Accesibility

This post may be a bit disjointed as there are really two topics I want to address.

The first is the idea of accesibility in terms of engaging with specific materials (articles, talks, plays, etc.) and the ideas presented in those materials. In the Kennedy Center guide for performaces for those with "social and cognitive disabilities" three 'categories' of disabilities are listed for their relevence to a performing arts setting: difficulty understanding others' desires and needs, difficulty understanding and showin emotion, and limited imaginative or symbolic thinking. As the Kennedy Center guide suggests, this grouping of disabilities can make it difficult for an individual to cognitively engage with a performance in the manner the producer/director/actots/etc. intended for the audience. This made me reflect on how A Fierce Kind of Love allowed me to grasp the recency and reality of institutionalization for individuals with mental disabilities in a way I never had with the numerous articles and papers I have read on the subject. From academic writing I knew about the horrors of institutionalization and I knew that it was as recent as the later 1980s that Penhurst was up and running, but for some reason I don't think it really "clicked" for me until I saw A Fierce Kind of Love. When Rachel Simon spoke about her family's choice not to send Beth to an institution based on her father's orphanage experience, and how that was uncommon at the time, that Beth was one of the few children with disabilities kept at home because the rest were institutionalized, it began to come together for me. This woman, who is probably about the same age as my mother, was the  'odd one out' for not being institutionalized. Now, when institutionalization is no longer the automatic 'go to' for children with disabilities, the reality that many adults in my life were essentially one meotic abnormality from being institutionalized linked the academic writings to the current world of disability. When in A Fierce Kind of Love they made a timeline of the actor's births and landmarks in disability history, I felt like I finally "got it". The performace made the reality of institutionalization accesible to me. Going back to the Kennedy Center's list of disabilities (difficulty understanding others' desires and needs, difficulty understanding and showin emotion, and limited imaginative or symbolic thinking) I realized part of A Fierce Kind of Love that made diability history so accesible to me could potentially have the opposite effect on certain people with cognitive disabilities. For those with "limited imaginative or symbolic thinking" the power of the stories of parents fighting for their children's rights may not have had the same effect. Of course, I cannot say any of this for sure as I do not know the experiences of such individuals, but based on the Kennedy Center guidelines, I would think that for some, the academic writing that fell a bit short for me may make disability history more accesible for others than a performance.

The second topic I wanted to write about is accesibility at Haverford, specifically in the KINSC. When I was walking to lab Sunday night, I saw Courtney in Zubrow commons, not one of her usual spots, so  I went over. She was looking at the exhibition space and measuring to make sure wheelchairs would be able to fit around the ehxhibition walls. Cool, I thought, and went up to lab. As you may imagine, I climbed stairs to my lab, and I realized I climbed stairs to get into the building. The stairs to the building entrance are only two or three stairs, but for wheelchair users, the number doesn't matter, the building is inaccesible. For a wheelchair user to get to Zubrow, you must enter throught the rotunda, go to the east wing elevator, wait for the glacialy slow elevator, and take it up to the second floor to cross over to Zubrow. This isn't that taxing of a trip, but is it really necessary when theh front entrance of sharpless could be made wheelchair accesible with a short ramp? Futhermore, the sign indiciation wheelchair accesible access to the KINSC on the front door of Sharpless features an arrow that makes no sense. These seemingly small obstacles to accesibility are things the college should look to fix as we move forward, but given the fast-approaching date of the exhibition, I think we should take step to make Zubrow and the KINSC as a whole as accesible as we can, even if that just means better signage for wheelchair accesible routes and clearly-labeled bathrooms-who doesn't benefit from that?