Writing a Portrait of Linda Ware: An Invitation to (Re)Imagine Dis(ability) Through Arts and the Humanities

• In Event: Imagining Disability Otherwise: The Impact of Dr. Linda P. Ware's Scholarship and Mentoring in Educational Contexts and Beyond

Abstract

In Imagine Disability Otherwise (2016), Disability Studies scholar Linda Ware invites the audience to reflect on their personal experiences with disability. She tells her students, “There’s a story being told to you about education.” Ware explains how the story of disability in education, as in other ‘helping’ disciplines like psychology, has largely been told through a medical lens, whereby we are trained to hunt for and find disability in the bodies or minds of our students. Through her collection of written words Ware invites us to re(imagine) the meaning we make and values we ascribe to human variation. She explains, “It is not my intention to minimize the experiences of learning disability but, rather, to invite readers to consider how human difference, regardless of disability category, has been constituted as a historically devalued life” (Ware, 2011, p.194). She takes up the issue of societal readiness to recognize disability for its commonality of life experience rather than its exceptionality (p.195).

Like Linda’s students, I too had been trained to find disability and write a child’s story based on a diagnosis, to prescribe remedies for their non-normative responses to generalized, often formulaic instruction. For years as a Special Education teacher I struggled against the structures that practiced labeling and sorting children, that missed opportunities to explore children’s (and our own) creativity. My early career was in documentary filmmaking where every production involved collaboration, and our focus was about storytelling. I had dreamed of writing children’s books, but instead worked at Children’s Television Workshop. Decades later during my doctoral studies I welcomed Linda’s invitation to join her in collaboration with colleagues from other disciplines, especially with artists to look differently.

Linda’s collaborator Riva Lehrer, faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and instructor in the Medical Humanities Departments of Northwestern University, describes how her [art] work is “heavily invested in story” (2020, 11:30min.). Ware (2011) beautifully describes Lehrer’s painting Pattern and then explains the problematic nature of "reading" disability as an exclusively pathological condition or an exclusively cultural construct when, in fact, both readings merit a more complex understanding to end the binary debate” (p.195-6). Ware’s work alongside Lehrer and documentarians Mitchell and Snyder (2008; 2020), informs my own teaching about Disability Studies. As a student I viewed one of Mitchell and Snyder’s early documentaries, Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back (1997) that documented the story of Disability Culture:
Our video evokes an intimacy with its interviewees and performers…[it] embodies a visual revolutionary praxis: get the faces of our community on screen, step back, and watch people fall in love with them rather than assume a false repugnance or artificial distance.
Their current film documents the murders of over 300,000 disabled people in WWII. While designing a new DS course for the general education curriculum, I will draw upon not only Linda Ware’s expansive work in Disability Studies, but also those with whom she collaborated over the years, across disciplines, forms, and continents, to (re)imagine (dis)ability through the arts.

Author

• Janet S. Sauer, Lesley University