The following is a rough transcript of the episode of Talking Radical Radio for the week of August 15 to 19, 2022.
Scott Neigh 0:08
My name is Scott Neigh, and this is Talking Radical Radio
Theme music
Dev R 0:30
Disability is not something that only affects specific disabled people. Everybody has varying abilities, they have varying skills, they have varying strengths, and capitalism, society, all of these things really try to enforce an idea of what a normal typical productive human being as and for a lot of us, disabled and non disabled, like, we don’t really fit those categories.
Scott Neigh 1:03
That’s the voice of Dev Ramsawakh. They and Kate Welsh are today’s guests on talking Radical Radio. This show brings you grassroots voices from across Canada, we give you the chance to hear many different people who are involved in many different struggles, talk about what they’re doing, how they’re doing it and why they’re doing it in the belief that such listening can strengthen all of our efforts to change the world. Kate Welsh is a white, queer, disabled person who uses she or they pronouns. They’re involved in anti-ableism education and visual arts. They work doing research related to ableism and they have a private practice as a mental health counsellor and provide support for queer and trans people who are disabled or chronically ill death. Ramsawakh is a diasporic, Indo-Caribbean, gender fluid, disabled artist who uses they and he pronouns. There are a multidisciplinary storyteller who works with a wide range of media. And one key focus for that work is disability justice. Kate and Dev are speaking today about the CRIP Collective, a small group of Toronto-based disabled educators and artists who do anti-ableism, anti-oppression, and disability justice workshops, and various other kinds of community building with disabled people with an intersectional approach. The first word in the collective’s name is a slur that some but certainly not all disabled people are reclaiming. In the case of this collective, it is also an acronym for “Community Resistance Intimacy Project.” The story of the collective begins about five years ago. Kate was working in the social service sector. She was the only (at least visibly) disabled employee at a seemingly progressive nonprofit – the kind of place that had good policies related to anti-racism, anti-oppression, trans inclusion, and so on, and employees with lots of different intersecting identities. But Kate experienced some very blatant ableism in that workplace. Neither their colleagues nor the organization were able to deal with it effectively. And they ended up quitting. The head of the organization asked Kate to connect them with some kind of workshop on anti-oppression and anti-ableism. So she looked around the Toronto context and found…well, nothing. This was a huge gap in the community and Kate decided to do what they could to fill it. They had co-facilitated some workshops on disability and queerness in earlier years, but they knew that they did not want to take on this new challenge on their own. So they reached out through community networks seeking specifically racialized and queer disabled folks who might want to co-facilitate and they connected with Dev. The two really hit it off and decided that they wanted to work together. And by 2018, they and another facilitator – Jayde Hinds, who’s no longer with the collective – had developed a workshop they called Unpacking Ableism demand for their work was high right from the start. And by 2021, Kate and Dev could no longer meet it on their own. So they invited five new members into the collective. They’ve also been expanding the kinds of things that the collective offers, along with anti-ableism education ranging from 101-level to more advanced they also do more focused on specialized workshops as well as various kinds of disability justice-centered facilitation and community building. In response to a question about the key things that non disabled people consistently fail to understand about disability, Dev said, “It’s pretty much just everything about disability.” Often non disabled people treat disability as a discrete thing that can always be clearly and easily identified, and then met with clear accommodations, but ableism just isn’t reducible to say being unable to get into building X or to make use of service Y. Rather, ableism permeates everything about how our world and lives are socially organized. While being disabled can be a vital source of joy, resilience and community, systemic ableism can, especially for multiply marginalized disabled people, make it nearly impossible to just survive. In the face of all of this, the kind of educational and community building work that the collective does is only one facet of the change work that is needed. But it’s an important one. Making a healthcare setting a workplace, a social service, or a community group into a more livable, less ableist space can make a big difference for the disabled people in that space. And the way Kate and Dev approach it, education is not about making sure people have particular terminology or information, but about cultivating the kind of critical perspective and confidence that can allow people to actively engage in working collectively against ableism. I speak with Kate and Dev about the work of the CRIP collective.
Dev R 5:46
I’m Dev. I use they/them or he/him pronouns. I’m what you might call a multidisciplinary storyteller. I am a little bit of a jack of all trades when it comes to media, but all of my work centers disability justice and all of my intersecting identities as a diasporic, Indo-Caribbean, gender fluid disabled artist.
Kate W 6:10
My name is Kate. My pronouns are they and she. I am a white, queer, disabled person. I use a walker sometimes and also wheelchair sometimes depending on the day. I do a lot of different things. I have this collective where we do anti-ableism education. I am an artist. I’ve done visual art around disability, disability justice, chronic illness, invisible disabilities, lots of things. Currently working at the Centre for Independent Living working on a disability equity project. I’m a researcher at University of Toronto, and also at St. Mike’s Hospital, where I do research around disability and the healthcare system. And then I also have a private practice where I am a mental health counsellor and I provide support for queer and trans disabled and chronically ill folks, as well as support for couples who are experiencing conflicting access needs. So for me, my life really is around like multi-level, multi-layer look at disability justice. The CRIP collective was started by me and Dev and another person named Jayde. It started just as providing workshops around anti-ableism education. And then we’ve expanded to include more disabled people in our collective and we do things that are more than just our one on one workshop. Now, we do these workshops for lots of different organizations nationally, as well as for disabled groups, specifically. So we’ve run some peer support groups. But mostly we’re doing this anti-oppression training focusing on disability inclusion and anti-ableism.
Dev R 8:04
One thing that we are working towards as well as a collective is creating community spaces in terms of like getting disabled folks connected to each other, getting disabled folks opportunities to share their experiences, or share things that they have to teach. And we can learn from, and just getting folks connected to opportunities that will help them thrive rather than just surviving.
Scott Neigh 8:32
How did your collective initially form and what has its trajectory been through the years?
Kate W 8:38
I have been working in a lot of different jobs, specifically in the social service sector. So in shelters and mental health support organizations supporting queer and trans people, and I was always the only visibly disabled employee. During some of my schooling, I ran workshops around queerness and disability, looking at the intersections of those two things. But this collective was actually, for me, born out of a negative experience. I was working at a seemingly progressive nonprofit that had progressive policies around anti-racism, anti-oppression, trans inclusion, also had quite substantial intersectionality among the employees among the management, and I experienced some very blatant ableism at this workplace. And I also experienced that my co-workers and managers and supervisors did not know how to support me when I experienced some pretty blatant ableism, and my coworkers didn’t know how to unpack it other than being like that was wrong. “Don’t say that,” rather than like being able to talk about the history of ableism in society, in this field, etc, etc, etc, right? There was no unpacking it, it was just, like, “This is wrong. And we don’t even know why it’s wrong.” So I actually ended up resigning from that job after a pretty unsupportive work environment. And the executive director said to me, “Well, why don’t you just bring me a workshop on anti-oppression and anti-ableism.” And I looked around, and there was nothing. No workshops existed. The workshops that did exist around anti-oppression rarely talked about disability, or it was like something in passing, it wasn’t intersectional, it wasn’t in depth. So I had previously been doing some work around queerness and disability, some work around community education. But this experience really lit a fire under me to be like, I need to do something, because I don’t want this experience to happen other people, or to me again. The person that I had previously been facilitating workshops with had moved out of the city. And I think that one person speaking out of the front of the classroom isn’t the best learning and I wanted to build a collective. And I also don’t think that it’s right for me to be a white person standing at the classroom by myself teaching about this stuff, when really, we need the voices of other folks.
Dev R 11:32
This was back around, I think, 2017. For me, on my side, I think somebody shared a post with me that Kate had made looking for other disabled folks, specifically racialized and queer disabled folks who would be interested in getting more experience doing facilitation work, and getting involved and doing workshops and things like that. So I responded to Kate’s post, and we met up at a coffee shop, late 2017. It was just, like, instant friendship. We talked just about how we thought about disability, our experiences, things like that, getting to know each other. Fast forward to about 2018, we decided to create Unpacking Ableism, which is the original workshop that we started, we had another facilitator, Jayde Hinds. And we decided to just throw, Unpacking Ableism together – like, develop this workshop on our own and just put it out to the public and be like, okay, we’ve got this thing, if anybody wants to check it out, we can run it for you, we can also get your feedback, things like that. We put it out thinking it would just be like our communities, or folks from our workplaces, or just, you know, folks that we know. But when we actually launched the workshop, we found that there were folks who, you know, found us just by searching up ableism training on Eventbrite, and we’re like, the only thing that popped up because, at least in Toronto, there just wasn’t anything else. The first iteration of the workshop was this full day workshop that was back in in-person days. But from there, it grew. Because it became really clear that there wasn’t just a gap in the training, but there was actually like a thirst for that training. Like, folks were really interested in it. Jayde ended up taking like a step back from the collective to focus on some of their own things. But me and Kate continued on. Back, I think, last year, 2021, we had been getting lots and lots of facilitation requests, even virtually. It was more than Kate and I could handle on our own. And something we talked about when we began was growing a collective and having more than just us to do these workshops. So we put out a call for some other folks, specifically, like, racialized folks, prioritizing queer and trans folks, to be able to make sure that we weren’t forgetting voices or leaving out perspectives or things like that when we’re doing this training, especially perspectives that are very often erased already. So that’s how we brought on Kain, Kitty, Salima, Jheanelle. And then this year, we brought on another member, Midnight. And we have been doing more and more of these workshops, we’ve been branching out into different kinds of facilitation, different kinds of educating and different kinds of community building type of things as a collective. And then as individuals, we all have our own arts practices and our own educative practices and careers and things like that. And so we all bring these really diverse perspectives and these different areas of expertise.
Kate W 14:57
I think we’re also at the point where maybe we’ll keep growing because we have these 101 workshop requests, but we also have community requests. And we’re starting to be able to be a bit more sustainable because people are paying us money for the workshops, we’ve started getting some corporate gigs around like media representation of disability and how to support disabled employees and how to build peer programs that are disability inclusive. So there’s a lot of momentum around this work. Everyone in our collective is disabled or neurodivergent, although not everyone identifies with the word “crip.” Crip is a reclaimed word for people with disabilities. Historically, it was used as a slur. We’ve reclaimed it. And then part of disability justice work is really making sure that we’re centering the most marginalized voices. So making sure that we’re centering the people in our collective who have the various intersections of oppression and making sure that we are continuing to do that, as we continue to build our collective as we continue to facilitate workshops, etc.
Scott Neigh 16:15
Based on your years of experience doing this work, what would you say are the key things that non-disabled people consistently fail to understand about disability and ableism?
Dev R 16:27
Generally, it’s pretty much just everything about disability. There’s this idea, I think a lot of non-disabled folks have that disability is really easy to identify, and that once you have a disability, you’re just sort of given accommodations. And that’s just that, you know, it’s basically living life the same way. But you know, you use a ramp instead of stairs, or whatever. And a lot of folks think that disability is something that you can see something that you can identify and prove with the naked eye, and no medical training. And there’s this idea that disability is very defined, that there’s a very rigid definition for what disability is, and that encompasses. And so with our workshops, the biggest thing that we really focus on is just educating about what disability really is, who’s impacted, how people are impacted, what it is like to try and access accommodations, and how multiply marginalized people experience barriers that are unique to their identities. Racialized disabled people experience disability very differently from white disabled people. So there’s a lot that people just aren’t aware of, and they aren’t aware that there are these things to be aware of. I think a lot of folks have this idea that they know about disability, and that they are really educated about it, because they know phrases like “people with disabilities” or, you know, they can tell you where to find the elevator. But it’s so much bigger and broader than that. These systems that impact us have these really insidious histories when it comes to disabled people. So I think that the biggest misconception that we are unravelling is that these issues are more than just getting into a building. It’s, you know, our basic survival. And for multiply marginalized people, that ability to survive is impacted, and so many different ways that it really is set up to be nearly impossible for us to just survive. Like, I’m not even talking about just having comfortable lives, just being able to survive is something that is made difficult for us.
Kate W 18:57
People aren’t aware of the fact that the biggest minority is disabled people. One in five people in Canada is disabled. And probably more than that, especially because we’re going through COVID right now, which is a mass disabling event worldwide. I think people have this idea that they’re not going to become disabled. But that’s a total myth, right? Like, we all have bodies. So we all are inevitably going to become disabled. We all have internalized ableism that is impacted by productivity and capitalism. And so thinking about how do we change systems, change attitudes, change how people treat each other, so that hopefully when they become disabled, they’re not having to go through what it was like when I became disabled, like, 20 years ago, or when Dev was born or whatever. I also want to say one thing that we really try to do in our workshops is make it okay for people to ask questions they might feel uncomfortable asking. So it’s really getting people to talk about, like, what are the practical ways that we can support them to make them feel comfortable talking about disability, and in turn, make it better for disabled people to like live in the world.
Dev R 20:19
Disability is not something that only affects specific disabled people. Everybody has varying abilities, they have varying skills, they have varying strengths, and capitalism, society, all of these things, really try to enforce an idea of what a normal typical productive human being is. And for a lot of us, disabled and non-disabled, like, we don’t really fit those categories and the expectations that are put on us by capitalism. Even for non-disabled folks, the levels of productivity that we are expected to be sustaining long term, it’s only been in the last like 50, 60 years that we’ve been at this level of productivity, while the wealth disparity gap is still growing, and folks are getting sick, they’re getting hurt by capitalism, they’re getting disabled by poverty by overworking themselves by trying to push through. It’s really this very individualist attitude that capitalism promotes, that we earn for ourselves, we have to earn our way through life, we have to prove that we are a productive member of society, and that we earn all the resources that we get. And instead of thinking about resources as, okay, let’s make sure everybody has the resources we need, let’s make sure we all take care of each other. What capitalism does is it promotes a very specific type of care. It’s about buying things. Whereas what disability justice is focused on, and what disabled people really need, and what society needs as a whole, is community care and interdependence. And that’s the ability to like rely on each other and not have to fend for ourselves all the time, and things like that.
Scott Neigh 22:18
In the context of the many different kinds of change work that ableism demands – as multifaceted, pervasive, systemic, and often incredibly harsh as it is – what do you see as the specific importance and role of the educational mode that is the focus of your group’s work?
Kate W 22:38
For me, education feels like one of the best ways to enact social change, because you’re working on changing attitudes and behaviours at a very base level. And we know that there’s other people doing other sorts of change, like policy change, and building change, or whatever. But the education piece for me I saw was really lacking. And also, that’s personally where I think I have a strength, I feel like I have strength in doing educational work. And education is so, so, so broad, that there’s so many things that education can touch. Where do we learn to be ableist? Where is that taught to us? And so we do talk about like the media and other things within our education. I think also, our education, you know, we have a chance to do on the ground stuff with you, we have a chance to do education with healthcare providers who are on the ground, shaping disabled people’s view of themselves, we have a chance to educate like CBC and players who are doing work around media representation. So for me, education feels like a very broad way to do systems change work. And we also know that disabled people are excluded from all parts of society, but education is really, like, embedded in all parts of society. So it feels to me like a balance. You know, bringing disabled people into this work is like bringing us into places where we’re historically excluded and actually being the, like, experts at the front of the classroom or on the screen or whatever. And education also feels good to me because for me, it’s important to do collective work. And education feels like inherently collective to me.
Dev R 24:38
We are trying to push back against this idea that you need formal training – you know, a degree in something – in order to be an expert. This is something that is especially important to push back against because of the harm that medical communities have inflicted upon disabled folks of all kinds throughout history and currently. There’s medical bias of all kinds. There’s reported studies on racism in healthcare. And I think that is also really important to acknowledge that our educational systems currently work as capitalist propaganda – the way that our curriculums are built, the way that we are expected to learn in very specific ways. It’s all built to make us into perfect workers, make us into the productive drone who will do the work and not question authority and be, like, okay, history class taught me that the government officials are always able to figure it out in the end. And, you know, that’s just something we all live with. And that’s, you know, something that we are seeing in action today with COVID. You know, there’s a lot of folks who aren’t paying attention to what the actual news, what the actual science, what the actual studies are saying about COVID. They’re relying on government officials to be looking out for their best interest. And clearly that’s not happening. So when we are thinking about education, we want to change folks ideas of who we value as educators who we take seriously, whose perspectives are we paying attention to and valuing? And is it worth it? A major part of our education work is conversations. We don’t just come into our workshops and throw information at you and go, okay, this is what you need to know. You know, there’s no tests, there’s no whatever. What it is, is we come in, we give folks the language to be able to engage in conversation with us. And then we work with folks and meet them where they’re at in terms of what their experiences are, what their perspectives are. And it is not about getting the language right. It’s about having the understanding to be able to walk away from those workshops, and be able to think critically about what is happening around you, and be able to identify issues without anybody having to explain to you why it’s an issue.
Scott Neigh 27:14
You have been listening to my interview with Dev Ransawakh and Kate Welsh of the CRIP collective. To learn more about their work, go to cripproject.com. To find out more about Talking Radical Radio, the guests, the theme music, and the ways that you can listen, go to talkingradical.ca and click on the link for the radio show. On the site. You can sign up for email updates, or follow us on Facebook, Twitter, iTunes, SoundCloud and other platforms. I’m Scott Neigh, a writer and media producer based in Hamilton, Ontario and the author of two books of Canadian history told through the stories of activists published by Fernwood Publishing. Thank you very much for listening and I hope you tune in again next week.
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