*The snippets gathered below are part of a documentation process that we practice in Constant, which we call 'snowpoling'. Snowpoles are used in areas where significant amount of snow regularly fall. When paths disappear under a mass of snow,the snowpoles allow someone to still find their way. Similarly, we use a snowpole marker in lots of written text to find back a specific fragment.*
*During events, we write collectively on etherpad pages. A keyword is added whenever is written a phrase or paragraph that is relevant to a specific thematic. Through these keywords, the relevant bits of text can be grouped, and for example used in preparation of a publication, giving a glimpse into fragments of contrasting types of writing/thinking around a similar theme.*
*Below is a selection of fragments from the snowpoles: **++ableist-questioning-framework++** and **++Interdependencies++** which were used in the context of the worksession "A Cane, Sticky notes and Another body", December 2024 in the Museum Dr. Guislain.*
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(tag: ableist-questioning-framework)
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Today was kind and confusing, a day filled with encounters and questions. Coming in and feeling the ghosts, but being touched by the beauty of the building nevertheless. Then sitting and feeling comfortable with a group who knows how to hold space gently. Feeling unsure of what this is all about, trying to piece it together. Bit by bit, wandering in the space, supervised or not, awestruck by all that’s there. Also feeling yourself being more comfortable expressing and being present with your own divergence, in a space that allows it. At times, feeling bored or upset, because of the hazy frame. At times, feeling warmth and flexibility that are too absent from this world. Many spaces are there, waiting to be explored.
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Natural realities of the planet that exist beyond our comprehension/capacity.
We are using terms and organising specific ways where ecology, technology or war fit.
framework : how do we think about the world and how this informs how we think about tech and other topics in general.
If we are thinking about small and vernacular tech, it's like different perspectives than what has been discussed here. How does tech fit different environments and contexts? Using technology in terms of different contexts.
Thought experiment:
not thinking about software or abstraction or encoding of features but also to think of infrastructures, the actual networks connecting places around Earth. Thinking of different ways to be connected to places which would not have been brought up by colonialism and imperialism
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"By endorsing accessible futures, we refuse to treat access as an issue of technical compliance or rehabilitation, as a simple technological fix, or a checklist. Instead we define access as collective, messy, experimental, frictional and generative. Accessible future requires our interdependence."
*Crip technoscience Manifesto, 2019*
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Questions: why so analogue?
**- to avoid technosolutionist attitudes**
**- to depart from people's needs rather than technological constraints**
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*(–is this how you use a snowpole? – almost! two plusses around the tag, five plusses above and under the quote :) ) (– thank you so much )*
*What* about positioning disabilities within "more" or less frameworks? Is that how we wanna think about this?
What about the fact that we're asked to make work regularly about disability? neurodivergence? This kind of forcing or legitimizing into a boxed certain context, what about that?
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(tag: Interdependencies)
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1977
504 sit-in
black panther and disability justice
One of the 504 Sit-in participants Corbett Joan O’Toole shared, “At that time in history, there was simply no access — no right to an education, no public transit. You couldn’t get into a library or city hall, much less a courtroom.” Disabled people wanted to see the government committed to disability inclusion and access. The disabled activists warned that if Joseph A. Califano Jr., who served as the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare during President Jimmy Carter's administration, didn’t take action by April 4th, nationwide protests would ensue.
Most of the protests happening across the country ended that day. However, the story in San Francisco was different. Following the San Francisco rally, nearly 150 people with disabilities streamed into the Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) Federal Building. They began climbing to the fourth floor where the HEW regional offices were located. Over 120 activists occupied the building, and they refused to leave the federal building until their demands were met, even when threatened with arrest and eviction.
The disabled protesters worked closely with and received support from a wide range of organizations and individuals, including labor unions, religious groups, and civil rights activists. Groups that supported the 504 protesters included the Black Panther Party, Glide Memorial Church, Gay Men’s Butterfly Brigade, Delancey Street, the United Farm Workers, the Gray Panthers, Salvation Army, and more. Because of this, the 504 Sit-in is considered an important moment for cross-movement organizing.
https://disabilityrightsflorida.org/blog/entry/504-sit-in-history
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Is the question like --> how to choose your own dependencies and is that possible?
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"Freedom and friendship used to mean the same thing: intimate, interdependent relationships and the commitment to face the world together. At its root, relational freedom isn’t about being unrestricted: it might mean the capacity for interconnectedness and attachment. Or mutual support and care. Or shared gratitude and openness to an uncertain world. Or a new capacity to fight alongside others. But this is not what freedom has come to mean under Empire. "
“Friend” and “free” in English … come from the same Indo-European root, which conveys the idea of a shared power that grows. Being free and having ties was one and the same thing. I am free because I have ties, because I am linked to a reality greater than me.”[49]
A few centuries later, freedom became untied from connectedness. The seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes imagined freedom as nothing more than an “absence of opposition” possessed by isolated, selfish individuals. For Hobbes, the free man is constantly armed and on guard: “When going to sleep, he locks his doors; when even in his house he locks his chests.”[50] The free individual lives in fear, and can only feel secure when he knows there are laws and police to protect him and his possessions. He is definitely he, because this individual is also founded on patriarchal male supremacy and its associated divisions of mind/body, aggression/submission, rationality/emotion, and so on. His so-called autonomy is inseparable from his exploitation of others.
When peasants were “freed,” during this period, it often meant that they had been forced from their lands and their means of subsistence, leaving them “free” to sell their labor for a wage in the factories, or starve. It is no coincidence that these lonely conceptions of freedom arose at the same time as the European witch trials, the enclosure of common lands, the rise of the transatlantic slave trade, and the colonization and genocide of the Americas. At the same time as the meaning of freedom was divorced from friendship and connection, the lived connections between people and places were being dismembered.
*Joyful Militancy — Chapter 2 : Friendship, Freedom, Ethics, Affinity*
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I thought things would be more social - this is not the anarchism that I need.
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how can you do open source medicine? -- access to medicine and the DIY aspect of it --
imperialism & empiricism --> not the same things
empires and how people - the power structures you are in, an academic look into it
how big farma holds patents
Helminthic therapy wiki:
"Solid scientific evidence shows that millions of years of co-evolution have created a symbiotic relationship between humans and helminths that provides us with essential immune regulation. "
"This site presents the extensive research supporting this practice, along with more than a thousand personal stories demonstrating it's effects, plus tips to help manage the therapy and optimise its benefits.
This is a collaborative, crowd-sourced site administered by volunteers with no commercial interest in the therapy. "
bodies getting sick from the lack of exchanges with the environment
improving health through such paradigm cannot be accomplished through a capitalist economy
solidarity and alternative networks are necessary to support people's healing outside a capitalist framework
https://www.helminthictherapywiki.org
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*What does it mean to shift our ideas of access and care (whether it’s disability, childcare, economic access, or many more) from an individual chore, an unfortunate cost of having an unfortunate body, to a collective responsibility that’s maybe even deeply joyful? What does it mean for our movements? Our communities/fam?
Ourselves and our own lived experience of disability and chronic illness? What does it mean to wrestle with these ideas of softness and strength, vulnerability, pride, asking for help, and not—all of which are so deeply raced and classed and gendered? If collective access is revolutionary love without charity, how do we learn to love each other? How do we learn to do this love work of collective care that lifts us instead of abandons us, that grapples with all the deep ways in which care is complicated.*
*Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha*
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"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 certain support. Nobody takes a walk without something that supports that walk, something outside of ourselves. And maybe we have a false idea that the able-bodied person is somehow radically self sufficient."
"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 ground, they do need shoes, as you said, they need social support. And I think that's something that 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* (Interdependance)
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"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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As Caroline Lazard says “Access has this capacity to break through mediums. Contents might exist as a description, as sign language, as a transcript, or as a tactile object.” How do you feel about the coexistence of different mediums? Do they add to each other? Do they interfere with your understanding?
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(imagemargin: circulations.constantvzw.org/publication-tool/images/ants_margin_2.png alt: Five ants are drawn in the margin)
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