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Portfolio for nbarker

Crafted by me from images I've found on the internet and some of my own buttons. Many are images that are on my carrel or desk.

Web Papers and Events

December 19, 2014 - 12:27

“It’s not like it says SYSTEM on the Door”:

Capitalism, Aging, & Systematized Oppression
in Susan Nussbaum’s Good Kings Bad Kings

 

Throughout Good Kings Bad Kings, each point of view character plays into and against structures of capitalism, mostly expressed in the institution of Illinois Learning & Life Center. Many of the characters are trapped by "the System", as the character Joanne Madsen refers to it, on page 200. Each has their own varying level of consciousness of that system.  However, Joanne herself has trouble defining what it is: so, how could the monolithic system be defined more concisely? How can we name the oppression that is created by the system, and begin to work against it by naming and knowing it?

November 28, 2014 - 20:34

As society frames it, disability is a loss and a deficit—seemingly pathological in its very existence. This is also the personal experience of a large portion of the disability community. Acquired disability is perhaps the best example of this: many people, your author included, experience acquired disability as a profound sense of loss, and a source of despair.

What if, instead, we reframed disability of all kinds as a source of gain, as the Deaf community has? This is a large part of the mission of the Disability Studies field, seeking to reframe disability as not just a loss, a deficit, but instead an expression of human difference and variation, and thus a valuable part of the human experience.

Each portion of the disabled community expresses their gain differently: each disabling condition has its unique effects, and each individual experiences those effects differently. Disability is by nature diverse, and it is our differences that we have in common.

October 8, 2014 - 19:45

What happens when your face is no longer yours? How can you ever feel like a whole self again, when your face no longer represents you? Faces are one of the main ways that we humans form conceptions of ourselves, and they are our method of taking in sensory information, as well as communicating with each other.

This was the dilemma that faced many Allied veterans of World War I. The trench warfare they fought in and endured has been described as hellish muck, among other things. Unfortunately, one of the most common outcomes of trench warfare was injury to the face.  A soldier would stick their head out of the trench, and lo--a shell explodes, a face is gone, if one’s lucky enough to survive. Those men that did survive were horribly disfigured. Along with the horrors of war, the disfigurement could rob these veterans of their senses of self, both social and personal, even down to their very sense of their masculinity. [1]

September 28, 2014 - 22:37

“Gender reaches into disability; disability wraps around class; class strains against abuse; abuse snarls into sexuality; sexuality folds on top of race... everything finally piling into a single human body."

–Eli Clare, Exile & Pride, page 134

In Exile & Pride, Eli Clare explores the intersections of his many different categories of identity, the questions raised by them, and the situations in his life that might serve to explain and complexify them. To say that the map of any one person’s identity is incredibly complicated is to incredibly understate a complex issue. (Some various different ways of graphically representing identities suggested by me and my classmates include drawing identities on a 3-dimensional graph, as blog-inspired tag clouds that link to each other, and even drawing an identity map as a garden). Clare summarizes the complexity of this as succinctly and poetically as possible in the quote we have on our course page, cited above.

Reflections

May 7, 2016 - 15:17

 Grace in my Heart, Flowers in my Hair, a Mouthful of Shooting Stars: 

A final personal reflection on Critical Disability Studies: Theory & Practice


 

And there will come a time, you'll see, with no more tears.
And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.
Get over your hill and see what you find there,
With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.

-Mumford & Sons, "After the Storm"

 When I began this course, I had already become heavily embedded in disability as a field and as a culture. Since the Identity Matters 360, I’ve pursued a research fellowship in disability studies & anthropology, been to the Society for Disability Studies, gotten better treatment for my disability, and oh so many more things. I’ve grown so much as a person that it’s overwhelming for me to realize how much has happened in the year and a half since I last did a final reflection.

December 18, 2014 - 15:38

Self-Evaluation Reflection: Now is the Start

For me, this has been an incredibly difficult and incredibly valuable semester of work. This was by no means a “typical” semester, if such a thing can be said to exist at Bryn Mawr. I feel that I have progressed greatly as not just a scholar, but as a thinking person.