why is this a frictional practice?

The word ‘friction’ refers to a public’s response to identifying and articulating phenomena of social injustice. As people with disability know intimately, manoeuvring normative able-bodied relations and built environments is taxing. Disabled folks bringing up the emotional labor involved in gaining access as a topic during a conversation, it causes friction. People feel discomfort as a result of hearing about this inconvenient reality, or respond with skepticism - are you sure your experience really happened the way you’re describing?!

By questioning a person’s testimony of what happened in a given situation, the listener withholds recognition and they undermine the speaker as a knower. When withholding recognition is caused by prejudice about the speaker’s social identity; their disability, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, class, age, nationality, this form of discrimination is called epistemic injustice.

Initiating conversations on subjects society is inclined to dismiss, has been the core business of my practice from the beginning. By collectively leaning into the discomfort, friction is approached as a strategic tool and it becomes our guide to action.

When designing a process to unpack ableism in institutional infrastructures for example, asking questions can be a way to instrumentalize friction. Inquiry as a form of collective learning is capable of jolting people into awareness about the economy of knowledge. What knowledge is valued? Whose testimony style is structurally privileged? What are habits of attention in Dutch society that stem from this systemic silencing?

why is this a crip practice?

The word crip, is short for cripple. By using ‘crip’ in relation to this practice, I refer to an element of my identity and claim my personal experience of living with complex embodiment. With it, I resist the ideology that certain forms of embodiment are more valuable than others.

As a concept, crip refers to the process of ‘reclaiming’ by people with disabilities, which pertains to both the identity, the culture and ancestry. The word demands awareness for the ongoing practices of dehumanisation and discrimination of disabled people in society, and for the community building and activism as a result of this.

Immediately drawing attention to the sense of urgency required to be present in relationships and processes that I am affiliated with, crip allows me to swiftly introduce a theoretic framework emerging from the culture; with ideas such as the temporary status of able-bodied-ness for example, or the value of embodied knowledge and the crip perspective on normalcy.

why is articulation important in this creative practice?

The concept of disability as a container holds a variety of embodiment, much like the multitude of approaches the communities representing the differently abled have to social identity. Recognising what words could describe your lived experience of being in a human body, is a personal one - I trust you know best how to identify at this time.

Language can be an important tool to articulate one’s way of being in the world, even so words are not the only way to communicate. There’s a lot of value in crip knowledge about interconnectivity between body-minds; from the boldness of the Protractile movement of the DeafBlind, the precise imaginations of non-verbal Autistic knowers, and the pace of conversations within the Deaf community, to name but a few.

Languages, just as identities are not static. As individuals and communities we are in constant flux, searching for and stumbling upon words to describe our humanity as we go. Experimentation with languaging is a principal quality of this practice; through navigating, negotiating, interpreting, translating, and inventing we make meaning while being in the world.

On this website, when referring to disabled folks I shall use different terms interchangeably, such as: handicapped folks, people with a disability, or crips. As I recognise the fluidity of language, identity and ability, my understanding of disability includes long-term conditions that are characterised by periods of good health interrupted by periods of illness or disability, other chronic physical and mental health conditions, chronic pain conditions, people identifying as Mad, neuro-diverse and neuroqueer folks.

Why is the crip community the focus of this practice?

As my specific brand of cripness greatly impacts my energy availability, I spend a lot of time at home while reading. Coming from a place of internalised ableism, disability identity denialism, my understanding of the interlocking systems of privilege and power has come about through rigorous and independent study of a rich archive of theory and community building practices.

For example, Ahsan’s book Shy Radicals, The Antisystemic Politics of the Militant Introvert (2017) made me aware that although I am experiencing a form of ongoing (social) isolation, I am a member of this “community that never gathers”. I learned a creative approach to being an activist while housebound, became part of ‘the occupy bedroom movement’ by using my social media platform to both connect and protest.

In recent years a new generation of intellectuals and disability activists have offered frameworks of radical inclusion grounded in lived experience, re-imagining disability (as well as gender). Gaining access to these materials has enhanced my understanding of the social power in Dutch healthcare situations I am embarking on, allowing me to self advocate. It hasn’t necessarily increased my epistemic traction because of the gap in collective hermeneutical resources, however the newfound knowledge supported me in recognising the concept of wholeness in disability as an identity, and a potential for thriving.

Disabled people have a right to access the epistemic intellectual resources that describe their experiences. Without ways of archiving and distributing the emotional labor of knowledge sharing with non-disabled folks, access making remains transactional and temporary. As such, people with more powerful social identities require underrepresented communities to keep educating them about the nature of their oppression. Whereas collective care practices that involve navigating (complex) access needs, are relational in nature and ongoing.

Because I have the privilege of being fluent in English, I had access to these books. Since the impact of understanding the politics of disablement has been life changing, a poignant question for me is: how can this rich archive of crip knowledge become avaible for Dutch speaking disabled folks in the Netherlands? So, I am currently compiling a Dutch crip lexicon, to make the language necessary for self-advocacy, crip culture literacy, and community building available to the community here.