The Unruly Salon: unfasten your seatbelts, take no prisoners, make no apologies!

Abstract

This article examines the multi‐faceted contributions of disability studies including the work of artists and scholars inspired by The Unruly Salon, a disability arts, culture and scholarship series held at Green College, the University of British Columbia January–March 2008 to substantive citizenship and cultural politics. The article examines various tropes of normalcy through the new epistemological and methodological lenses and resources posed by disability studies projects. It shows how social, structural, cultural and material barriers construct some as ‘disabled’ and others as non‐disabled and puts forward ways to connect social models and human rights’ frameworks with a cultural politics of situated disability narratives that have the power to perform back to such normalizing regimes through disability arts, culture and scholarship. In so doing, the article demonstrates how disability cultural politics and scholarship lay claim to specific transformative counter‐publics. Scholars in disability studies from the Unruly Salon marshal new and transformative forms of social citizenship by, with, and for disabled people to create generative and innovative public discourses about disability as difference. Qualitative research is challenged to think anew its methodologies and epistemologies in light of the powerful difference that disability variously makes.

Keywords:

• disability
• arts
• culture
• imagery
• education

Acknowledgements

This issue is dedicated to Dorothy E. Smith, Alex Lubet, Fazal Rizvi, Catherine Frazee, and Stephen Petrina. It would not have come about without their unflagging support for grounded politics.

Notes

1. The title was inspired by the opening remarks of Catherine Frazee (12 January 2008) given at the Unruly Salon, Green College, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia. The text of her remarks is being published in the Review of Disability Studies: An International Journal (in press) and scheduled for publication in 2009.

2. Standpoint epistemology is an unfortunate unwittingly ableist term when read though the lens of disability studies. It privileges the metaphor of standing or walking as the normative body of its epistemology though its proponents support the idea that work from the voices of particular oppressed groups brings both validity and epistemic truthfulness.

3. Comprised exclusively of people with physical and sensory impairments, the UPIAS manifesto entitled The Fundamental Principles of Disability (1976) contains the profound assertion that it is society that disables people with impairments: In our view it is society which disables physically impaired people. Disability (emphasis added) is something imposed on top of our impairments by the way we are unnecessarily isolated and excluded from full participation in society. Disabled people are therefore an oppressed group in society’ (UPIAS 1976, 14). The terms disabled, persons with a disability, etc. are contested. For a lucid account, see Titchkosky (2001).

4. Such a view is captured well in the international movement of people with disabilities stated well in Colin Barnes’s history (2003) which I quote here: ‘Disability culture, on the other hand, is therefore a minority, sub, or subordinate culture. It emerged from within, and is associated with, the international disabled people’s movement, and reflects the norms and values of disabled activists, their supporters and allies. Key elements of disability culture are the redefinition of disability by disabled people and their organizations, and the radical socio/political interpretation of disability commonly referred to as ‘the social model of disability.’

5. Skydive is the title of a play featuring a disabled and non‐disabled free‐floating aerial‐suspended characters (Kerr 2007).

6. Alison Tom, Judith Mossoff and Tim Stainton at the University of British Columbia paved the way in this regard. I salute them.

7. Virginia Wolfe (1989) A Room of One’s Own. Harvest Books, Fort Washington, PA (1989). Chapter 4, quoted in Frazee (2008, 2).

8. ‘Inmates’ was the term doctors and colonial administrators used in records to describe those committed to the Asylum, formerly known as ‘PHI.’ It is not actually an inaccurate term, considering confinement in the earliest stages of asylum‐building often involved being jailed in prisons (‘Gaols’– the British spelling of jails) and later after the advent of asylums, being transferred from the local goals to the Asylum.