Disabled Leadership in theory & practice

There is increasing talk about Disabled Leadership in the Arts. There are stirrings, positive ones, potentially amazing even, in the arena of the Arts and Disability. (Even in wider fields, for example Autism Research – just reading the Twitter feed coming from IMSAR2018 indicates that level of Actual Autistic participation has increased and that is a cause for hope for a better future in research and practice.)

Excitement and awareness aside, there are still some brass tacks issues to face and tackle head on. Before we can even make that leap into Disabled Leadership, there needs to be some basic concepts of respectful and ethical interactional treatment of disabled people. How do we establish leadership if the non-disabled world cannot even bring themselves to the level of viewing disabled people as human beings worthy of esteem and regard as equal participants in society?

A fundamental topic is that of payment. Yes. Money. And plain simple respect. Let’s start here. Continue reading

A Thin Fine Line

This is a musing about invasion of privacy and the thin fine line between funny and sinister.

When one has been accorded much care, consideration and respectful support from a great number of people, one may become not only quite overwhelmed, but also lulled into a feeling of security, such that when this sense of ‘safeness’ is challenged, one becomes suddenly unsure how to react. One incident was highlighted in my previous post, “Confronting the Invisible.”

Recently, I have been encountering a series of little events, each one so minute in isolation that only the very observant or meticulously private person would react to, let alone notice at all. I have tried hard, in deference to the more prevalent “hey, relax!” laissez-faire social perception of the majority, to downplay in my own mind, each of these events which nevertheless irked me greatly. However, now that I am faced with an escalating rate of recurrence of these ‘small things,’ and the accumulation of which are forming a disturbing but as yet nebulous denouement with an accompanying mixture of utter weariness and foreboding, I am finding harder and harder to brush them all off. Continue reading