March 21, 2016 - 21:01
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What is disability culture? Is there one, are there many? Who calls culture into being? (Kuppers, 3)
These questions of Kuppers that Kristin called our attention to in the Serendip post for this week definitely stuck with me. When I've mentioned an interest in disability culture to friends or family before, I've found myself struggling to define or explain exactly what I mean. I usually flounder around a little and then revert to giving some examples (the What Can a Body Do? exhibition at HC my freshman year, a play about deafness and family I saw with Lindsey at Penn) to try to get the jist of what I mean across. While doing the reading and watching the movie, I experienced a similar senstation: I can feel and sense what I might call disability culture but at the same time I can not get out a concise definition of the term. However, thanks to so many of the readings from this semester, I am trying to find more than frustration from this lack of coherence and I do think there is more there.
Could thinking about culture as fluid and changing, as a verb rather than a noun (as Kuppers does), be a gate opening practice? If we move culture outside of the norms of academic discourse (again, as Kuppers does), could we bring in more voices and perspectives - voices and perspectives that seem key to culture (verb) or a culture (noun) in the first place? Is there accessibility in thinking that anyone can call culture into being?
Also, very much as side note, now that I'm thinking about the word culture I'm realizing that in science (and the BioArt project actually) we use culture both as a noun and a verb - one can have a culture (noun - from google: the cultivation of bacteria, tissue, cells, etc. in an artificial medium containing nutrients) or one can culture (verb - from google: the process of maintaining bacteria, tissue, cells, etc. in conditions suitable for growth). Interesting...