Crip News v.111

Pay transparency, SF Deaf Club, new works, urgent calls, events, intensities. Thanks for being here.

Dec 11, 2023

Today’s issue will be clipped in your inbox, so be sure to click through and scroll through to the bottom, to the Intensities section, for some not new news on Palestine and Disability Justice. Also make sure to check out an urgent call to the Census Bureau in the Calls section.

NEWS

Fair Pay for Disabled Workers

Against a purple berry-colored background, the words "Fair Dues" cascade from the top to the bottom. The central line stands out in a vibrant neon green hue.

U.K.-based disabled organizer Shani Dhanda recently launched Fair Dues, a public Google Sheets doc for disabled workers “where people can share how much they charge or have been paid anonymously, helping each other understand their worth better.”

In the U.S., disabled access workers Madison Zalopany and Alison Kopit have launched the 2023 Pay Rate for Access Workers Now (PRAWN) project. It “came out of a desire to build connection and shared knowledge among access workers in the hopes of establishing an industry standard and raising the bar for the way that access work is materially valued.” PRAWN is actively seeking data from 2023, so submit your pay info from 2023 here.

These disability-focused projects come after several high-profile pay transparency docs in recent years, like the Art/Museum Salary Transparency 2019 project.

Happy Birthday, Deaf Club

Dec. 9th marked the 46th anniversary of the first show at the Deaf Club in San Francisco. The venue, a Deaf space since the 1930s, became a legendary spot in the vibrant punk scene of the late 70s, featuring over 100 bands in its few years of shows. The many textures of sound there are one of the sites Alison O’Daniel explores in her genius film, The Tuba Thieves (excerpted above and recently reviewed in Variety).

New Works

Toronto-based Crip Rave and DJ Crip Time (Stefana Fratila) were recently featured on the lineup of Pique, a party in Ottawa. The event featured a suite of club access features.

There are two images overlaid on one another. One shows dirt and plants. In the other, a figure is in a bubble inside a room in a house. — **Darrin Martin**, **Take Breath is Breath** (still), 2023.

Resistance & Respiration is on view at Contemporary Calgary through April 14, 2024. Curated by Amanda Cachia and featuring work by Anna Berry, Erik Benjamins & Finnegan Shannon, Atanas Bozdarov, Hannah Bullock, Bob Flanagan & Sheree Rose, Andrew Gannon, Darrin Martin, Dylan Mortimer, Liz Nurenberg, Dominic Quagliozzi, Aislinn Thomas, Alice Wong & Georgia Webber.
A special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly on “New Histories and Theories of Race and Disability” is out. Edited by Kelsey Henry, Anna Hinton, and Sony Coráñez Bolton, it is packed with an array of late-breaking scholarship on a range of topics, including heidi andrea restrepo rhodes on “Bed/Life,” “An Asian American Crip Manifesto” by Mel Y. Chen, Mimi Khúc, and Jina B. Kim, and much more.
Seeing Ourselves 2, the second diversity report from Screen Australia, pays particular attention to disability representation and spotlights several workshops and resources for artists and producers.
Disney’s newest film Wish, features a disabled character voiced by disabled artist and organizer Jennifer Kumiyama.

The team of Accessible Everything at the “Past, Present, Istanbul” exhibition at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Istanbul, Türkiye. (Photo courtesy of Accessible Everything) — Photo courtesy of **Accessible Everything**.

A feature in The Daily Sabah looks at the growth of Istanbul’s Accessible Everything, an organization that is advancing anti-ableism across Turkey.

Daisy sits in front of a large painted photograph in her studio. Daisy is in a floral dress and has dark shoulder length hair. The large painting behind Daisy is a group of Bulgarian women sitting and standing together, with a photograph as its substrate. They are adorned with painted flowers, bright washes of color, blue grass, and a lavender sky. — **Untitled (A Walking Woman’s Collective)** (2020) by **Daisy Patton**.

Lenscratch and Megan Bent have published a suite of essays by and about disabled photographers: Jen White-Johnson, Jaklin Romine, Nolan Trowe, and Daisy Patton.

CALLS

URGENT: Tell the Census Bureau we need accurate disability data!

The U.S. Census Bureau has proposed changing how it defines disability in the American Community Survey, a data source that is used to allocate trillions of dollars in funding and enforce civil rights. The change would drop 40% of disabled people out of the definition of disability. TELL THE BUREAU: NOTHING ABOUT US WITHOUT US. Take action by December 19th.

Some other calls this week:

Cooper Hewitt is seeking NYC-based disabled folks for a paid opportunity evaluating new accessible in-gallery technology for touchscreen displays. More here.
A Disability Justice organizer in Oakland, CA is seeking a Personal Assistant/Access Support Person for part-time work in the East Bay. More here.

EVENTS

Disabled Grief & Rage: Resistance Poetry

Sunday, Dec. 17, 12 - 3pm MT, online

This 3 hour workshop, facilitated by Rise, will make space for the anger, the tending, the loving, the yearning, the rest, the isolation, the movement, the stillness, the aches, the balms... the words we don't yet have; the words we do, and are waiting to cast.

2 images of a neon colored forest sit on top of each other. The background image is lighter and makes a frame around the smaller, vibrating neon forest. The forest is highly textured with hot pink, super bright blue and green trees, plants and tree bark. Large green letters say: Speculative Crip Ecologies + Rituals in the Age of Multispecies Disablement. White italicized letters below say: Join our eco-disability reading + discussion group. Non italicized white letters follow: Sunday December 17th 3:30 to 5:00 pm Pacific Time / 4:30 to 6:00 pm Mountain Time / 6:30 to 8:00 pm Eastern Time. Access Magic Free, ASL, Access Doula, Reading Selections Provided.

Speculative Crip Ecologies + Rituals in the Age of Multispecies Disability

Sunday, Dec. 17, 6:30 - 8pm ET, online

Join Indigenous disabled artist moira williams for the 4th eco-disability centered online reading and discussion event to discuss "Our Cherokee Uncles Black and Native Erotics" and “Epilouge Of Water and Land” from Tiffany Lethabo King’s The Black Shoals Offshore Formations of Black and Native People.

There’s a tilted horizon and thin lines that shoot out from a vanishing point like a sunset (the usual Crip News header) except the colors are inverted and it’s a black background with white lines, like nighttime. Big text floats over the land-line: INTENSITIES BELOW. Smaller text under: we could breathe, hold the breath and let it out slow, mist the plants, or notice a sensation, get water, leave the screen entirely, nap

Not New News

The world is watching as Israel continues its illegal and genocidal war on Gaza and across Palestine. Today, Palestinians have called for a global general strike.

A greyed-out iris flower covering the entire page, against a dark green background. With its letters in green, except the parts where they touch the flower, and turn pink, the words “Reading”, “for,” “Palestine” vertically divide the poster in three. — Poster design by **Roï Saade**.

The Access in the Making Lab (AIM) has launched Reading for Palestine, “a collaborative, long-term initiative where readers from AIM, their kin and invitees volunteer their time and voice to read for Palestine from a collection of texts and media for as short or as long as they are able.”

The Transnational Feminist Disability Studies Collective is seeking signatories on a statement against the genocide in Gaza.

Alice Wong recently published “Why Palestinian Liberation Is Disability Justice,” with 3 upcoming commissioned pieces by disabled women of color on Palestine for Disability Visibility.

Disabled organizers Grayson Schultz and Jesse Meadows have both published essays on Substack packed with links to more resources. HEART and the Ad’iyah Collective are creating spaces where Muslim survivors can process genocidal trauma together. And if you have other resources or events to share, click through at the bottom of this email and leave links in the comments of this - or any - issue.

A silver glitter circle sticker that says “Queercrips for Palestine” with a Queercrip symbol in the center with the Palestinian flag in the symbol. The sticker is on a white cubes tile background with black grout.

Rebirth Garments is running a Gender Affirming Garments for Liberation Giveaway to support Gaza.

And if you have more resources to share, please post them in the comments on this issue!