Accessible World ClassRoom of the Air presents A Non-Visual Perspective on Self-Defense, August 17, 2010
In this seminar, Larry Lewis, President of Flying Blind LLC will be discussing non-visual strategies for self-defense techniques that can be used by persons who are blind/visually impaired. Lewis has studied a few different martial arts but has found his passion in training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, a grappling-based Martial Art with a highly affective self-defense component that requires no vision to learn and utilize.
Lewis will be discussing the components of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as well as the pluses of training in this amazing martial art as well as offering strategies for avoiding conflict situations should they arise.
Users will gain an understanding of how such a Martial Art can improve the overall quality of one’s life while keeping them safe in the unfortunate event that much larger assailants attack them.
Presenter: Larry Lewis
Group Discussion Leaders
Ruth Ann Acosta, Email: ruth1244@gmail.com
Sherry Wells E-mail: sdwells@us.ibm.com
Date: Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Time: 6:00 PM PDT, 7:00 PM MDT, 8:00 PM CDT, 9:00 PM EDT and elsewhere in the world Wednesday 01:00 GMT.
Enter your first and last names on the sign-in screen.
If you are a first-time user of the Talking Communities online conferencing software, there is a small, safe software program that you need to download and then run. A link to the software is available on every entry screen to the Accessible World rooms.
All online interactive programs are free of charge, and open to anyone worldwide having an Internet connection, a computer, speakers, and a sound card. Those with microphones can interact audibly with the presenters and others in the virtual audience. To speak to us, hold down the control key and let up to listen. If no microphone is available, you may text chat with the attendees.
Content Note: While this post isn’t going to talk about sex at all, and it’s only going to briefly touch on some things that get grouped under “kinky” sexuality, I would recommend against it being read at work.
Here is an image to give you a chance to back out! (Image is totally safe for work.)
Image Description: A sign that reads “Wheelchairs and Strollers Please Detour Through Bears”
A collection of links today about Dr Paul Longmore’s life, work, and death. I don’t mind telling you all that I’ve spend most of today sitting here feeling horrible and sad about his death. I know I talked earlier about his impact on my scholarship. I’m reading so many remembrances by other disability historians and scholars today. A major part of both our activist and scholarly community is gone, and I cannot imagine how grief-stricken his close associates must be feeling.
*I’ve been co-editing H-Disability since it launched in March 2001. But I had nothing to do with its founding–that’s credited to Paul Longmore and the summer institute where the idea was hatched, long before my involvement.
*I’m president of the Disability History Association right now–but in many ways, the organization exists and thrives because Paul Longmore was very, very persistent when he saw an opportunity to support scholarship on disability.
The essays in The New Disability History: American Perspectives narrate many of the battles disabled people have had to wage for self-respect, autonomy, opportunity, and survival. Some of these battles have been waged in courtrooms, some in state legislatures, some in the pages of magazines. Throughout U.S. history, disabled people have had to organize in order resist the dominant culture’s tendency to dismiss and/or bully them. As editors Paul Longmore and Lauri Umansky summarize in their Introduction, “People with disabilities themselves, as individuals and in organized associations, have, in all eras, struggled to control definitions of their social identity, to direct their social careers.”
“I can think of no one that I admire and respect more than Paul. His ideas, work and advocacy have shaped the development of countless young people with disabilities,” Chelberg says. “Paul has given the disability community the intellectual power it needs to push for justice on such wide ranging issues as work disincentives, in-home personal assistance and media images.”
Longmore, who joined SFSU in 1992, has studied disability issues for two decades while also becoming a scholar in American colonial history. He is director of the SFSU Institute on Disability and served as co-director of the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on Disability Studies, a first-of-its-kind event held at SFSU in 2000. Later that year he helped convene the first major academic symposium on disabilities and sexuality.
Palin’s promise to be a “friend and advocate” for the families of children with disabilities has some parents understandably excited. In August, University of North Carolina researchers reported “chilling” rates of “hardship” among both middle class and poor families with disabled children as they struggle “to keep food on the table, a roof over their heads, and to pay for needed health and dental care.” Large numbers of adults with disabilities face the same hardships.
Even though 90% of Americans with disabilities are adults, Palin, John McCain, and the news media have talked almost exclusively about children. And that talk has been mostly about “compassion” not “issues.” The McCain-Palin campaign website has a single page on “Americans with Disabilities for McCain,” but it says nothing about policy positions. Other pages mention autism and disabled veterans but no other issues.
I’m incredibly broken up about this for someone who never met Dr Longmore. I have his work scattered about my desk, and have always recommended his Why I Burned My Book as a powerful and well-written introduction to issues related to disability and disability activism. I’ve quoted him extensively since returning to university, and found his works to be the most influential in my own. I’m so shocked at his death.
If you ever want to confuse people, tell them glasses are assistive devices that assist people with lower-level vision impairments, and then compare these assistive devices to such things as arm crutches or wheelchairs. In my experience, they’ll often insist that people who wear glasses are normal. (Not like people who use wheelchairs or arm crutches or any other type of assistive tech, no no, those people are disabled. And everyone knows you can tell who has a disability and who doesn’t just by looking at them, right?)
I’ll often introduce people to the idea that our image of what “disabled” looks like is constructed by talking about glasses as assistive tech, just assistive tech that is generally accepted by society. For a lot of people I interact with every day, getting glasses is routine, and you’ll see glasses everywhere on the street – advertisements for fancy glasses frames! and for new types of lenses! Glasses for everyone! (For certain definitions of “everyone”.)
At the same time, media & pop culture still use glasses as “code” – either for This Is Serious Work, or This Person Is A Nerd/Geek (and a particular type at that) or a scientist/doctor, or a Serious Scholar. This is true whether the person uses glasses all the time, or if they just use them for certain things. On Leverage, for example, when “the bruiser” character Eliot puts on his glasses he suddenly becomes totally sexy and I’d totally hit that because I’m shallow it’s usually an indication that his persona for the episode is Egghead/Nerd or Expert on something. Neal, who is a “recovering” con artist, does something similar in White Collar when he’s doing close-up nerdy-type work on his forgeries, or when his persona is “doctor”. I also clearly remember Elle Woods putting on her Serious Glasses and getting into her Serious Clothes for when she wants to be taken seriously as a lawyer in Legally Blonde. Glasses = Smart!
What brings this back to Glasses As Assistive Tech is that glasses are very normalized to people watching the shows, and yet glasses aren’t all the common as just a Thing The Character Wears in the show. I know why this is – glasses cause light-reflections, glasses make it harder to read someone’s expression on the screen, glasses can be dangerous in fight scenes, if they have lenses they can get scratched up and cause more problems, and if you’re not someone who wears glasses all the time I’m betting they’re distracting.
But, of course, movies and television aren’t the only media we consume. Comics, novels, and video games don’t have these problem. You can give every character in a novel glasses if you want, and it doesn’t really matter. And yet, when I was reading romance novels & chick lit all the time, I can only remember one heroine who wore them, and she went through the whole “Oh, but no one will find me pretty! Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses!” (And, despite her glasses being a huge thing in this novel, the cover art didn’t show her with them. Not that this is surprising, but still.)
So what does this have to do with anything? Well, glasses are assistive tech that is very normalized, and yet doesn’t appear very often in our media. When it does appear in our media, it’s often a code for something. This person is Smart. This person is Studious. This person in Playing A Role. This person is Eliot and his glasses make him really really hot omg why are there not more episodes of him wearing glasses and being friendly? And if we can’t see this incredibly common type of assistive tech in our media being used as just a Thing That People Wear, it’s no wonder we so rarely see people using assistive tech in our media just because Some People Are Blind or Some People Uses Arm Crutches or whatever.
Commenting Note: Sadly, I am still on Thesis Time, and likely will be until the end of the calendar year. Comment-approval/responding to will be slower-than-usual on account of this.
It looks like almost all of my links today (save the last) are mainstream media news stories or press releases. I haven’t looked at the comments because I like not being angry and hating people, but I have never found the comment section of these places to be awesome for nuanced discussion, so read with care.
A terminally ill boy whose specialized wheelchair was broken on an Air Canada flight from Toronto to New York has been given it back after the airline had it fixed.
….
Stratten said the Air Canada response has “so many lies it’s not even funny.
“They did not send an electric wheelchair last night, there was one sitting in the lobby this morning that was not adequate. We were never told it was there,” he said in an email. “They never called to say it, they never called after hearing it was inadequate and the replacement that just got here is a scooter people use to go shopping, and is worse than the first.”
Canada’s premiers are joining forces to rein in ballooning health-care costs by pooling their purchasing power for drugs and medical supplies.
The premiers unveiled plans on Friday to set up a national agency that would be responsible for purchasing $10-billion in prescription drugs a year as well as medical supplies and equipment.
Having one entity responsible for drug purchases for all 13 provinces and territories would lower costs on a major contributor to the growing tab for health care.
I saw this as a good thing, Don saw it as a bad thing. What are your thoughts?
In January 2008, the Access for Sight Impaired Consumers (ASIC) Board approved a motion to back the filing of a human rights complaint against the City of Richmond. The complaint seeks to resolve the City’s unwillingness to provide access to public information in an audio format – specifically street names at controlled intersections equipped with an accessible pedestrian signalling (APS)device.
While the City is refusing to provide what amounts to public information through this audio or voice messaging format, it is also refusing to use similar voice messaging at approximately 60 “special” crosswalks which are already equipped with pedestrian activated amber warning signals. Without an APS device at these “special” crosswalks, pedestrians who are blind or sight impaired are unable to utilize such crosswalks in a safe and independant manner. Given there is no universally recognized tone to indicate the amber pedestrian signals have ben activated (unlike the well recognized “cuckoo” or “chirp” at controlled intersections), voice messaging is emerging as the accepted standard by other Metro Vancouver municipalities. For reasons unknown, the City of Richmond is unwilling to follow the successful practice of neighbouring municipalities.
Dr Sherry says thousands of Australians experience disability hate crimes each year.
“Some of it goes back to social Darwinist ideas about survival of the fittest; some of them talk about their images of disabled people being smelly or dirty or bad karma, possessed by the devil,” he said.
AM spoke to a former Australian adult guardian, the statutory appointee who oversees the affairs of adults with disabilities.
He said he had not encountered the issue of hate crime against people with disabilities.
Dr Sherry says that is “exactly the level of ignorance” that allows it to continue.
Using websites is now second nature to over 80% of the UK population, with web users going online to browse, shop, book tickets etc. So why is it in our latest annual council usability report, looking at the top 20 council websites, that there’s been a slight dip in the usability of council sites?
Leading councils in this year’s report included South Tyneside with a 70% usability score, South Holland with 68% and Chichester with 66% – not particularly top scores given these are supposed to be the best sites. Areas of disappointment included navigation, error handling, calls to action and progress indicators to support users when conducting online transactions.
Purpose: The third edition of this edited reader will present an array of scholarship designed primarily to introduce undergraduates to considerations of race and gender in the media. Though written so that lower level students will be able to engage with the content, I want the book to be interesting and sophisticated enough to also appeal to juniors and seniors, who may be the largest consumers of the text. Some lower-level graduate courses (specifically those that also enroll advanced undergrads) also may find this of value. The text will emphasize critical and reflective thinking about these issues, and will encourage critical consumption of mediated messages. The first two editions contained mostly original work, but revisions of recently published works are more than welcome. To get a sense of the very wide array of material I want this book to contain, I encourage you to explore the tables of contents for the first two editions, and other information available on the publisher’s websites.
Sorry to link & run, folks. Hope your day is being slightly more under control than mine! *grin*
When writing in my own space, I tend to make a lot of jokes about how much I enjoy doing “history in the future!”, by which I mean a lot of primary sources are on-line. Last year, for example, I randomly put the name of one of the people I was writing about into Google, and out popped a bunch of articles he’d written about his theories on Deaf people in the 1860s, which drastically changed my thesis.
For those of us who like to highlight disability related history, the internet can be a huge boon. Whereas as little as five years ago, reading Susan Burch’s description of the Hotchkiss videos for the National Association of the Deaf would have been my only way of learning about them, various video-sharing websites (especially YouTube) allow for us to see these videos, and get a better idea of their impact and importance, for ourselves.
Transcript, as provided by pdurr on YouTube:
Description: John Hotchkiss is an older white man wearing a suit and signing for the camera.
Excerpt of Hotchkiss discussing memories of old hartford from the NAD Motion Picture Project
translation of excerpt by P. Durr – NOTE translation’s accuracy is not confirmed.
“Another time Clerc called a boy who had passed by his house asking, “Please tell (name sign of bent L handshape going downward from top of lips to bottom of chin indicating a beard) S-T-E-W-A-R-D to please have wood delivered to me.” “My pleasure,” the boy replied and went on his way. But this boy completely forgot about this message as his mind was set on playing. Thus, it totally slipped his mind to inform Steward (name sign) of Clerc’s message of his need for wood and Clerc never received any.
A few days passed and again Clerc approached this boy, tapping him with his walking stick and holding him by the shoulders. “I told YOU to PLEASE tell Steward to bring me wood and you said, ‘Ah huh, Yes, Yes, Yes’ but instead you went off and completely forgot. Darn you for forgetting.” and he went off in a huff. As days went by, Clerc would continue to bump into this boy and would always say “Darn, you’re the boy who forgot” (hand at mouth) and stomp off.
The boy was embarrassed and became weary of Clerc’s insults so he decided to go to him and asking his forgiveness for having forgotten to deliver the message to which Clerc let out a joyful laugh and said “alright, you are forgiven, you are forgiven, be on your way.” And with that they departed.
Context, of course, is important. Hotchkiss is telling a story about Laurent Clerc, who is considered the father of the US Deaf Community – for certain definitions of Community, which I will get to in a moment. Dr. John Hotchkiss himself is a very important member of the Deaf community, having been part of the first generation of Deaf students to attend Gallaudet University. Once he graduated he took up teaching, and was a passionate advocate for the continued used of Sign Language in teaching Deaf children.
In the 1910s, the National Association of the Deaf began making several films of Sign Language masters such as Hotchins, and they toured the country. While they were mostly seen by Deaf students, there were hearing students who also saw these ‘silent’ films, exposing them to “the beautiful language” as well.
These films were created as a means of combating the oralist movement (requiring Deaf people to learn to lip read and articulate verbally, a movement that also attempted to ban Sign Language in schools), as well as recording the history of US Deaf people. Looking at the present, the increasingly easy access to video technology is leading to a similar growth in easily accessible videos by and for Deaf people, many of them on YouTube.
What is not obvious from this one video but would be if you went seeking out the rest of the National Association of the Deaf videos from roughly this time period is that “the beautiful language” that they’re preserving is pretty much the beautiful language of white men with the means to attend Gallaudet University. Gallaudet accepted one class of women pupils, and then refused to accept any more for over a decade. Even afterwards, women pupils were discouraged from attending, because they risked “stealing” jobs from more-deserving men. As well, there was a great divide between white and non-white/people of colour in terms of Deaf education. There was a segregated Deaf school system in parts of the US, and Black Deaf schools developed their own form of Sign Language. You can read a bit more about this at the Black ASL Project. Historians like Susan Burch make it very clear that there was no attempt by white Deaf leaders to support Black Deaf people, and only limited support in the non-segregated school system of the North and Western US.
I like to highlight some things in disability history because I find it frustrating that, if you want to learn about the history of disability in a non-specialized context, you’re probably only going to learn the tragedies. I’ve taken classes that have talked about forced sterilization and the eugenics movement, both in North America and abroad, but never had a class that dealt with the foundation of the Deaf press, say, or the National Fraternal Order of the Deaf – even in classes that were about Fraternal Orders in the US. I’ve taken classes that have focused on the resistance of marginalized people, but somehow fail to mention decades of resistance by people with disabilities, and often fail to mention even the success of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
We have a history that is more than tragedy, that is more than the last 20 years of fighting. It is not all brave plucky fighters, and it is certainly not all wonderful people who had no prejudices and only celebrated good things. People with disabilities are people, and I think talking a great deal more about this history is part of the way we fight against stereotypes and the boxes people put us in.
Commenting note: I am, as I said, on Thesis Time right now, which basically means I’m hardly at all around. If you decide to comment, please keep commenting policies in mind, and I’ll do my best to keep up with them.
On November 8-10, 2010, the National Adult Protective Services Association (NAPSA), partnering with the University of California Irvine, Center of Excellence on Elder Abuse and Neglect, will host their annual national conferences at the Westin Gaslamp Quarter Hotel, San Diego, California. Other conference partners include Dr. Nora Baladerian and the California District Attorneys Association.
The Archstone Foundation has provided funding for thirteen $1,000 scholarships for APS professionals from California, and the Office for Victims of Crime, Office of Justice Programs, United States Department of Justice is also providing scholarships and other support to the conference (Note: Points of view expressed in this event are those of the organizers and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice).
2010 NAPSA Conference Registration Fees
Pre-Conference: $75 ($55 with NAPSA Conference Registration)
Members: $325
Non-members: $400
These rates are effective until 10/08/2010; after which the conference member fee increases to $400, the non-member fee to $475, Pre-Conferences to $100, and Post Conference to $120. Please be sure to note the refund policy on the conference registration site.
NEW! Post Conference* $95 ($75 with NAPSA Conference Registration)
*See details about National Financial Abuse Summit below
Four Pre-conference Intensives:
Monday, November 8, 2010 (8:30AM-12:00PM):
a.. “Too High a Cost: The Adverse Effects of Elder Abuse”
a.. “Cultural Jeopardy in Adult Dependency & Disability
a.. “Abuse of Deaf and/or Hard of Hearing Women”
a.. “Legal Advocacy for Persons with Developmental Disabilities”
NAPSA Conference:
Monday, November 8 (1:00pm) – Wednesday, November 10 (5:00PM):
Eight (8) breakout rooms Three (3) plenary sessions Over 45 presentations Over 70 presenters Expanded Exhibit area and Social/Networking opportunities
Keynote Presenters include:
Ollegario “Ollie” D. Cantos VII, National Disability Rights Leader; Member, President’s Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities
Marie Therese Connolly, JD, National Elder Rights Advocate and Author
Bill Benson, NAPSA National Policy Advisor
The conference will provide many highly acclaimed speakers such as: Nora Baladerian Ph.D., Dean Hawley MD, Candace Heisler JD, Holly Ramsey-Klawsnik PhD, Mark Lachs MD, Scott Modell PhD, Laura Mosqeda MD, Robin Rose, Daniel Sheridan PhD, as well as many new innovative speakers.
In one sentence: Woeful Afflictions discusses representations of blind women in Victorian American literature, both fiction and non-fiction, and by both blind and sighted people.
I had some difficulties with this book which may colour my review. Its primary audience is, of course, literary scholars and (presumably) people who read Victorian literature. I am, sadly, neither of these things, but even so I did manage to get a great deal out of the book.
Klages analyses a variety of textual sources, varying from Dickens’ “The Old Curiosity Shop” to Gibson’s “The Miracle Worker”, from Cumming’s “The Lamp Lighter” to Annual Reports from the Perkins Institute for the Blind and various autobiographical works by blind women. I especially enjoyed the latter, as there are very few examples of writing of actual blind women from this time period, and Klages’ discussion of these (few) works made me want to seek them out to read for myself. It’s frustrating how rare such treasures are.
Klages makes two points which I think are most important. The first, evident throughout the whole book, is that representations of people with disabilities haven’t really changed all that much since Dickens. There are certainly shining lights, some of which we’ve talked about here on FWD, but mostly, people with disabilities in media and pop culture are still presented as tragedies, as poster children, or as lessons for the non-disabled. It grows rather tiring to read descriptions of books I’ve never read and realise that they’re basically describing books I have – because the tropes just haven’t changed that drastically.
The other thing that I think is important is in this paragraph:
To become a self… twentieth century disabled people have had to deny, forget, or erase the bodies that mark them as physically different. They have had to accede to forms of self-hood available through sentimental value systems, which construct them as both objects and agents of feeling and empathy, but not necessarily as capable of independent rational thought and economic autonomy. And they have had to renounce virtually all forms of physical sexuality, accepting the disabled body only as a site for feeling, rather than for production, reproduction, or pleasure. These factors, the result of more than one hundred and fifty years of sentimental representations of disability have over-determined the relegation of disabled people to the position of perpetual ‘poster children’, and prevented them from becoming recognized as adults, operating on the same terms, and with the same concerns and rights, as non-disabled adults. [1. Klages, Mary. Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality in Victorian America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, 196.]
In essence, these representations are things we either attempt to fit ourselves into, or struggle to remove ourselves from, but they still impact us, no matter what choices we make.
For the most part, I enjoyed Klages work, although I think getting the full value of the read would require a bit more background than Klages puts in. That said, one could check this book out, review the chapter titles, and sort out which bits most interest you, as it reads more as a series of inter-connected articles than one ‘whole’ argument. The writing style felt very jargon-heavy to me, but I’m not a literary scholar and thus I’m not positive I was her target audience to begin with; I’m certain others would have no problems. I give it 3/5 stars.
Commenting note: I am, as I said, on Thesis Time right now, which basically means I’m hardly at all around. If you decide to comment, please keep commenting policies in mind, and I’ll do my best to keep up with them.
In 1999, at the urging of our sister and colleague Barbara Faye Waxman Fiduccia, the Center launched a new series of reports on women and girls with disabilities – written by women leaders in the disability rights and women’s rights movements [click here to download our first three reports]. These three reports were inspired by Barbara’s co-authorship of our 1999 Research and Data in Brief report on Violence Against Disabled Women [click here to download the report [PDF]].
Sadly, we lost Barbara in 2001 and, while we will always miss her great and powerful spirit, her passion to ensure the full human rights of women and girls with disabilities continues to inspire the Center’s work.
In that spirit, we are issuing a CALL FOR PROPOSALS for a series of new BARBARA WAXMAN FIDUCCIA PAPERS ON WOMEN AND GIRLS WITH DISABILITIES – on a full range of women’s human rights crises that affect women with disabilities in every corner of the globe.
In Barbara’s words in Women and Girls With Disabilities: Defining the Issues – An Overview (1999): “Disabled women and girls are of all ages, all racial, ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds and sexual orientations. . . Disabled women and girls live at the corner of disability and womanhood – with two ‘minority’ identities, a double dose of discrimination and stereotyping and multiple barriers to achieving their life goals.”
The 2011 BARBARA WAXMAN FIDUCCIA PAPERS will present the self-defined perspectives of women with disabilities – both in the USA and globally – on such topics as: access to health care, reproductive rights and health, violence against women and girls, women and AIDS, educational equity, family life and parenting, employment and economic development, balancing work and family, participation in Government at every level – from local to national to international. We also urge you to propose Papers on issues that we have not mentioned here. To submit a proposal or ask a question about our plans for the 2011 Papers, send an email to the Center’s president at lwolfe@centerwomenpolicy.org
