Disability Part 4: disability and critical pedagogy
“…liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information…”
Paulo Freire
Artist Jesse Darling’s Neoliberal Agitprop Poster (2013) highlights the visible disabilities, or vulnerabilities, that many of us see around us, if not experiencing ourselves. The article by Khairani Barroka (aka Okka) who identifies as a disabled and chronically ill artist, writer and researcher, by contrast begins with the statement, “Pain hides in plain sight”, immediately drawing attention to the idea of invisible disability.[1] The article proceeds by describing her experience of chronic pain and fatigue and the struggle to be heard both by the the doctors in her home country, New York and at first in the UK too. In recounting these experiences I noticed that she used the word “extreme” multiple times in the text to describe this pain and the “gulf” between her experience of this pain and others perception of her. The problems encountered when trying to communicate this pain spurred her towards creating, performing and touring the show Eve and Mary Are Having Coffee (2014) internationally. Her aim was to interpret her experience in an audio-visual way for others to hear and see.
Okka writes about performing on this tour, “…I am 98% of the time kneeling or laying down, performing poetry or performance art while refusing to stand and cause myself pain, whether seen by others or not”.[2]
In the article Okka goes on to explain and explore the contradictions of her peformances thus revealing for the reader what was hidden from the audiences of her show: she went to lengths to make her show accessible to those in wheelchairs or d/Deaf whilst all the while feeling the need to “negate very real pain” that she herself was experiencing. In doing so, Okka also draws attention to the intersectional dimensions of her experiences as an “Indonesian disabled woman artist”[3] Okka explains her use of the term disabled, “I take here the social model notion of disabled as the opposite of ‘enabled’…”[4] Okka has spoken of the need to decolonise disability.[5]
Some aspects of the article resonated me. The description of experiencing severe pain and the gulf between one’s own perception of this – and others’ perception – echoed my own experience of arthritis when consultant’s looking at X-Rays would say something along the lines of “…it doesn’t look too bad” (i.e. not worst grade joint degeneration) despite my pain preventing me from walking properly. A physiotherapist explained it to me, “X-Rays don’t show pain”. I realise that doctors follow a text book instead of listening to patients. I also reflected on my experiences of cancer treatment and the complexities of this: temporarily(?) disabled and yet still living with the after-effects on a daily basis, or the words “you look well”, well-meant, encouraging even, but sometimes hard to take when they contradicted my experience. The idea of hidden or invisible has been much on my mind in the past year or so due to my official ‘shielding’ status in the pandemic and the knowledge that some of my students have also been shielding and yet there were no outward signs of any vulnerability for others to see.
I began to think more about the words ‘abled’ and ‘disabled’ and what they mean and the binary oppositions they create in language and thought that are unhelpful when thinking about hidden disabilities . Thinking about ‘abled’ or ‘disabled’ not as fixed or opposing terms, but states of being that may fluctuate throughout someone’s life, and the social model of disability with its emphasis on the social environment, led me to thinking about how we are fundamentally dependent on one another. This reminded me of the scene in the film Examined Life where philosopher Judith Butler takes a walk with Sunaura (aka Sunny) Taylor. Sunny is an artist, writer and activist for disability and animals rights and together they take a walk through San Francisco deconstructing what it means to take a walk. Towards the end of the scene, Butler comments:
“My sense of what is at stake here is really rethinking the human as a site of interdependency…Do we or do we not live in a world where we assist each other? Do we or do we not assist each other with basic needs…as a social issue and not just my personal individual issue or your personal individual issue..?”[6]
Butler’s work in recent years has addressed the question of vulnerability (and resistance) to argue that vulnerability is nowadays the main product of capitalism. Butler makes her case whilst cautioning against the attitude declared in, say, Jesse Darling’s poster, the task Butler writes is:
“…not to rally as vulnerable creatures or to create a class of persons who identify primarily with vulnerability…a class of victims…”[7]
And she continues by wrestling with issues and dilemmas in human rights agendas which tend to create paternalistic policies that remove the agency and power from those they seek to protect:
“What if the situation of the vulnerable is, in fact, constellation of vulnerability, rage, persistence, and resistance that emerges under these same historical conditions?…Vulnerability ought not to be identified exclusively with passivity; it makes sense only in the light of an embodies set of social relations”.[8]
What if indeed. More often in the United States than elsewhere perhaps, the politicisation of disability and vulnerability as part of an anti-capitalist resistance has led artists and activists to develop what Guilia Smith calls ‘crip aesthetics’: an emergent field that derives insights and practice from disabillity studies, art and aesthetics and anti-capitalist activism.[9] In a conference paper in 2014 Judith Butler noted:
“Both performance studies and disability studies have offered the crucial insight that all action requires support, and that even the most punctual and seemingly spontaneous act implicitly depends upon an infrastructural condition that quite literally supports the acting body. This idea of “support” is quite important not only for the re-theorization of the acting body, but for the broader politics of mobility”[10]
I read Okka’s article in this context and reflected on what it means for education.
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Professor Dan Sturgis in his keynote paper, ‘Bauhaus: To turn away from normality’, at the opening of the symposium OurHaus in 2019 observed[11]:
“Gropius understood that any art or design institutuion is really making people rather than products”.[12]
This statement struck me at the time and stayed with me. I thought about how it chimed with the vision of Camberwell, outlined by School of Fine Art Dean Sophia Phoca, as a place of socially-engaged art practice but was a different way of expressing the same idea. Like the bauhaus of the past with its myriad experiments and wide range of beliefs (socialism; veganism, etc.) we might hope to produce socially-aware, ethically-minded graduates despite the limitations of the times (where the bauhaus was constrained by social and political turmoils of the times, so too is the university today).
In thinking about the idea of socially-engaged art practice and art schools producing people not products, Paulo Freire’s notion of critical pedagogy is important here with its underlying principles of social justice.
Originating with his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) critical pedagogy famously developed in response to Freire’s critique of what he called the ‘banking model of education’ in which:
“Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositer…knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider know nothing…Projecting an absolute ignorance on others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression..students alienated like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic..”[13]
The aim of critical pedagogy for Freire and those of his follower’s, influenced by Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon, is that education should develop in students the critical consciousness necessary for liberation from oppression and social transformation. The Freire Institute describes this as ‘Praxis (Action/Reflection)’:
“It is not enough for people to come together in dialogue in order to gain knowledge of their social reality. They must act together upon their environment in order critically to reflect upon their reality and so transform it through further action and critical reflection”.[14]
Dialogue is one aspect of critical pedagogy and in chapters 2 and 3 of his book Freire discusses how dialogue is: an act of radical love for the world and its people; an act of humility that breaks down hierarchies and power dynamics between teacher and student and an act of faith in terms of believing in people to change the world. Freire uses the term “student-teachers” to convey the idea of a shared critical thinking and problem-solving, dialogic approach. One of the aspects of my teaching over the years has been reading groups and I straightaway felt that that Okka’s article would be a good reading group text for several reasons. The text has an engaging, first person account that exposes questions around the definitions and distinctions between disabled and abled, visible and invisible vulnerabilities. Atif Choudhary has spoken recently in a lecture of the need to “normalise difference” and people needing to “unmask” about their disabilities or difference because many are hidden.[15] He also spoke about how individual life experience should inform practice in inclusive curriculum design.[16]
A reading group offers a more open format for discussion than a seminar with a stated theme and allows for an open-ended setting in which the hierarchies between lecturer and student are collapsed in favour of dialogue, listening and learning from each other. Friere wrote in his book that “liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information”.[17] Moreover, by bringing the subjects in Okka’s text out into the open for discussion it could potentially break down any taboos around admitting a disability that students may have and encourage a sense of permission to discuss disability. Susanne Main, researcher and curator of Exhibiting Pain (2019) has described how, for example, the sharing of artworks in a related facebook group and blog “helped to foster a sense of community between those people” experiencing chronic pain.[18]
Okka’s experiences as described in the article would readily facilitate critical questioning and thinking too in the spirit of Freire’s approach to pedagogy. Issues of gender and coloniality intersect in her experiences with disability and open out into a wide range of related issues that implicate problems of oppression and power in social and institutional structures in different parts of the world, for example, in health care and medical settings or the performing arts and pose questions about ableism and what it might mean to decolonise disability[19]. Critical questioning can lead to what Freire described as ‘generative’ themes, for example, a discussion of Okka’s text might lead to new modes of knowledge or “cripistemologies”.[20] Okka’s experiences allude to the mind-body split found particularly in western traditions of thought and the alternative concept of bodymind, mentioned in my previous post is relevant. bell hooks, whose work has been influenced by Paolo Freire’s ideas, brings a feminist perspective to bear on the issues around the mind-body split, in a different context, when thinking about pedagogy in her book Teaching To Transgress (1994).[21] Throughout her book she refers repeatedly to (psychic) pain and the need for empathy. In Okka’s article, importantly, there is also the unfolding question of self-care.[22]
When interviewed about his book Academic Ableism, Timothy J. Dolmage poses these questions for educators:
“How am I part of this culture, even unconsciously? What toll is this taking on me? On my students? What makes me afraid to admit this, or to admit my complicity in it? How can I work to change this culture?”[23]
These are the questions I will be taking forward in my own work
[1] Barokka, K., ‘Deaf-accessibility for spoonies: lessons from touring Eve and Mary are Having Coffee while chronically ill’, in Ride: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 2017, vol. 22, no. 3, p. 387.
[2] Ibid. p.388.
[3] Ibid. p.390.
[4] Ibid. p. 388.
[5] Barokka, K., ‘Against Racist Ableism in Arts Education’ 23 June, 2020, Centre for Feminist Research, Goldsmiths College, University of London.
[6] Judith Butler with Sunuara Taylor in Examined Life (dir. Astra Taylor) 2008.
[7] Butler, J., ‘Judith Butler on Rethinking Vulnerability, Violence and Resistance’, 6 March, 2020, n.p. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4583-judith-butler-on-rethinking-vulnerability-violence-resistance
[8] Ibid.
[9] Smith, G. ‘Chronic Illness as Critique: Crip Aesthetics Across the Atlantic’, in Art History, vol. 44, no.2, April 2021, pp. 286-310.
https://www.facebook.com/CFRGoldsmiths/videos/295026105216058/
[10] Butler, J. ‘Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance’, Madrid, June 2014
[11] OurHaus symposium – Bauhaus: Utopia in Crisis, 24 October 2019 at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London.
[12] Sturgis, D. ‘Bauhaus: To turn away from normality’ in Art, Design and Communication in Higher Education, Vol. 19, issue 1, 2020, p. 13.
[13] Freire, P. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 2005, London: Continuum, p. 70
[14] https://www.freire.org/paulo-freire/concepts-used-by-paulo-freire
[15] Choudhary, A., ‘Diversity is about counting people, inclusivity is about insisting people count’, WEA Diversity lecture, 28 April, 2021.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Freire, P., Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 2005, London” Continuum, p. 79.
[18] ‘Exhibiting Pain’ , Susanne Main, Open University research student interview, 2019
[19] Coloniality as defined by Aníbal Quijano in Quijano, A., ‘Coloniality and modernity/rationality’, Cultural Studies, 2007, 21:2, pp. 168-178.
[20] McRuer, R. & Johnson, M. L. “Proliferating Cripistemologies: A Virtual Roundtable’ in Journal of Literacy and Disability Studies, vol. 8, issue 2, 2014, pp. 149-169.
[21] hooks, b., Teaching To Trangress, 1994. London: Routledge.
[22] ‘Self-care’ as defined by the WHO as “the ability of individuals, families and communities to promote health, prevent disease, maintain health, and to cope with illness and disability with or without the support of a healthcare provider” https://www.who.int/reproductivehealth/self-care-interventions/definitions/en/
[23] Jaschik, S. ‘Author discuss his new book on disability and higher education’, Inside Higher Ed, December 7, 2017 https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/12/07/author-discusses-his-new-book-disability-and-higher-education
Disability Part 3: disability and intersectionality
#DisabilityTooWhite
I ended my previous post with a reference to the intersectional identity of artist Christine Sun Kim. The article, ‘Confronting the Whitewashing of Disability’ in which Vilissa Thompson, creator of the hashtag #DisabilityTooWhite, is interviewed also raises this issue. The term intersectionality originated with the work of Kimberelé Crenshaw, a lawyer by background and an academic, and she descibes it as “a prism” through which to understand the ways in which inequality and disadvantage is multiplied by the different facets of someone’s identity (race; gender; sexuality; age; etc.); a spectrum.
Intersectionality derived from Crenshaw’s legal work and a landmark legal case that she fought for black women’s employment rights. In a now influential paper for the University of Chiacgo Legal Forum in 1989, she wrote of, “…the conceptual limitations of the single issue analyses that intersectionality challenges”.[1] In the introduction she set out her aims:
“I argue that Black women are sometimes excluded from feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse because both are predicated on a discrete set of experiences that often does not accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender. These problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including Black women within an already established analytical structure. Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated”.[2]
Nowadays intersectionality is used in more broad terms, encompassing a variety of different identities and the ways in which different facets of identity intersect. Crenhsaw acknowledges this in a later article explaining that identity politics was “in tension” with social justice by eliding or ignoring differences.[3] There are many diagrams of intersectionality but this is one (below) I prefer because it captures the unique characteristics of an individual, the possible facets of someone’s identity, types of discrimination, and importantly, the various aspects of social structures and context in which someone might be situated and oppressed by.
When I began reading about #DisabilityTooWhite in the interview with Thompson, I started reflecting on the intersection of disability and race as well as the question of representation in the context of the art college and the artworld. I realised how few disabled Black or Asian artists, for example, are visible in the mainstream of the art world institutions. I thought about the late artist Donald Rodney. In the late 1990s, as a result of his worsening sickle cell disease he had a hip removal operation and developed a motorised wheelchair constructed, for him by Guido Bugmann at the School of Computing, University of Plymouth, with a complex of sensors and electronic neural network, devised to move the wheelchair in circles, spirals and figures of eight.[4] The wheelchair became the artwork Psalms (1997) and was first exhibited for the exhibition, ‘Nine Night in Eldorado’ at the South London Gallery in his absence, see the footage here:
And I thought about Yinka Shonibare, who is, currently, perhaps one of the most prominent Black and disabled artists’ in the UK.
When thinking about institutions the problems were apparent at once as my first thought was that I work in a building of painting studios with no lift; yes, no lift.
I also started thinking about the intersection of disability and race in terms of the ‘awarding gap’ (aka attainment gap) and to what extent the ‘whiteness’ of disability might compound such problems. In the book Student Attainment in Higher Education (2016) there is virtually no mention of this intersectionality and its possible effects on attainment. Writing in the context of a discussion about the 2001 HEFCE initiative Strategies for widening participation in higher education, Geoff Layer states:
“…It is clear that students from black and minority ethnic (BME) groups generally are well represented in higher education proportionate to the composition of the population. The numbers of students entering and declaring a disability has increased…However, what is also clear is that different groups had varied levels of achievement.”[5]
The possible intersections of disability and race are not developed in any of the essays in the book but the quote above, and table below, hints at problems.
Intersectionality is not explicitly mentioned in the book but, in one essay where Crenshaw’s work is mentioned, her ideas are somewhat obfuscated or misunderstood.[6]
Crenshaw’s methodology goes beyond the superficial and has been described by one of her former students, Kevin Minofu in this way:
“…not really concerned with shallow questions of identity and representation but…more interested in the deep structural and systemic questions about discrimination and inequality”[7]
This stemmed from Crenshaw’s insights that unconscious bias alone did not explain racism and discrimination when the legal institutions themselves were structurally flawed and could not offer equality. Again, this has led to me thinking about what structural issues are there that prejudice against attainment in terms of the intersection of disability and race in the art college and university as a whole? In his book, Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education, writing in the North American context, Timothy J. Dolmage considers race and disability in these terms:
“Of course it is hugely problematic to make a ‘like race’ comparison here – but we can and should (cautiously) understand disability in a ‘with but not in place of race’ discourse, simply because we know that ableism on college campuses is deeply racialized, as racist attitudes and practices are also ableist”[8]
In a European context, Shonibare’s artwork Antoine Lavoisier (2008) part of a series he made called The Age of Enlightenment, evokes that historical epoch and draws attention to an era when the classical ideals of the body prevailed and Europe constructed itself as civilised whilst ‘othering’ and marginalising difference.[9] The headless figure emphasises the body as separated from the so-called mind of reason of Enlightenment thinkers. Shonibare is subverting these values by placing his own autobiographical references into this history, placing Antoine Lavoisier in a wheelchair and wearing fabric signifying the colonial trade of fabrics. This work also conjures the issue bodymind – the term used in disability studies to reverse the western mind-body dualism that dates back to the Enlightenment. Condensed together here are the contradictions and complexities of the historical and cultural structures and effects but also showing how deep these run.
Returning to the current period, Geoff Layer, in his chapter, does however acknowledge that a possible means of addressing attainment is in terms of an inclusive model offering a systemic approach. The systemic approach Geoff Layer describes is curriculum change and pedagogic change, though he doesn’t state from what to what, but the reader may infer that this might be a shift from traditional, historical, ‘chalk and talk’ ideas of teaching western content towards a diversity of subjects and student-centred approaches to teaching and learning. This is an interesting approach because it shifts the questions of addressing the problems away from the medical and legal frameworks of thinking about disability towards what can be changed in the way that lecturers do their work to improve the situation.
Reflecting on my own subject area and teaching, working in continuing education teaching art history and feminist art history or in higher education, more commonly teaching modern and contemporary art, a lot of the material I have taught relates to the depiction of the body and debates about representation. At Camberwell for a few years, before the introduction of a new fine art curriculum without separate context units, I ran a seminar course on Art, Identity and Representation. Part of these discussions explored some of the issues raised in the interview with Vilissa Thompson about #DisabilityTooWhite overlapping around: what is referred to as ‘the charity model’ of representation; the importance of representation and the effects of lack of images that people can identify with (in the interview “self esteem”, “isolated” and “outcast” are words that are used) etc.[10] For this reason, reading the article prompted me to think more about the context in which I teach more than the content, hence the discussion in this post of accessibility, attainment, systemic or structural issues.
However, thinking further, I am became aware that the examples that I reach for when planning teaching have, with a few exceptions (e.g. Frida Kahlo) been largely white artists who have represented the disabled body (e.g. Hannah Wilke or Jo Spence). Whereas, a discussion of Yinka Shonibare might have focused on identity, cultural hybridity, colonialism, history and globalisation but not disability. I realised that I can see this bias in feminist art historians such as Amelia Jones, Marhsa Meskimmon or Griselda Pollock too, all of whom have written about race and representation and cultural but rarely about disability and race as such. This shows the need for more intersectional thinking and awareness. Having thought about the issues in the interview, I feel inspired to address this in my teaching and generally foreground this more, mixing up the way in which different artists or their works are discussed. My students start their second year with a short unit designed to quickly spark ideas and get students back into making after the long summer break. These students are asked to write a short manifesto about something they believe in, want to protest, etc. I suggest that to them that they think about hashtags and this interview would be perfect as an example that they could work with or find similar, it is short but packed with thought-provoking issues.
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Sadly, Donald Rodney passed away from his sickle cell anaemia in 1998. RIP.
[1] Crenshaw, K. ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’, University of Chicago Legal Forum, Vol. 1989, Iss. 1, Article 8, p. 149.
[2] Ibid. p. 3
[3] Crenshaw, K. ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color’, Stanford Law Review, Vol. 43, No. 6 (Jul. 1991) pp. 1241-42.
[5] Layer, G., ‘Influencing change through a strategic approach to student attinment’ in eds. Steventon, G, Cureton, D. & Clouder, L, Student Attainment in Higher Education: Issues, controversies and debates, 2016. London: Routledge, p. 10.
[6] Debra Cureton writes of “multiple identities” and “notions of personality development” without quite grasping precisely Crenshaw’s arguments. Ibid. p. 68.
[7] Cited in Coaston, J. ‘The intersectionality wars’ in Vox, May 28, 2019, n.p. https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/5/20/18542843/intersectionality-conservatism-law-race-gender-discrimination
[8] Dolmage, J. T., Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education, 2017, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 38-39.
[9] Downey, A., ‘Setting the Stage: Yinka Shonibare MBE in conversation with Anthony Downey’ in Downey, A., Yinka Shonibare MBE, 2014 , Munich: Prestel, p.10.
[10] Blahovec, S., ‘Confronting the Whitewashing Of Disability: Interview with #DisabilityTooWhite Creator Vilissa Thompson’