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Disability and Neurodiversity: Joy and Justice

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Disability and Neurodiversity: Joy and Justice

Disability pride flag

The Disability Pride flag. It has diagonal stripes of green, blue, white, yellow, and red on a dark grey background.

This guide uses the colours from the Disability pride flag throughout. The colours represent different experiences of Disability, with the parallel and diagonal lines representing the community standing with one another in solidarity.

Author and Book Features

The reading list may seem overwhelming, so here are some ideas with where to start:

Alice Wong - featured several times in the curation reading list with Disability Visibility, Disability Intimacy, and Year of the Tiger: an Activist's Life. All of these books are brilliant, and I would highly recommend disability visibility if you want to get to know more Disabled activists and artists

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha - featured with Care Work, The Future is Disabled, and Tonguebreaker, a poetry collection. They are also featured in the article section, with The Joyful Intersections of Disability Justice, Care, and Pleasure, a great place to start to get a feel for their writing. 

Shayda Kafai - If you want an overview of Sins Invalid art activism, I highly recommend Crip Kinship. Lots of the authors and artists featured in this list are also involved with Crip Kinship. It is incredibly joyful and portrays how we can create liberating Disabled environments.

Keah Brown - featured in the articles section with her article My Joy Is My Freedom, and with her book The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love with Me.

Video Features

There are lots of videos featured in this curation, from performance art to stand up comedy, and even tiktoks. If you're not feeling up to reading, these are great places to start!

Hannah Gadsby's Douglas

This is a clip from Hannah Gadsby's Netflix stand up special 'Douglas' where she talks about being autistic. I absolutely love her standup, if you have netflix go watch the whole special!

Ballet, Beauty, and the Joy of Wheelchair Dance

Kate Stanforth dances around London in her wheelchair. “I never thought a wheelchair would make me laugh and bring me such joy every day. It’s chaos. It’s beauty. It’s life.”

Podcasts

Reading list

Online Art and Galleries

Featured Posts

Share Disabled joy

Share on these slides a special interest, hobby, TV show, anything that has brought you joy. 

Comment cards - Disability and Neurodiversity: Joy and Justice

Links to blogs

Note on language

Some resources in the reading list use language that I would consider outdated. However, I have still included them in the reading list as I believe they are all valuable. Some instances occur in books which have been translated from other languages, and so that may play a role. While I, and others, may prefer identity-first language, 'Disabled person', others may use person-first language, 'person with a Disability'. I believe it is important to allow people to use the language they wish for themselves.

Artwork Features:



Community As Home Project

 

An illustration by Ashanti Fortson of a distant lighthouse directing its beam toward the viewer and illuminating a short-haired figure sitting alone in a small canoe. We are looking at the figure from behind. They are gripping the sides of the boat and eagerly looking towards the lighthouse and shoreline. The waters around them are relatively calm and the parts of the image that are not being illuminated by the lighthouse are a dark, deep purple and blue. Above the horizon line of the ocean, the sky is dark and cloudy, and going up the image, the clouds transition to a view of rolling ocean waves. In these stormy waves, the same figure is in their canoe to the left of the image, but they look tiny against the rest of the ocean. Between the visual transition of the clouds to the waves, there is a large blue gray cloud shape that serves as a text bubble. Inside the cloud shape it reads: “When I found the autistic community, it was like finally coming home after 23 long years at sea. Often you don’t realize how lonely and frightened you’ve been the whole time, until you find your people. -CADENCE”

An illustration of Pauline Vetuna and Ruby Allegra having coffee together and smiling at each other. Pauline has dark brown skin and very curly black hair, and is wearing a turquoise-colored button-up shirt on top of a light blue sweater, as well as an olive-green bum bag. Pauline holds a spoon above their cup of coffee. Ruby is a white person with fair skin, slightly curly dyed-pink hair, freckles on their face, and a septum piercing. Ruby is wearing thick clear-framed glasses, dark purple pants, a purple long-sleeve shirt with white stripes, and a black T-shirt with collaged imagery and slogans from anti-racism and anti-imperialism protests. They’re holding their coffee mug with both hands, as if raising it to take a sip. They’re buckled into their mobility device, and their elbow rests on the armrest. The headrest and control-stick of their mobility device are also visible. On the table in front of Ruby, there’s a small dish with a spoon inside, and Ruby’s sketchbook and pen. Above and behind the two figures, different sheets of paper sit on the white background. Four sheets have text and drawings on them. The drawings across the sheets are sparkles, a watering can and growing plants, houses, and the sun and clouds in the sky. The text on the sheets reads, “What is also beautiful and exciting is the opportunity to co-create together the kind of spaces we want to see but have been denied in the world as it currently is.” At the bottom of the illustration, a large pencil draws a line from the edge of the table. Above it are the names “Pauline Vetuna” and “Ruby Allegra,” separated by a sparkle.

From the Community As Home Portrait project with the Disability Visibility Project. © Ashanti Fortson. You can view the whole collection here. 

Finnegan Shannon

 

A blue bench with white writing in capital letters, stating 'this exhibition has asked me to stand for too long sit here if you agree' From Finnegan Shannon's "Do you want us here or not?" collection. Used with permission of the artist. © Finnegan Shannon. See their gallery and instagram for more of their work.  

Carmen Papalia and Heather Smith

 

A red/pink background has bold, capitalised white writing on, reading 'interdependence is central to the radical restructuring of power'. The background looks like it has been coloured in by hand, and you can see the strokes. Used with permission of the artists. © Carmen Papalia and Heather Kai Smith. See Heather's website for more of her work, and Carmen's discussion of the work in the video Open Access: Accessibility As Temporary, Collectively-Held Space (2020), also embedded below: 

 

Carmen Papalia

Performance Art

 

"Mobility Device" 

A performance art project where Carmen's white cane is replaced by a marching band playing a site reactive score



See the reading list for more artwork