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++ableist-questioning-framework++
++unhinged++

"We're very culturally ingrained early on to move in certain ways, to walk in certain ways. And for me it's very interesting to think about what it means to be born in a body that can't physically move in the culturally accepted ways, and you have to design your own movements. I would say that many culturally accepted movements are also restrictive on some level"

Sunaura Taylor in conversation with Judith Butler (Interdependence)
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++friendship as freedom++
++interdependencies++
"It seems to me that we're all supported in our movements by various kinds of things that are external to us. We all need certain kind of surfaces, we need certain kinds of shoes, certain kinds of weather, and even internally we need to be ambulatory in certain ways that may or may not be fully operative in all of us. And I'm just thinking that a walk always requires a certain kind of technique, a ertain support. Nobody takes a walk without something that supports that walk, something outside of ourselves. And maybe we have a false idea that the ble-bodied person is somehow radically self sufficient."

Judith Butler in conversation with Sunaura Taylor (Interdependance)

"I think that idea translates also into so many other, different fields, this idea of independence. That an able-bodied person can take a walk independently without anything else is sort of a myth. They do always need certain groundm they do need shoes, as you said, they need social support. And I think that's something rhat definitely affects the image of disabled people. That somehow disabled people are perceived as more dependent, or that they are the ones that are dependent, when in actuality we are all interdependent, that is, dependent on different structures and on each other."

Sunaura Taylor in conversation with Judith Butler (Interdependence)
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++friendship as freedom++
++interdependencies++
++coloniality and ability++

" INTERDEPENDENCE. Before the massive colonial project of Western European expansion, we understood the nature of interdependence within our communities. We see the liberation of all living systems and the land as integral to the liberation of our own communities, as we all share one planet. We attempt to meet each other’s needs as we build towards liberation, without always reaching for state solutions that inevitably then extend its control further over our lives."

Care work - leah lakhsmi piepzna samarashina
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++technovernacular creativity++

" TVC reappropriation acknowledges underrepresented ethnic groups’ ability to adapt new technologies, modifying artifacts on the basis of their political and social circumstances. In Chicano culture, rasquachismo signifies the “view of the underdog,” which combines inventiveness with a survivalist attitude (M. Anderson 2017). Rasquache practitioners make the most from the least, using discarded and recycled materials, even fragments, to create an aesthetic that is both defiant and inventive. Chicano American lowrider culture demonstrates rasquachismo as a practical application of TVC reappropriation. The technical methods, skills, processes, techniques, tools, and raw materials used in lowrider culture establish an individual or group identity, develop an aesthetic, and fulfill community needs (Chappell 2014)."

Nettrice Gaskins Techno Vernacular Creativity
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++unhinged++
"Like dancing, making is a situated action, always in flux and sometimes unplanned, around technologies that
engage creativity. Doing and sensing actions (see Knight 2015) support embodied creativity through human interactivity and how bodies are situated in environments. Technology extends improvisation through the creation of interactive, tangible objects like controllers and sensors for musical performances, for example. These objects push the boundaries of what is real, especially when they represent interactive physical systems that can sense and respond to performers and the world."
Nettrice Gaskins Techno Vernacular Creativity
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++orientations++
"We are also orientating ourselves toward some objects more than others, including physical objects (the different kinds of tables), but also objects of thought, feeling, and judgment, and objects in the sense of aims, aspirations, and objectives. I might orient myself around writing, for instance, not simply as a certain kind of work (although it is that, and it requires certain objects for it to be possible) but also as a goal: writing becomes something that I aspire to, even as an identity (becoming a writer). So the object we aim for, which we have in our view, also comes into our view, through being held in place as that which we seek to be: the action searches for identity as the mark of attainment (the writer becomes a writer through writing). We can ask what kinds
of objects bodies tend toward in their tendencies, as well as how such tendencies shape what bodies tend toward."
Sara Ahmed Orientations : Towards a queer phenomenology

becoming disabled through orientation in a world where the relationship between the body and objects is a relationship marked by friction?

"Bodies hence acquire orientation by repeating some actions over others, as actions that have certain objects in view, whether they are the physical objects required to do the work (the writing table, the pen, the keyboard) or the ideal objects that one identifies with. The nearness of such objects, their availability within my bodily horizon, is not casual: it is not just that I find them there, like that. Bodies tend toward some objects more than others, given their tendencies. These tendencies are not originary; they are effects of the repetition of “tending
toward.”"
Sara Ahmed Orientations : Towards a queer phenomenology

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++orientations++
++averages++
++interdependencies++

"First, it’s a false divide to make a we/them: either able-minded, able-bodied, or disabled. After all, how cultures define, think about, and treat those who currently have marked disabilities is how all its future citizens may well be perceived if and when those who are able-bodied become less abled than they are now: by age, degeneration, or some sudden — or gradual — change in physical or mental capacities. All people, over the course of their lives, traffic between times of relative independence and dependence. So the questions cultures ask, the technologies they invent, and how those technologies broadcast a message about their users — weakness and strength, agency and passivity — are critical ones. And they’re not just questions for scientists and policy-makers; they’re aesthetic questions too.

Second, in many cultures — and certainly in the US — a pervasive, near-obsession with averages and statistical norms about bodies and capacities has become a naturalized form of describing both individuals and populations. But this way of measuring people and populations is historically very recent, and worth reconsidering."

"Well — it’s worth saying again: All technology is assistive technology. Honestly — what technology are you using that’s not assistive? Your smartphone? Your eyeglasses? Headphones? And those three examples alone are assisting you in multiple registers: They’re enabling or augmenting a sensory experience, say, or providing navigational information. But they’re also allowing you to decide whether to be available for approach in public, or not; to check out or in on a conversation or meeting in a bunch of subtle ways; to identify, by your choice of brand or look, with one culture group and not another.

Making a persistent, overt distinction about “assistive tech” embodies the second-tier do-gooderism and banality that still dominate design work targeted toward “special needs.” “Assistive technology” implies a separate species of tools designed exclusively for those people with a rather narrow set of diagnostic “impairments” — impairments, in other words, that have been culturally designated as needing special attention, as being particularly, grossly abnormal. But are you sure your phone isn’t a crutch, as it were, for a whole lot of unexamined needs?"

All Technology Is Assistive Sara Hendren
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++orientations++
++averages++
++eugenecist-organising++

“. . . before the nineteenth century in Western culture, the concept of the ‘ideal’ was the regnant paradigm in relation to all bodies, so all bodies were less than ideal. The introduction of the concept of normality, however, created an imperative to be normal, as the eugenics movement proved by enshrining the bell curve (also known as the ‘normal curve’) as the umbrella under whose demanding peak we should all stand. With the introduction of the bell curve came the notion of ‘abnormal’ bodies. And the rest is history.” Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and other Difficult Positions Lennard Davis
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++orientations++
++unhinged++

"Autistic modes of being are so internal to the self’s relationship to the body that nothing short of total freedom—bodily, psychological, and social—is required for a full autistic liberation. The very conditions of living are of immediate concern to autistic folks, whose currents of thought run along a number of different pathways and are fundamentally resistant to generalization and typologization.

The urgency of understanding the spatial experiences of autistic people, then, stems from the root of sociopolitical anxieties imposed by urban modernity. The trajectory of autistic spatiality in an increasingly urbanized, territorialized Europe throughout the twentieth century has had fundamental implications for how liberatory autistic spaces might be reconceived as communities that exist at—and, therefore, challenge—the societal limits of care."
Patrick Jaojoco - Autistic Spatiality and the Limits of Care

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