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.
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.
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!
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!
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.”
Some resources in the reading list use language that I would consider outdated.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.
From the Community As Home Portrait project with the Disability Visibility Project. © Ashanti Fortson. You can view the whole collection here.
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.
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:
Performance Art
"Mobility Device"
A performance art project where Carmen's white cane is replaced by a marching band playing a site reactive score
This is a padlet board where you can add anything that has brought you joy recently