This is a bright, vectory-style image of someone laughing, someone else signing, and something in a wheelchair protesting. There is also the disability pride multi-color bolt. — Instagram: @oddi.jessica

WINTER 2024

January 17, 2024 (details TBD)

B.D. Maroon will talk about her book Black Lives, American Love: Essays on Race and Resistance, which deals in part with her work for Black community health during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in Florida. Event will be hybrid.

February, 2024 (details TBD)

Jennifer Lunden will talk about her book American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the 19th Century Woman who Brought Me Back to Life, which is about chronic fatigue, chemical sensitivity, and gender. Event will be hybrid.

February 23-24, 2024 @ Indexical (details TBD)

Jay Afrisando and collaborators will host a two-day visit in Santa Cruz from a New York-based artist collective thingNY to present Jay’s work [opera captions].

SPRING 2023

Monday April 17,7:30 pm & Tuesday April 18,1:30-4:30 pm (in person; Communications 139)

Screening of “The Tuba Thieves” & Workshop with filmmaker Alison O’Daniel

Alison O’Daniel is a d/Deaf visual artist and filmmaker who builds a visual, aural, and haptic vocabulary that reveals (or proposes) a politics of sound that exceeds the auditory. O’Daniel’s film ‘The Tuba Thieves’ had its world premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and is currently on the film festival circuit. O’Daniel is a United States Artist 2022 Disability Futures Fellow and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow in Film/Video. She is represented by Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles and is an Assistant Professor of Film at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Event details. These are three intertwined, wavy black lines that serve to break up the sections of the website.

Wednesday, April 26, 4-5:35 pm (in person; Theater Arts Studio A104*)

“Constructing the Prosthetic Body in Claire Cunningham’s Dance Theater” – Discussion/Workshop with Krista Miranda

This is a black and white photo of a white woman who is laughing, in profile. She's had brown hair and is wearing glasses. Queer crip writer and interdisciplinary artist Krista K. Miranda, Ph.D. is invested in the nuances of embodiment, imagining better futures for queer and crip life, and recuperating the figure of the non-reproducing woman. Her in-progress monographs, Playing with Your Parts: Dismantling Bodily “Wholeness” through Queer and Crip Performance and Non-Reproducing Women: On the Failures of Feminist Coalition in Protest, Performance, and Practice are grounded in performance studies, gender and sexuality studies, and critical disability studies. Her work can be found in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies’ Special Issue: Staging Feminist Futures, The Oxford Handbook on Dance, Theater, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, and Pornographies: Critical Positions.

Suggested viewing and reading: Claire Cunningham and Jess Curtis, “The Way You Look”; Miranda, Krista. “I wasn’t made to click. But with you I Click. We. Click.”: Constructing the Prosthetic Body in Claire Cunningham’s Dance Theater” (see email for attachments)

This event take place using Cynthia’s Disability and Performance class as a platform, and her students will be required to attend. Masks are requested to be worn by all attendees; we will have some masks available. The course is held in a dance studio, which makes it easy to move or lie down. The studio does not have standard furniture, but folding chairs will be available for those folks who prefer not to sit on the floor. No shoes are allowed on the dance floors, and no food or drink other than water is allowed. Wheelchair access to the Theater Arts A Building requires going through the B Building elevator. If you were to park at the disabled spots behind the eXspace/E100, next to C102, you would follow the ground floor path along the C Building to the elevator and take it down to the first floor A Building level. Alternately, if you park up near the circle / media theater, you would take a path around the front of the eXspace, turn the corner and then go along the second level pathway of the C Building to that same elevator. See the attached map for more clarity. If you have further access questions, please contact Cynthia at clee185@ucsc.edu.

Monday, May 1, 4-5:30 pm (Zoom; CART provided)

Discussion/Workshop with Syrus Marcus Ware

Syrus Marcus Ware is a Vanier Scholar, visual artist, activist, curator, and educator. Using painting, installation, and performance, Syrus works with and explores social justice frameworks and Black activist culture. His work has been shown widely, including solo shows at Grunt Gallery and Wil Aballe Art Projects in 2021. His work has been featured as part of the inaugural Toronto Biennial of Art in 2019 in conjunction with the Ryerson Image Centre (Antarctica and Ancestors, Do You Read Us? (Dispatches from the Future)), as well as for the Bentway’s Safety in Public Spaces Initiative in 2020 (Radical Love). His performance works have been part of festivals across Canada, including at Cripping The Stage (Harbourfront Centre, 2016 & 2019), Complex Social Change (University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, 2015) and Decolonizing and Decriminalizing Trans Genres (University of Winnipeg, 2015). Syrus is a core-team member of Black Lives Matter—Toronto and is an Assistant Professor in the School of the Arts (Theatre and Film Studies) at McMaster University. These are three intertwined, wavy black lines that serve to break up the sections of the website.

Friday, May 5, 11a-2p (hybrid, Zoom room TBD)

Encore Papers & Presentations, agenda forthcoming!

This is a neon sign that says Encore! in all caps. The photo is black and white. To get to know each other and our work, we’re doing a very low effort, free event (that you can add to your CV!). For this event, we invite you to give a presentation/conference paper/similar that you already have that is connected to disability studies/justice, that you are currently working on and want feedback on, etc. If the presentation already exists, you do not need to edit their presentations – you can begin by providing context for the presentation’s original/intended audience if needed. More details are here. These are three intertwined, wavy black lines that serve to break up the sections of the website.

**Monday, May 8, 4-5:35 pm (in person; Theater Arts Studio A104*)**

“Theory of the Freak Show” – Discussion/Workshop with Michael Chemers

Michael Chemers researches the “dramaturgy of empathy,” a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary inquiry that seeks to understand how performance culture fosters compassion and kindness (and conversely, fear and hatred). His work on the dramaturgy of empathy has led him to research and publish in fields as diverse as Disability Studies, New Media Studies, Social Robotics, Shakespearean Studies, Monster Theory, and the Underground Circus Movement. His books include Staging Stigma: A Critical Examination of the American Freak Show (2008), Ghost Light: An Introductory Handbook for Dramaturgy (2010), and The Monster in Theatre History: This Thing of Darkness (2017). He is the chair of the Department of Performance, Play and Design and director of the UCSC Center for Monster Studies.

Suggested viewing and reading: Matt Fraser, Born Freak part 1, part 2, part 3; Chemers, Michael. “Exploitation and Transgression.” In Staging Stigma. (see email for attachment)

*This event take place using Cynthia’s Disability and Performance class as a platform, and her students will be required to attend. Masks are requested to be worn by all attendees; we will have some masks available. The course is held in a dance studio, which makes it easy to move or lie down. The studio does not have standard furniture, but folding chairs will be available for those folks who prefer not to sit on the floor. No shoes are allowed on the dance floors, and no food or drink other than water is allowed. Wheelchair access to the Theater Arts A Building requires going through the B Building elevator. If you were to park at the disabled spots behind the eXspace/E100, next to C102, you would follow the ground floor path along the C Building to the elevator and take it down to the first floor A Building level. Alternately, if you park up near the circle / media theater, you would take a path around the front of the eXspace, turn the corner and then go along the second level pathway of the C Building to that same elevator. See the attached map for more clarity. If you have further access questions, please contact Cynthia at clee185@ucsc.edu.

Tuesday May 9, 7:30 PM, Studio C

Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution – Screening and Q&A with Directors Jim Lebrecht and Nicole Newnham, Producer Sara Bolder (not hosted by the Disability Studies cluster)

This Oscar-nominated documentary focuses on a groundbreaking summer camp that galvanizes a group of teens with disabilities to help build a movement, forging a new path toward greater equality. Executive produced by President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama. (co-sponsored by SocDoc, Social Practice Arts Research Center, and Porter College) These are three intertwined, wavy black lines that serve to break up the sections of the website.

Wednesday, May 17, 4-5:35 pm (Zoom; CART provided)

“Ecosoma Worlds” – Discussion/Workshop with Petra Kuppers

This is the cover of Petra Kuppers' Eco Soma. It's very dark and dreary. Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist and a community performance artist. She creates participatory community performance environments that think/feel into public space, tenderness, site-specific art, access and experimentation, using ecosomatics, performance, and speculative writing to engage audiences. She is the Artistic Director of The Olimpias, an international disability culture collective, and co-creates Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio, with her wife, poet and dancer Stephanie Heit, from their home in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Her most recent academic book project, Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters, appeared as an open-access text with the University of Minnesota Press in early 2022.

Suggested viewing and reading: Leah Lakshmi in Sins Invalid 2009 – Part 1; Leah Lakshmi in Sins Invalid 2009 – Part 2; Leah Lakshmi in Sins Invalid 2009 – Part 3; Petra Kuppers, Starship Somatics; (also see readings sent via email) These are three intertwined, wavy black lines that serve to break up the sections of the website.

WINTER QUARTER

Sami Schalk’s Black Disability Politics

This is the cover of Black Disability Politics by Sami Schalk. The cover is black and the titling is light yellow with red lines. The first event in 2023 for the THI Research Cluster for “Disability Geographies and Disability Time Travels” will be held on Friday, February 24th from 11-12:30 via Zoom. We will be reading the Introduction and Chapter 1 from Sami Schalk’s new book Black Disability Politics (Duke 2022). We are very excited about this as our first text because it brings together many of the themes that are central to this cluster’s work: the importance of intersectionality to the project of disability justice and the role of disabled Black communities in creating disability justice movements; the importance of history in the “time travel” of imagining disability futures — not to mention that for those of us in this part of California, much of the history Schalk is engaging is, in fact, local history, attached to the geographies many of us encounter every day.

The book is available in our shared DS-THI drive, through the library, or wherever you like to order books. These are three intertwined, wavy black lines that serve to break up the sections of the website. THI Cluster Meeting

Friday, December 2 @ 11a

Goals and Priorities
Introductions: forming community
Events

Missed the first meeting and want the notes? Cluster members can find notes in the DS-THI Team Drive.