises of confirmation--it’s hard!). I would lastly like to thank everyone for making the space one that was comfortable enough for me to share personal experiences and anecdotes, particularly those related to parts of my identity that I was just figuring out and working through. It’s been an exciting semester, leading up to a lot of personal change for me (as is clearly evident from my final project), and it’s been because of the kindness of the group that I’ve been able to bring some of these moments into the classroom!