Who has monoplogies on knowledge? A thought I had when watching Christine Sun Kim’s film (2010) on her approach to visualising sound as a deaf artist. Why did hearing communities assume they had the monopoly on sound, when they took such a singular approach to only ‘hearing’ sound. Sun Kim talks about feeling sound, seeing sound, and creates a multitude of sculptures that paint and mark make and cause objects to jump with the vibrations of sound waves. Sound is physical. Sound is somatic. Sun Kim makes it clear how she has brought attention to ways hearing communities ignore the multiplicities and materiality of sound waves. She captures this material sound activity and demonstrates the joy of sound possibilities experienced by deaf people through the other 5 senses. The assumption by those who can hear sound, imagine that those who are deaf, do not interact with sound is false.
Thinking about my own practice as an educator, I am leading a workshop on 3D making out of found objects, and since seeing this film, I’ve wanted to show this video to my students. I have included work about the artist Judith Scott in the project brief as well, who is an American sculptor and was an artist who had Down syndrome and was Deaf. Which isn’t necessarily a disability, but people of this experience have historically been institutionalised and ostracised, and regarded as people who cannot participate in language and society if they are Deaf or have Downs syndrome. It is these violent assumptions that abled people and hearing people make.
Judith Scott was born in 1943 and was institutionalised for over 40 years and kept away from her family. It was only in the 1980’s when these institutions closed and she was brought to Oakland by her sister, that she gained access to an art environment at Creative Growth Art centre in Oakland California in 1987. She began to sculpt by wrapping and binding several objects together with yarn where these ritual processes became her intuitive material language, her way of communicating. In previous years she had been denied access to language, and presumed to not have significant thoughts or talent.
It is this monopoly on language, words, art expression, that denies Disabled or Deaf or people with diverse learning experiences, to have agency and access to art making and expression.
I have used Judith Scott in my teaching to get students to question ideas around knowledge production and dissemination in the practice of language and communication. Whose voices are listened to when they are not verbal?
How are artists like Christine Sun Kim and Judith Scott communicating in ways that are not rooted in ableist and racist ideas of knowledge. Thus showing the intertwined ways epistemological violence is practiced by enforcing European western values on knowledge production systems that are predicated on ableist forms such as practices of writing/hearing/verbal communication.
UAL uses the social model of disability. Defined as
- Dyslexia or another Specific Learning Difference
- A sensory impairment
- A physical impairment
- A long-term health or mental health condition
- Autism
- Another long-term condition which has an impact on your day-to-day life
UAL say they are committed to inclusion and to accommodate disabled students. Yet as many theorists have noted, the institution itself is predicated on ableist barriers, and intentional barriers to accessing the institution that reify racism ableism and sexism. There are many processes of teaching that I’ve noticed occur in departments I’ve taught on at UAL, where it is clear the way communication with students about course curriculum, knowledge and assessment is designed for students outside theses institutional parameters of knowledge to fail.
For an example where students have used their mental health as a starting point for their research. The students are not told how to visually research, and are not told how this summer project will inform their intense making projects. They are marked down for being conceptual, because the material/colour and aesthetic information is not considered broad enough to comply with the European design practices and theory – which consistently undermine and devalue students who are disabled, are using neurodivergent thought processes, or are coming from non cultural capital class backgrounds. The university assumes a certain kind of research knowledge base, and a reliance on a visual one. It becomes clear how students feel excluded for their own approaches to research that might look and feel different.
It is in these ways we see the university as an institution that works its staff so hard, they can’t do more than follow the assessment formulations that severely marks students down for their limited research. How can we steer students to develop appropriate research skills, without devaluing their ideas on disability, ethnicity? What kinds of academic support are needed. How can we use social justice methodologies and pedagogy to support students who are navigating educational systems that were not designed for them to succeed?
In Penny Jane Burke & Jackie McManus (2011) Art for a few: exclusions and misrecognitions in higher education admissions practices, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, they talk about the way students selected for Art and Design courses are expected already to have clear communicated potential. “These are tied in with ontological perspectives that value certain dispositions and attitudes more highly than others, and this is inextricably connected to classed and racialized inequalities and subjectivities” Burke, McManus. (2011) describe here from their findings, the attributes they use to distinguish candidates as potential students on their courses, were subject to particular subjectivities on assumed shared knowledge and and equity in access to cultural capital, where people from racialised and non middle class backgrounds are more likely to fail to be perceived as having these aptitudes. I see this research reflected and involved in the practice of research as well, and how students of colour with intersectional disabilities and experience of class, form a complicated barrier that leads to students not thriving in these environments. Students who are people of colour, and are neurodivergent are less likely to have been diagnosed, often mask their symptoms and struggle in isolation. These debates feed into a lot of how disability services and representations of disability justice movements are very white, as mentioned in the resource of Disabilitytoowhite. This means students of multiple experience are less likely to seek support and perhaps have conditions or symptoms viewed through racialised lenses by tutors/teaching staff. Who might perceive the students as under achievers, an unconscious racist bias of believing students of colour are not putting enough work or are as talented as their white counterparts. Or having more sympathy for disabled white/affulent white students rather than trying to see what obstacles students of colour are experiencing or masking, and the impact of mitigating these disabilities or closing the gap/gulf of cultural capital, disabled students of colour have further barriers and perceptions of their work assessed by tutors in this way.
Intersectional disability – gender and disability mean girls are less likely to receive diagnosis of neurodivergence, meaning the affect it has on everyday life and studies is not supported as it should be. Women of colour and femmes of colour are less likely to be believed by their doctors about chronic pain symptoms, and again are misdiagnosed or undiagnosed for their disabilities o conditions. Khairani Barokka states in her piece, “Deaf-Accessibility for Spoonies: Lessons From Touring Eve and Mary Are Having Coffee While Chronically Ill”(201 7) about the intersectionality of race and disability, where for years her levels of pain were misbelieved and dismissed by professionals, where she found herself working in 2014 under unsafe conditions because of how her disability was perceived, she says she was suffering health and chronic pain wise from “working under other people’s assumptions that my pain was negligible, lack of proper healthcare, and setting unduly high expectations for the arts work I’d become immersed in” She went on to create a show on In/visible disabilities and the continued gaslighting brown disabled people face when trying to articulate how much pain they are actually in. Here we see race gender and disability collide. The root of inherited intergenerational trauma also means disability in the form of chronic illness, race and gender intertwine, as structural oppression is the disabling factor – using the social model of disability we can see how it is society and the models and structures we come to live inside that make it disabling to navigate. Khairani also reflects on making her show accessible as possible, but fails to include herself, and ask for a PA or assistant.
In 2017 I had the joy of working with Khairani Barokka, we were working on the same event together, on bodies of colour and disability. We both spoke Bangla. Queer disabled brown poetic connections are rare. I shared an endurance performance on intergenerational trauma, and in 2018 we were on a disabled poetry event together. We have similar experiences of navigating pain and negotiating western medical systems with our brown disabled bodies. I am reflecting on how I might incorporate these embodied methodologies into my teaching with students, possibly by putting our disabled bodies forthright and centre as disruptions and ruptures. How it is a deliberate and vulnerable act to make invisible disabilities visible. This is something I practice in my art performances, but I would like to see how I could use this context of lived experience to share with students and employ this thinking in my teaching. Khairani talks of the empathy gap, and how to bridge connections of experience of pain with each other. I feel I would want to explore this with my teaching practice, as I have done in a the performance ‘you and 1 are more alike…’ 2017 that sought to visualise and complicate experiences of shared ancestral pain and trauma.
‘You and I are more alike…’ 2017 Raven Row. Raisa Kabir.
Khairani thinks about how to use exercises in teaching performance in higher eduction to highlight the bodily differences of trying to perform whilst disabled she says she would, “propose an intersectional, disability-aware exercise for production classes. I would ask them how, if they lived with chronic pain, they could continue to perform and produce whilst placing an undisputed premium on holistic self-care in complex circumstances, whilst maintaining an artistic practice.” To put something like this in practice would be to ask students to consider outside of themselves and comprehend how much they rely on their bodies, and what would it mean to not be in control of how it functions. What does it mean to rely on others?
From reading the extensive ‘Disabled People: The Voice of Many publication by Shades of Noir’. There were so many resonant articles and resources articulated with care nuance and expertise, that I felt reflected my own experience as well. It is a collection and anthology of reflection and practice that explores the full intersectional experience of disability, race and gender and its impact in continuing and higher educational settings.
The article I’ve chosen to reflect on their inclusive approach to the Arts sector and/or Higher education is Rebekah Ubuntu’s ‘An inquiry into Disability and intersectional identities’. It is a self interview format, and discusses the intersection of class disability, race and queer identity. Rebekah says their experience of disability is informed by their experiences of race, gender, class and being in foster care. That we cannot extricate ones intersectional experience of disability without taking into account how all parts of ones identity is shaped and informed by the other.
Rebekah speaks of how their diagnosis of Autism was delayed for many years because any characteristics of stress and trauma were seen as the product of surviving the foster care system. It was only when Rebekah was able to take agency over their own health that they were able to obtain a diagnosis. This personal account echoes other evidence of gender impacting rates of support and diagnosis of autism. Children of intersectional experience are often gas lit about their own experiences of trauma. Rebekah mentions even though their school has disability screening, this was never presented as an option for them or the same equal support given to other white disabled peers.
Here we see time and time again disabled people of colour struggle to be recognised as disabled by medical professionals, often depriving them of medical care, medication and holistic support they require. Both Khairani and Rebekah are artists. Rebekah because of their diagnosis is able to build disability assistance into funding applications. Learning to advocate for oneself as a disabled artist, ask for food ask for support, ask for the institution you are working for to care for you is so hard. And I empathise deeply when you are forced to work in any setting unsafely and without the disability support in place. Rebekah says their survival as a Black, queer disabled working class person is dependent on access to their safe space “cocoon” to have this space they can retreat to.
I imagine there are many disabled students of colour on campus at UAL, who are struggling deeply with issues of juggling their disability, diagnosis, high work loads, micro aggressions, and being in an institutionally white/racist environment – a place where their complex experiences of race and disability are unrecognised or deeply misunderstood. I would like to think about the idea of how to create a safer space for black and brown students, to examine/share tools that help foster and create collectivity between other students of colour, that take into account disability and trauma, that will equip them to weather the storms of their degrees.