Mark Willis blogs at a blind flaneuer. He is editor of Research Enterprise at Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine.
Re-Imagining Accessibility
Re-Imagining Accessibility is a series of talks scheduled in April 2007. It also is an ongoing project exploring a blind writer’s pursuit of lifelong learning, literacy, and access to information technology. Without spurning the legal framework provided by fair use in copyright law and reasonable accommodation in disability law, now is the time to look beyond rights-based strategies to expand the means and meanings of accessibility. Re-Imagining Accessibility affirms that people with disabilities are actively engaged in the work of making adaptations and negotiating accommodations. This represents a significant form of cultural production. It is creative work, and its energies, insights, and experiences need to flourish in any vision of an emerging Creative Age.
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 Blowback
The concept should be obvious, and you can think of it in terms of policy wonks reverse-engineering the Golden Rule. It sounds like one of Newton’s laws of physics, but we don’t perceive much Newtonian order anymore. We see asymmetrical power relations wherever we turn. Even our military, after trillions of dollars spent on weapons acquisition, needs to retool for asymmetrical warfare.
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Foot Rage and the Blind Flaneur
There must be a name for this kind of sickness. I call it foot rage. I began to get a grip on it when I realized one day that the drivers of those SUV's and riding lawn mowers entertained the same sick thoughts. They call it road rage. The symptoms are much the same - the anger, the impatience, the grandiosity, the finger flipping, the foul swearing. Some drivers even keep guns in their cars to defend against the road rage of others. A white cane feels like a pretty slim stick by comparison. [Follow the link to read a prelude of this oral performance piece. It premiered at the 2006 Multiple Perspectives on Access, Inclusion, and Disability Conference at The Ohio State University on April 17.]
Grandpa's Square
Everyone else knows it as Nathan Phillips Square, the heart of the city. But to the Toronto family who opened their hearts to me, it will always be Grandpa's Square. Nathan Phillips was the "Mayor of All the People" in the 1950s and 60s. He played a leading role in building the new City Hall fronted by the plaza that bears his name, which sparked Toronto's transformation into a showcase of international architecture. When you visit, look for the bronze sundial on the rise above the skating rink, Nate's gift to the city. |
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Bottom-Feeder: Notes on the Ecology of Negotiating Accommodations
It happened when I was traveling from New Orleans to Dayton via Atlanta's Hartsfield International Airport. The day began with carefree dancing in the street at the French Quarter Festival, and it almost ended on the tarmac in Atlanta in the middle of a terror
alert. When I look back now I realize there were portents of this trajectory. It was the peak of "major combat operations" in the current Iraq war. The top news story that day - the story repeated over and over again as I passed from airport to airport on my journey home - was the toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad.
Osip Mandelstam
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A Word is the Search for It
In the autumn of 1933 Osip Mandelstam wrote a seditious poem that sealed his fate. He composed it on the elusive plane of thought and language that psychologist Lev Vygotsky called inner speech. Mandelstam never committed the poem to paper. He recited it aloud to only a handful of friends. But it quickly burned the ears of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. The head of Stalin's secret police knew the poem by heart and recited it with sadistic relish. Vygotsky may have heard it, too, although there is no evidence that he betrayed his friend. Using the "enforced subtlety" of subtext and secret writing, poet and psychologist shared a proscribed life of the mind in the shadow of Stalin's Great Terror. This essay is a search to recover something of that life: the knowledge that a word removed from motive is a dead thing. |
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