#ablerism

[zzkt]

Students finishing up socially-minded design and art projects: This might be a useful time to ask yourself about the relationship between wonder + urgency in your work. If you’re stuck, ask: is it all wonder, no bite, no urgency? All earnest urgency, but lacking wonder?

— Sara Hendren (@ablerism) December 5, 2019

(via http://twitter.com/ablerism/status/1202617908553224197)

[zzkt]

Me to engineering students: “Forget ‘don’t be evil’—here’s a wallop of politics that you’ll need to survive.” Me to liberal arts majors this spring: “No time for critique alone, friends. If you folks don’t get into the fray for world-building, we’re f*cked.” Love, Prof. Sara

— Sara Hendren (@ablerism) May 15, 2019

(via http://twitter.com/ablerism/status/1128747928963756032)

[robertogreco]

At Eyeo 2015, Sara Hendren discussed her life and work and the inherent messiness of life and work, including discussion of “Investigating Normal” and her Adaptation + Ability Group (more), a research lab at Olin College; Slope : Intercept; The Accessible Icon Project; and what it means to be “a public amateur.” Accessibility and assistive technology are not only topics of research for Hendren, but are everyday practices. Her presentation was no exception, as each image she showed included an audio description. In addition to its important messages, the talk is a beautiful composition delivered with grace and love. I’d heard raves about it since the summer, but was still struck as I watched. Here is the caption for the talk as posted to Vimeo:

Sara Hendren is an artist, design researcher, and professor based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She makes material and digital artworks, writes, and lectures on adaptive and assistive technologies, prosthetics, inclusive design, accessible architecture, and related ideas. Her work has been exhibited in the US and abroad and is held in the permanent collection at MOMA (NYC), and her writing and design work have appeared in the Boston Globe, The Atlantic Tech, FastCo Design, and on National Public Radio (US), among others. She teaches socially-engaged design practices, adaptive + assistive technologies, and disability studies for engineers-in-training at Olin College. She writes and edits Abler, a syndicated column sometimes also on Gizmodo.

See also my previous posts and bookmarks tagged with Sara Hendren’s name.

[alaina]

"I grow accustomed to comments that feel aggressive in their formulaic insistence: that must be really hard [to have a dying baby], that must be really hard [to be afraid you’ll have another seizure in the middle of the grocery store], that must be really hard [to carry in your uterus the bacterial evidence of cheating on your husband]. Why not say, I couldn’t even imagine?

"Other students seem to understand that empathy is always perched precariously between gift and invasion. They won’t even press the stethoscope to my skin without asking if it’s okay. They need permission. They don’t want to presume. Their stuttering unwittingly honors my privacy: Can I…could I…would you mind if I—listened to your heart? No, I tell them. I don’t mind. Not minding is my job. Their humility is a kind of compassion in its own right. Humility means they ask questions, and questions mean they get answers and answers mean they get points on the checklist: a point for finding out my mother takes Wellbutrin, a point for getting me to admit I’ve spent the last two years cutting myself, a point for finding out my father died in a grain elevator when I was two—for realizing that a root system of loss stretches radial and rhizomatic under the entire territory of my life.

"In this sense, empathy isn’t just measured by checklist item 31—voiced empathy for my situation/problem–but by every item that gauges how thoroughly my experience has been imagined. Empathy isn’t just remembering to say that must really be hard—it’s figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all. Empathy isn’t just listening; it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.”

from Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams—a series of essays, partly about her job experience as a medical actor (via ablerism)