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ableism

AmyMay's picture

Diffracting and Entangling System-Correcting Praxis

Diffracting and Entangling System-Correcting Praxis

            In my post from week 4, I posited a question to the class: what place do diffraction and entanglement have in practices of system-correcting praxis?  Are the concepts diametrically opposed?  To answer this question, it is necessary to delve deeper into the theoretical and functional foundations of correcting vs. system challenging praxis.  Only by understanding the problems inherent to these types of activism can we utilize diffraction and entanglement to improve their implementation.  Integrating processes of diffraction and entanglement into system correcting activism offers a way to prevent the passive subscription to existing systems of power inequality and reduce the disabling nature of enabling acts.

someshine's picture

A Disabled Person or A Person With A Disability?

While reading the mountain, I was reminded of a puzzling thought that occurred to me while doing a problem set for my Introduction to Linguistics course in the fall of 2010. Though most of the specific terms I learned oh-so-long-ago are fuzzy, I remember working on a syntax unit in which my professor asked us to examine a particular sentence and determine which words seemed naturally related to one another. A small example would be: A big, red balloon. I will not pretend that I can teach any of you reading my post about the syntactic rules we learn and practice, but basically, there is something about the relationship between 'red' and 'balloon' that draws our attention. One might associate 'big' and 'red' together before associating 'balloon' with 'red', but it would seem unusual to assume an immediate relationship between 'big' and 'balloon.' I'm not as interested in the reasons behind these associations we are linguistically socialized to believe and practice as much as I am interested in how these kinds of relationships impact our perceptions of language as they refer to disability and impairment. 

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