Author: hfoleck

Here is a link to our final paper on language and autism.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Fpfbu88TC0iPAElLGKBazftbqwJ0dUyO6acYJWOHwGw/edit?usp=sharing

Hannah Foleck (writer), Emily Kile, Daniel Hoffman, Benjamin Sweeney

To Kill a Mockingbird

B: Scout dressing up as a Ham symbolizes anything? Ham comes from pigs does that mean anything?

H: ends on a climactic note of the murder of Bob Ewell, the idea of saving Boo Radley from the eyes of the public after killing Bob even though it was in defense of children. There is a worry that he will be accused or condemed for the murder becuase of his disability. “Let the dead bury the dead” why even bring it up to court in the first place

B: Did Bob ewell face justice?

H: would a court case even be righteous? We saw bob get away with essentially murder the first time simply by lying his way through court so why couldnt he do it again? On top of that the only other person in the case would be Boo who has a disability which makes him different giving Bob an advantage over him even if he is guilty. 

B: Harper lee did a poetic justice by killing Bob just like how Tom was murdered. I think he faced justice even though it might have been more satisfying to see him go to court and jail

D: maybe it wouldn’t have gone the same way, the court case, because lee wrote it so that the court is not just, we know what a court case can look like against an innocent man

B: should maybella receive punishment for what she did?

Bibi Haldar

D: man not medicine will heal all, the idea I got from the story

H: i almost expected for the people in the town to find her dead

E: liked it up until the last sentence, couldn’t tell who the “we” was, really liked how they kept pushing to make sure she was ok, continued to try to help her even after her cousin was treating her so horribly

H: how the town continues to help Bibi through the whole story, helping her when she has seizures and when she lives alone and again when she opens her own store to support herself and her baby. 

E: character with the best morals tend to be less interesting to read but the townspeople in this are the ones i want to emulate

H: terrible treatment that comes from her family, the cousin not caring about her seizures 

E: takes all of her agency away by refusing to help her in any way, says he knows what’s best for her but it is actually what’s best for him. Disabled people are seen as a burden for people, especially economically, a harmful mindset, this reading was interesting because the only time there were money issues are when the townspeople stopped buying from him because he treated her terribly.

H: the idea of her being contagious to the baby is just giving her family another reason to hate her and turn her into an outsider. It seems to me that the relationships that she makes with the townspeople and her baby are what helped her 

E: positive relationships cured her

Hannah Foleck (writer) , Emily Kile, Lauren Reiff, Katherine Blair

L: Connection with Tom Robinson, with arm and the systematic institutionalized racism, especially in the court case. We associate doctors with healers so when we see doctors being evil there is a break where people find it hard to believe. We want to trust our doctors but when it comes to racism or disability there can be lying. There were experiments done on slaves like the nazi experiments

K: the sanbow stereotype, trauma of capture shock and resistance led to the degraded mental state of slaves. Learning about the history of slavery we learned about the poor treatment, but we often gloss over the mental trauma

L: people who kept slaves used the mental trauma as a confirmation bias, when the phys issues emerge from the abuse and rape, they would use this as a reason to keep slaves because they are incapable of taking care of themselves.

H: This would give them a reason to do experiments on other people such as slaves or people with disabilities  

L: comparison to nazis in the way that there are experiments done on people because they are viewed as less than

E: slavery and insitutionalization of people with disabilities and the experimentation is all rooted in taking away the agency of people with their own bodies

L: when someone fought back against the experimenters they would physically disable them to keep them docile for the experiments so they couldn’t fight back.  

E: nazis experiments was rooted in the american eugenics experiments, many of these theories came from america

L: medical records were kept incredible, eugenics was viewed as a very respected field

H: They did not see people who were different to them as real people which allowed them to do these experiments and treat them worse without feeling badly about it

P: connections between eudenicists vs societal impules, slavery compared to the holocaust 

L: “white medicine” vs “black medicine”, viewed as not even human, as though their bodies would not respond the same way with the same medicines. Afircan american people being responsible for their own medicines and not even being treated. 

K: mixed children not truly belonging anywhere, not one really wants them because they don’t belong to the black people or the white people

H: the dad having to pretend he is a drunk in order to be accepted for having mixed children

K: a black person is the same as any person all people lie and there are always bad people, essentially separating him from everyone else

L: Toms hand, the disability emerged from working conditions gives people a reason to separate him even further

K: using his disability as a valid point as to why he couldn’t have done it, and people dismissing the only piece of valid evidence. Interesting how Tom explained his story, May made the first move on him so she had to respond in this extreme way, by accusing him and her entire testimony was made up of lies. 

H: once they started this lie they couldn’t back down, they needed everyone to believe them otherwise they become even less than they already were. There is a sense of shame that comes from being interested in a person of color or someone who is different from you.

Hannah Foleck (writer), Emily Kile, Emily Litsinger, Benjamin Sweeny, Daniel Huffman

Generally enjoyed book, nice writing style and prose, quick read

D: first 20 pages introduced to 2 characters with disabilities

H:a way to deal with life and mental illness is compartmentalizing

EL: is mental illness considered a disability because it can be invisible and is not commonly seen

B: some people find it hard to consider ptsd a disability, disability is considered something you are born with, ptsd is something you develop

D: called shell shocked, not ptsd, shell shocked sounds temporary, refer to it as ptsd not shell shocked, not easy to come back from

H: temporary disability is not considered as bad in the long run opposed to permanent disability

D: are mental disabilities considered real disabilities

EK:it is possible to be temporarily diabled, ptsd can be recovered from but not everyone, there are ways to cope for some people but not everyone, good days versus bad days, disability is not static. Is there benefit to refer to it as shell shocked because of the time in which the book took place. Benefits and drawbacks of both names

B: different ways of coping with all mental illnesses, physical disability is a little bit different 

EK: never 100% apply a modern diagnosis to historical, even fictional, cases. Such as female hysteria which umbrellaed over so many other diagnoses

B: The yellow wallpaper, noted to have similarities with historical diagnoses of women

D: Eva, did she take her own leg off for the insurance money?

EK: she killed plum, refers back to her own insecurities, forced into the position of a poor disabled mother, as a result she hardened herself against others, showing love in a very fiscal way. Cut herself off emotionally, considered it unacceptable for Plum to act like that as a grown up. 

D: kill or cure, she killed a disabled character because she couldn’t cure him. 

H: won’t let her son revert back to this infantile state, she refused to accept his newfound disability and chose his fate for him.

This short story follows a swallow, who is about to begin his migration to Egypt, when he is interrupted by the statue of the happy prince, standing in the center of the town. The swallow spends the entire story helping the prince give away parts of himself in order to help the poor and starving people of his town. The story ends with both the swallow and the happy prince dying and being brought to heaven by one of God’s angels. This story is told from the perspective of a privileged person and therefore gives an interesting light on the subject of disability. The Happy Prince gives us an insight on how people without disabilities see people who have a disability as someone that they can fix.

With a first reading of this short story you see a privileged prince, who has lived a life so wonderful that he has never known sadness, giving everything he has left to make the people of his town happy. He gives until he has nothing left and is melted down and thrown away. Upon first glance this can be seen as a wholesome story, one about giving and making the lives of people less fortunate than you better. When reading the story through the lens of disabilities studies this story takes a slight darker turn. The story has to be read as the prince being a nondisabled person and all of the poor people being the disabled characters. 

The prince turns into a nondisabled person who has never seen a person with a disability before. He has lived his whole life assuming that everyone was like him and that he was “normal”. When he dies and gets turned into a statue he sees, for the first time, what life is really like. There are people with disabilities everywhere in this world, whether they be visible or invisible. The prince has never seen this before and has to take in this information and deal with the reality of life. 

The conclusion that he ends up coming to is that he has to fix these people. In the story he gives the poor people money, and that is a nice thing to do in real life, but when viewing this story through a disabilities studies standpoint what you see is that the prince is in fact trying to cure the disability. Instead of ever leaving his castle when he was alive, and meeting these people and trying to make his whole kingdom better, he tries to end the problem altogether. He takes on the kill or cure mentality. The poor people are depressing to him, so he wants to get rid of them by making them richer. There is obviously a problem with the town as a whole. 

The better solution would have been to see the issue of the town as a whole and try to create a better living situation for the people living there long term. The money will run out, but the corrupt power that is running the town is not going anywhere. It is important for good people to try and find long term solutions to the social problems that people with disabilities face instead of trying to hide the problem behind gold trimmed curtains.

Hannah Foleck (Writer), Emily Kile, Jessie Harper, Eliana Black,

Keona May

Em: Disability studies have been about having people with disabilities being the subject of research rather than the researchers

H: creating a space where people with disabilities were test subjects

El: Very dehumanizing

Em: There is so little room for people with disabilities in academia, especially the instructor, because people assume that people with disabilities are incompetant and cannot understand higher learning

El: researchers and teachers on the subject tend to not be disabled and the view point becomes biased. Useful to have someone with first hand experience as well as an education

K: representation in this field is so crucial and it is not happening, ex: had tweedy for black women writers, talk about what it means to have a man teaching about women writers. Having the experience of being a part of the movement creates an entirely new narrative. 

El: provides much more impact

J: Having a relativity to the issue ie: disability, even having a disabled person in your family or friend group

El: education is so based on text books and biased research done by people who have never even been around someone with a disability. More real life experiences.

H: physical barriers against people with disabilities theaters in UMW are crazy ex: My class had a project where we checked all theaters and None of them on campus met up with the ADA

J: Accessibility on campus is essentially nonexistence, the excuse of keeping the campus historically accurate to not making the necessary changes is ridiculous. 

K: Would we be considered an ableist society, if people with disabilities created the infrastructure, it only becomes a disability or issue if someone creates a barrier for someone to get through. If ramps were a norm it would not be an issue

Kim E., Lauren Lemon, Jessie Harper, Hannah Foleck (writer)

Kim: body positivity movement, getting rid of the negative connotations around words like fat, and being used just as an adjective, same time as the disabilities movement and the body positivity movement, fetishizatiion around the two groups at the same time?

Jessie: All bodies are beautiful, body positivity started in the 1960s, right around the exact same time as the disability movement

Kim: Depending on if fat people will lose weight similar to the kill or cure, people with disabilities are only accepted if they die or can be cured, getting rid of the idea that it is taboo to talk about these things.

Jessie: very social media based, acceptance has come out as we can see people who are physically different from us being very similar to us in our souls. Nice words vs nasty words, is the word special part of the nice words. 

Hannah: special used to be a nice word, but today it has been turned around and used against people who are different from you

Kim: ties into the infantilization of people with disabilities, seen as children their whole lives. All of the nice words are being called that from non-disabled people, not taking into perspective the feelings and ideas of disabled people

Jessie: it fees correct but did you ask anyone who is disabled, “isn’t that special” being turned into “isn’t that dumb”

Lauren: It’s not always visible, making sure the nice words are a part of your normal vocabulary not just specializing how you talk about people based on who you are around

Kim: language is fluctuating, what is PC has changed over the years and learning which words are ok and not ok.

Jessie: the first rule should just be to ask, ask your questions respectfully and learn the right ways to treat respect each person on an individual basis

Kim: retaking over these words and making them into prideful words, disabled people need to be a part of the conversation, outsiders tend to run the conversation and talk over people with disabilities.

Hannah: Invalid vs Invaild, calling people with disabilities literally invalid by naming them something like that.

Kim: We still today have forced sterilization of people with disabilites literally keeping them from reproducing, treating them as less than human in one of the most basic ways. 

Jessie: seeing people as invalid dehumanizes them even to the people who see them as valuable

Kim: testing to see if your baby has disabilities before they are born, can be used to help parents prepare for the financial hardships that that may entail, but this can be taken and used to get rid of babies with disabilities before they are even born, can be used in a very gross way but hopefully gets used in a better way to help prepare 

In the 60s and then resurgence when medicare was slashed, disabled people protesting now for the same things they were protesting for 60 years ago, it sucks to see people fighting for the same things that they have been for years.