Living Archives Interactive Website World Wide Release

The Living Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada has launched the ‘long awaited’ website on Friday Oct 24, 2014. You can explore the website now by typing in this URL: http://eugenicsarchive.ca/

BIG thanks to the technical team, Natasha Nunn (Tech team lead), Ben McMahen, and Colette Leung! Numerous Living Archives team members have contributed to the content.

In the weeks to come the site will be filled with more content as articles are still being returned from reviews and a few section are stil be worked on.

Please share the website and watch for new additions to come!

People With Disabilities React to Mannequins Created in Their Image

Fashion mannequins — the type you see constantly in clothing store windows — are generally what we think of as flawless specimens of the human form. But this project questions what we mean by “flawless”:

This project gives us an opportunity to experience Human Variation and bring into question how we represent ourselves.

This site has a short video that is worth watching.
http://jezebel.com/people-with-disabilities-react-to-mannequins-created-in-1475812519

Surviving Eugenics in the 21st Century: Our Stories Told

Join us in Edmonton on Monday October 21, 2013 at the Metro Cinema at the Garneau for the world premiere of Surviving Eugenics in the 21st Century: Our Stories Told. A series of unique short videos, survivors of Alberta’s eugenic era share their stories. What does eugenics mean now for a variety of people parenting, or considering parenting in contemporary Alberta?

Watch the trailer (at the end of this post!)

The ideas and practices aimed at improving “human breeding” known as eugenics were influential across North America in the first half of the 20th century. The Sexual Sterilization Act of Alberta was law in the province from 1928 until 1972 and was aimed to prevent what it called the “multiplication of the evil by transmission of the disability to progeny”.

The province of Alberta occupies a special place in this history. First, it is the province in which the vast majority of eugenic sterilizations in Canada were performed (approximately 90%), with British Columbia being the only other province to pass involuntary sterilization legislation that was explicitly eugenic. Alberta’s eugenic sterilization program was vigorously implemented until the repeal of the Sexual Sterilization Act of Alberta in 1972. Secondly, it was against the Province of Alberta that Leilani Muir won a landmark legal case in 1996 for wrongful sterilization and confinement, a case that has helped to preserve a rich documentary basis for understanding the history of eugenics in Western Canada.

The typical grounds for eugenic sterilization were that a person’s undesirable physical or mental conditions were heritable, and that those persons would not make suitable parents. Central amongst those targeted by such eugenic practices were people with a variety of disabilities, especially (but not only) developmental disabilities. Yet many other marginalized groups— single mothers, First Nations and Métis people, eastern Europeans, and poor people—were also disproportionately represented amongst those subject to eugenic ideas and practices, such as sterilization. An understanding of why, and of how eugenics operated as it did in Western Canada, is relevant not only to the 3.6 million Canadians with a disability, but to all Canadians who embrace human diversity and strive to build inclusive communities.

Surviving Eugenics in the 21st Century: Our Stories Told premieres at the Metro Cinema at the Garneau (8712 – 109 Street, Edmonton) on Monday October 21, 2013. Doors open at 6:30 pm and the film begins at 7:00 pm.

Join the film-makers, survivors, and other interviewees present for this world premiere!  Closed captioned (CC).  Sponsored by the Living Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada www.eugenicsarchive.ca  FREE ADMISSION

The trailer: http://youtu.be/2NREI24ugT0

The Sterilization of Leilani Muir

A new Wikipedia article about the National Film Board (NFB) documentary “The Sterilization of Leilani Muir” has been launched. The article is about the 1996 documentary directed by Glynis Whiting.  The documentary presents the story of Leilani Muir, starting when she was a young child and continues through her personal journey of her time at the Provincial Training School (Michener Centre) in Red Deer, Alberta, her sterilization and the launch of her successful lawsuit against the provincial government. The Living Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada held a showing of the film during the first Alberta Eugenic Awareness Week (AEAW) in 2011. The article can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sterilization_of_Leilani_Muir

Hope is NOT a Plan

Canadians with disabilities are about one and a half times as likely to be victims of violence as other Canadians. People with disabilities in Canada have civil rights on paper but not in practice. Canadian citizens, everyday, have their civil rights ruthlessly violated by their government.  This has to be stopped, because Hope is Not a Plan!

Disturbing Portrayal of Blindness

I’m used to bad portrayals of blindness and blind people—portrayals that fail to recognize the huge extent to which the challenges associated with blindness are created by negative attitudes, misconceptions about blindness, and badly designed products, services, and institutions. What I’m not used to is such a blatantly offensive and exploitative representation of blindness. This is truly one of the worst of recent years.

In Their Eyes

A video of photo journalism that captures the voices and faces of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. By John Lehmann.

Sesame Street Reaches Middle Age

As someone as interested as much in the sorts of people we as a society think valuable as in the processes that we use to produce more of those we value, and fewer of those we don’t, I was was struck by a brilliant post last week at Like a Whisper on a topic that might not be suspected of raising deep points about both these values and how we shape people to realize them: Sesame Street’s 40th anniversary. Like many people born in the past 50 or so years, I grew up on a steady diet of Sesame Street, initially in black and white in the back streets of Broken Hill, and later in full colour in the beach-laden northern suburbs of Perth.

I remember, quite vividly still, a particular episode that has made its way into family lore. My parents had decided that they needed to make a break from a gritty mining town in the outback of Western New South Wales for somewhere that at least had grass (really), or even water in visible supply, and took me on a trip with them east, touring through the eastern part of the state, through Tamworth (my first sight of real greenery), Port Macquarie, Coffs Harbour, and all the way up to Lismore, before torrential rainfall ended any more northerly ventures. While in Coffs Harbour, Sesame Street was doing its usual share of child-minding while my folks got on with other things. We were in some very cheap motel that included a coin-fed television, what we might think of as the early version of pay tv.

Think Differently About Autism

From the National Autistic Society, in the UK, a short video on bullying, Asperger Syndrome, and what it’s like; h/t to Asperger Square 8. The video forms part of the NAS’s I Exist and Think Differently about Autism campaigns, which have been ongoing for the past year or so.

Description of video, partial transcript, and further information and links beneath the fold.

Lebanese Whatsorts Rap

This Arabic rap, “Difference is Normal” was shot in Lebanon, Qatar, and Syria. Like the What-Sorts website it explores issues of human variation, particularly disability, but it does so through the haunting medium of Rap Music. It includes subtitles and there is a little sign language, but I don’t know which sign language it is. The particular version used in this music video was modified after the recent war in Lebanon and partly addresses the difficult issue of violence induced disabilities that result from war. That is how does society respect and treat the victims as individuals at the same time that we are trying to make martyrs and fuel outrage toward the other side.

We stand for …

This is a great video created by DeedeeMom, and shown on his YouTube channel. It was created for the YouTube “What do you stand for?” competition in 2007.

The video is short; it has music in the background but no talking and all the text is fully displayed. The text in the video reads:

Julia Serano’s “Cocky”

Author of Whipping Girl Julia Serano performing “Cocky”:

h/t to Womanist Musings, including for the transcript beneath the fold (small corrections made by me).

The Modern Pursuit of Human Perfection

On October 23rd last year, the What Sorts Network, in conjunction with the Canadian Association for Community Living and the Alberta Association for Community Living, sponsored a public dialogue at the University of Alberta called

The Modern Pursuit of Human Perfection
Defining Who is Worthy of Life

The event began with a panel of people who talked about their experiences with children, doctors, families, and disability. There were then several short commentaries, followed by some open discussion. The event was free and open to the public, and we have videocasts of all parts of the event to share.

Over the next month or so, we will put the videos of the public dialogue up on the What Sorts blog; each runs for 5-10 minutes or so. Today

Chinese, anyone?

Food for thought (groan). Here is journalist Jennifer 8. Lee’s recent ( July 2008 ) TED talk, “Who was General Tso? …”

Chinese as the Linux of the culinary dining experience. Yeah.

Some nice discussions of this at WoC PhD, to whom I tip my hat. Transcript after the cut.

Peter Singer on Parental Choice, Disability, and Ashley X

This post kicks off a series of posts at What Sorts that we hope will appear every Tuesday and Friday over the next few months called Thinking in Action. In the first instance, this series will offer commentaries on talks and discussions at the recent conference Cognitive Disability: A Challenge to Moral Philosophy. The aims of these Thinking in Action posts will be to generate and advance discussion of specific issues that arise in taking up the themes of the conference. The posts will typically feature a relatively short clip from a talk or discussion at the conference, followed by a commentary; transcripts of all excerpted video clips will appear at the end of each post. In light of our experience with this first (extended) round of posts, we’ll see whether we continue the series with clusters of posts with other thematic focuses. We will both tag and categorize each post with the series label “Thinking in Action” so that you can review them together, if you like, and we encourage the use of posts in the series in classrooms, in local discussion groups, and in organizations at the interface of government, university, and community. We will aim to make each of these self-contained, with the conference podcasts themselves serving as a larger reservoir of perspectives on cognitive disability on which you can draw. We hope that you will join in the discussions, both on the blog and beyond it.

To help us get some idea of what readers know about the conference podcasts we’ll be discussing, here’s a quick poll that we encourage you to take before proceeding.

As one might expect, Peter Singer’s talk at the conference Cognitive Disability: A Challenge to Moral Philosophy, presents ideas that Singer is well-known for. Amongst these are views that draw parallels between animals, on the one hand, and individuals with disabilities, on the other, especially those with “profound mental retardation”, a medical category that includes, amongst other features, having an IQ of 25 or below. I want to kick off this series of blog posts not with a discussion of that general comparison—though Dick Sobsey might well take that up in the next few posts—but by concentrating on something in Singer’s talk focused on the issue of parental rights and disability. Here is Singer, toward the end of his talk, presenting the perspectives of parents. Singer points out that, as a group, parents of children with disabilities divide over their views of their own children. Although it is a little unclear, even from the fuller context, precisely what “this issue” is that parents divide over, it concerns pain, death, and quality of life:

[This clip is from Singer’s talk at the Cognitive Disability conference, podcast #15: 33.30 – 38.02] If you are having trouble playing the video above, the full transcript is provided at the end of the post, and you can also try Youtube directly by clicking right here.

I want to raise three points about what Singer says here.

BroadReach Screening Room

Norm Kunc and Emma Van der Klift have been leaders in the Canadian Disability Advocacy movement for many years, and are highly respected and sought after international speakers and consultants on disability issues. Among other achievements, they have produced some thoughtful and interesting short videos, such as Euthanasia Blues and Credo for Support.

What is Experimental Philosophy? The Video!

In this short video, Eugene Mirman gives an answer to this question that takes you through one of the best-known “experiments” in the newly developing field of experimental philosophy–one developed by Josh Knobe, whom you can see at Bloggingheads.TV at length in conversation with John Horgan about experimental philosophy back in February.

[Sorry, no captions for this video but there is a transcript below the cut. Despite all the developments on captioning at the “front end” via Youtube, we still haven’t found a systematic way to caption that we can afford, time or money-wise, at the “back end”. But we’re still working on it. …]

Manypetunias asked way back when–How is experimental philosophy different from social psychology?–a question you might have after watching this video. Short answer: mostly because the sorts of intuitions that it probes, at least in cases like these, are those that feature in classic philosophical issues (in this case, moral responsibility). X-phi-ers, despite burning the armchair of traditional philosophical analysis, typically are still interested in the questions as their more sedentary predecessors. They just don’t want to sit down!

h/t to Experimental Philosophy, and also congratulations on a vid that will promote interest in the question: What is x-phil?.

Positively Autistic

Autism Awareness icon

CBC News has just run a special, Postively Autistic, that many will find of interest–the link to the site is beneath the fold below as well as a transcript. The video runs 19 minutes, and features Amanda Baggs, Ari Ne’eman, and Michelle Dawson, amongst others. The site for the special also contains a lot of other information. General drift: representation of autism as a positive human variation that stands in need of social acceptance, and links this view to the disability rights movement and the idea of neurodiversity. It’s a bit more choppy than I would have liked, and has very articulate autistics (like Baggs and Ne’eman) speaking for auties as a whole. Maybe this is a good way to start with introducing the idea of autism as a form of natural human variation, but we might push further and represent more of this variation, some of which folks will find more disturbing. (Here having Dawson in here is a bonus, since while she’s incredibly articulate, she also conveys a few more clues about the kind of variation one might find on the spectrum. Sadly, there’s not an extra piece on her, only on Laurent Mottron, whom she works with in Montreal, on the CBC website. I suspect that was a personal choice of Dawson’s.)

To be sure, this is not a way of saying

Saturday Night Live (SNL) parody of Lennon sisters mocking disabled people

A discussion on the Disability Studies in the Humanities listserv has centred around a skit recently performed on this American-produced late-night variety show. While SNL prides itself on being an alternative to mainstream television which pushes the limits of conventional cultural attitudes and mores, the skit serves to bolster deeply-entrenched biases, stereotypes, and ideas about disabled people (and disabled women in particular) as revolting, sexually disqualified, and so on. Check it out at the link below (uncaptioned of course):

http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/the-lawrence-welk-show/727501/

Acknowledgements to Tobin Siebers, Margaret Finkand, and  Rosemarie Garland Thomson on DS-HUM.

Pollyannaism about polygamy: Martha Nussbaum on Mormon history

Picture of Martha Nussbaum

Back in May in a blog post on the University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog, Martha Nussbaum offered some thoughts about both the history of Mormon polygamy in the United States and about attitudes toward polygamy more generally. I’m sympathetic to much of what Nussbaum says here but think that she’s wrong both about that history and about the more general attitudes in play.

Nussbaum critiques the negative views of American public opinion about Mormon polygamy, saying that

Mormon polygamy of the 19th century was not child abuse. Adult women married by consent, and typically lived in separate dwellings, each visited by the husband in turn. In addition to their theological rationale, Mormons defended the practice with social arguments – in particular that polygamous men would abandon wives or visit prostitutes less frequently. Instead of answering these arguments, however, Americans hastened to vilify Mormon society, publishing semi-pornographic novels that depicted polygamy as a hotbed of incest and child abuse.

While Nussbaum does acknowledge the patriarchal nature of (Mormon) polygamy, I suspect that she is both painting too rosy a picture of the history of Mormon polygamy, as well as mis-diagnosing the root of the distaste for polygamy in the popular mind. Such distaste runs deep alright, but the problem is not with polygamy per se. Below the fold is a bit more on each of these points, including some YouTube videos and transcripts, both serious and more humorous.