Sharing Projects, Looking Back

Sorry for the delay in posting this--I'm coping with hand injuries at the moment that are making communication difficult. 

Some threads for discussion I'd like to address for tonight are, as we've continued to discuss, about who gets to represent whom within disability--I'm constantly reminded of the phrase "nothing about us without us". Especially in the case of intellectual disability, this very frequently simply does not happen. 

This post, however, is a fantastic step towards remediating that. http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/kids/stories/peopleplaces/downsyndrome/

Sorry everyone I completely forgot to post!

I recall getting back my plate and secretly wishing that it had turned into something extraordinary—something weird, beautiful, or hideous—anything really, as long as it’s different from the way I drew them. Instead, I saw red and yellow wave patterns lining up perfectly on the plates, exactly the way I painted them. Disappointed, I turned my head to my right and saw Mary’s plate. It was amazing. A small black mountain growing out of a regular agar plate. It was absolutely amazing. In retrospect, I am struck by how the plates became the perfect metaphors for our lives.

I'd like to spend some time in class talking about the desexualization of disabled people, and how this tendency of the oppressor to erase or ignore the humanity of the "other" extends to other parts of identity, including gender identity, sexual orientation, race, etc. Through reading A Disability History of the United States, we saw some examples of how sexuality was used against people with disabilities, or as a way of defining disability (for example, women who were essentially considered disabled because they became pregnant at a young age--many of these seem very tied up in misogyny and sexism--or the men who were considered physically/mentally "unfit" for society because of their relationships with other men).

A thread I would like to keep thinking about as the semester continues is the accessbility of information. The bioart portion of the CCW collaboration was born out of a desire to make science accessible to a non-scientist public, but I have yet to fully wrap my head around what that means. I think that in the moments of actualy doing the project in the lab I ended up focusing more on physical accessibility than conceptual accessibility. Although, I don't really think those are two separate goals - we had one moment in lab where the physical iPhone microscope adapter totally conveyed the concept of what a microscope can do to one of the CCW artists.

One idea that I would like to explore more in class is parental reactions to being pregnant with/having a child with a disability, and how genetic testing plays a role in this process. As I mentioned in class, prenatal screening is the norm for most pregnant women nowadays, at least in the United States, including tests that indicate whether or not your child has Down syndrome. While some women choose to abort pregnancies based on prenatal testing results, others adapt and seek information so that they can be better preapred and equipped to satisfy their child's particular needs.