The representational history of disabled people can largely be characterized as one of being put on display or hidden away. Self-representations have been a powerful part of the disability rights and culture movement, but recently scholars have analysed the ways in which these run the risk of creating a 'single story' that centres the experiences of white, western, physically disabled men. Here we introduce and theorize with Project Re•Vision, our arts-based research project that resists this singularity by creating and centring, without normalizing, representations that have previously been relegated to the margins. We draw from body becoming and new materialist theory to explore the dynamic ways in which positionality illuminates bodies of difference and open into a discussion about what is at stake when these stories are let loose into the world.Keywords: arts-informed methodology; representation; digital storytelling; body; story; disability and difference Points of interest• In this article we talk about a research project, Project Re•Vision, which is exploring representations and meanings of disability and difference through digital stories.• In our research project, we asked disabled people and healthcare providers to each make a digital story. We invite you to watch the digital stories as you read the article. Go to http://projectrevision.ca/videos/. Following the prompts, type in the password 'projectrevision'. • Digital stories are videos, two to three minutes long, that pair audio-recordings of personal narratives with visuals (photographs, short videos, artwork, etc.).• We end with the suggestion of being open to the possibilities -the creative, communal, and artistic possibilities -of how the digital stories made within our project disrupt problematic representations of disability.
This article explores twelve short narrative films created by women and trans people living with disabilities and embodied differences. Produced through Project Re•Vision, these micro documentaries uncover the cultures and temporalities of bodies of difference by foregrounding themes of multiple histories: body, disability, maternal, medical, and/or scientific histories; and divergent futurities: contradictory, surprising, unpredictable, opaque, and/or generative futures. We engage with Alison Kafer's call to theorize disability futurity by wrestling with the ways in which "the future" is normatively deployed in the service of able-bodiedness and able-mindedness (Kafer 2013), a deployment used to render bodies of difference as sites of "no future" (Edelman 2004). By re-storying embodied difference, the storytellers illuminate ongoing processes of remaking their bodily selves in ways that respond to the past and provide possibilities for different futures; these orientations may be configured as "dis-topias" based not on progress, but on new pathways for living, uncovered not through evoking the familiar imaginaries of curing, eliminating, or overcoming disability, but through incorporating experiences of embodied difference into time. These temporalities gesture toward new kinds of futures, giving us glimpses of ways of cripping time, of cripping ways of being/ becoming in time, and of radically re-presencing disability in futurity.To watch the stories presented in our article, go to http://projectrevision.ca/videos/. Following the prompts, type in the password "futurities." Please note: these videos are intended for readers only and are not for public screening.In The Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Ranci ere asserts that art can be political when it helps us imagine a world wherein things are arranged and meaning is made differently (Ranci ere 2006). Ranci ere is speaking back to the argument that aesthetics is pure and purely about satiation of the senses by positioning art as possessing the potential to become political. For Ranci ere, art, like politics, centers on ways of reconfiguring the world. When art reveals ontological reconfigurations, disrupting the
Project Re•Vision uses disability arts to disrupt stereotypical understandings of disability and difference that create barriers to healthcare. In this paper, we examine how digital stories produced through Re•Vision disrupt biopedagogies by working as bodybecoming pedagogies to create non-didactic possibilities for living in/with difference. We engage in meaning making about eight stories made by women and trans people living with disabilities and differences, with our interpretations guided by the following considerations: what these stories 'teach' about new ways of living with disability; how these stories resist neoliberalism through their production of new possibilities for living; how digital stories wrestle with representing disability in a culture in which disabled bodies are on display or hidden away; how vulnerability and receptivity become 'conditions of possibility' for the embodiments represented in digital stories; and how curatorial practice allows disability-identified artists to explore possibilities of 'looking back' at ableist gazes. ARTICLE HISTORY
Although Deaf and disability arts 1 has been practiced under this name since the 1970s in Canada, within the last 15 years it has begun to be recognized as its own field of arts practice and production by arts councils and cultural funding bodies (Gorman 2007). Increased funding has accelerated the production of Deaf and disability art and has increased attention from arts organizations and audiences alike. With this leveling-up of Deaf and disability arts comes the advancement of a discourse specific to this sector, one that includes conversations about how we make arts accessible and how we blend accessibility with aesthetics and curatorial practices, about the development of distinct disability, crip, Mad, Deaf aesthetics, and about the role the arts play, and have always played, within the achievement of disability rights and justice.Throughout this article, we embrace the developing discourse around Deaf and disability art and use it to recognize and discuss the art produced out of Project Re•Vision's (Re•Vision) artsbased research workshops-multimedia storytelling workshops and theater workshops with D/deaf 2 and disabled people-and think through the role these workshops played in the development of Deaf and disability arts in Ontario. We also think about how these works of art, by and about disabled people, function as a form of public pedagogy, 3 ushering in new understandings of disability. We begin by describing the scope of Re•Vision as a research project and connecting this project to the emergence of Deaf and disability arts in Canada. We then draw on reflections of d/Deaf and disability artist participants as told to us through interviews conducted after the workshops to unpack the roles these played in their artistic development. We conclude by discussing the significance of Re•Vision in cultivating Deaf and disability arts through facilitating artistic training and the development of key artistic connections which led to other disability arts projects and advancing disability aesthetics.
Re•Vision, an assemblage of multimedia storytelling and arts-based research projects, works creatively and collaboratively with misrepresented communities to advance social well-being, inclusion, and justice. Drawing from videos created by health care providers in disability artist-led workshops, this article investigates the potential of disability arts to disrupt dominant conceptions of disability and invulnerable embodiments, and proliferate new representations of bodymind difference in health care. In exploring, remembering, and developing ideas related to their experiences with and assumptions about embodied difference, providers describe processes of unsettling the mythical norm of human embodiment common in health discourse/practice, coming to know disability in nonmedical ways, and re/discovering embodied differences and vulnerabilities. We argue that art-making produces instances of critical reflection wherein attitudes can shift, and new affective responses to difference can be made. Through self-reflective engagement with disability arts practices, providers come to recognize assumptions underlying health care practices and the vulnerability of their own embodied lives.
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