Reading Group Session 1 - Hosting notes for JT and FdE only

Draft plan

• Jacquie gives acknowledgement, brief intro to program, hand over to ALL
  
• Jon shares access approach for the meeting
  - Tallara has offered to be our access attendant today – Zoom DM
  - We have received a number of access requests through the booking process, and thank you for sharing them. Among the access requests, we have been asked to provide captions, which you should now be able to access through the Zoom menu. We also received requests for a transcript of this discussion, which we will produce (either by recording the audio of this session, or saving the auto-generated captions). Please let Fayen and I or Tallara know if you have any issues with this, and we will follow up with you.
  
  - Discuss temporary, collectively-held approach which we are setting up and unpacking in this session … 
• Jon shares today’s theme and plan. (Recalling Jacquie's note re Carmen positioning himself as a non-visual learner: in this reading group, we are also positioning ourselves as a temporary collective of learners)

• Fayen guides a version of habitual pathways exercise:
  
  For our opening movement exercise together, I'd like to think about habits, or actually, about questioning habits. 
  
  In my case, I have a habit when I'm in a meeting like this to automatically rest my hands face down. Yet if I take the simple action of flipping my hands over, I can notice subtle shifts in my posture, and in the space available to me to breathe. 
  
  If it available to you, wherever and however your hands are now, I invite you to turn your hands over or into some other different position than they have been, and notice how your body shifts.  
  
  Now, if you wish to and are able, I invite you to lift your hands and begin to rotate your thumbs. Now pay attention to how you are doing this. Are your thumbs moving together, or randomly? Do you keep moving them in the same direction. If you notice you are repeating particular motions, try to choose another approach, reversing the direction, or shifting your orientation.
  
  If you wish, explore moving your fingers, or wrist, or elbows. 
  
  Notice shifts in your body. Notice which movements feel better, which movements activate different muscles. 
  
  As you do this, pay attention to whether you are falling back into any repetitive motions, any habitual pathways, and each time you notice this, play with changing the path. 
  
  Now, let's slow down and still the movement of our thumbs or fingers or wrists or elbows. 
  
  I’d like to invite you to bring your attention instead to the weight of your head.
  
  I invite you to make a very small movement to shift that weight -  just slightly. 
  
  It could be a slight tile of your head to the left or right. Or it could be to move your head just slightly backwards so that your vertebrae stack on top of one another. 
  
  As you do this, can you find a position of more comfort? 
  
  Do you need to change anything about how you are seated or laying down or whatever posture you have adopted today - do you need to change anything in order to find a position of more comfort? 
  
  As we move to our discussion, now, I’d like you to carry the idea of question habits, and thinking through whether habits and protocols and systems are supporting your participation, and whether changes could be made to support you to participate more fully. 
  

• Fayen presents summary of ‘For a new accessibility’ by Carmen Papalia
  
  In 2005, artist Carmen Papalia became frustrated with the supports he had been receiving from the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. He had also had disappointing experiences in museums, where designers who seemed to be most sighted were producing very limited ways for blind visitors to engage with art. He felt that these supports and access approaches made him feel more distanced from society.
  
  Carmen decided to reject the labels of blind or visually impaired. He began to identify instead as ‘a non-visual learner’. he didn’t want to keep trying to fit in with visual culture. He wanted to devote his time and energy to undoing his past visual learning, and exploring the conditions that might allow him to thrive as a non-visual learner.
  
  However, he also felt that achieving a social and cultural shift in institutions was near impossible, so he turned away from institutions, and concentrated instead on one-to-one and small group interactions.
  
  In 2013, Carmen heard the term ‘radical accessibility’ during conversations about decolonisation. He began to use this term to describe access that grows out of a grassroots community; access that considers power, oppression, strategy, agency, mutuality, solidarity, collaboration, creative practice and justice.
  
  As he worked to imagine a radically accessible space, he came up with five principles of what he named ‘Open Access.’
  
  1. Open Access relies on those present, what their needs are and how they can find support with each other and in their communities. It is a perpetual negotiation of trust between those who practice support as a mutual exchange.
  
  2. Open Access is radically different than a policy that temporarily removes a barrier to participation for a group with definitive needs. It acknowledges that everyone carries a body of local knowledge and is an expert in their own right.
  
  3. Open access is the root system of embodied learning. It cultivates trust among those involved and enables each member to self-identify and occupy a point of orientation that centers complex embodiment.
  
  4. Open Access disrupts the disabling conditions that limit one’s agency and potential to thrive. It reimagines normalcy as a continuum of embodiments, identities, realities and learning styles, and operates under the tenet that interdependence is central to a radical restructuring of power.
  
  5. Open Access is a temporary, collectively held space where participants can find comfort in disclosing their needs and preferences with one another. It is a responsive support network that adapts as needs and available resources change.
  
  Carmen gathered a group of artists and activists to participate in creative investigations of access. Some of the group identified as disabled, others as young, Indigenous, trans, queer, mad persons of color. The group met weekly, over three months, to discuss access, and to test the Open Access principles through creative interventions in museums and galleries.
  
  To acknowledge each person in the group as an expert about their own access, at their first meeting, they were invited to respond to the question: “What conditions must be in place in order for you to thrive or elect into the museum community?”  This led to a collective list of wants that provided a first step to understanding the collective needs and politics of the group.
  
  Carmen closes his essay with some conclusions he had reached at the time of writing:
  
  “Offering support requires us to listen, realize our privilege, redistribute our access, step aside, and let those who are seeking support lead the conversation about their own well-being. It requires us to acknowledge the disabling social and cultural conditions of the institutions that we are dedicated to enforce. It requires us to admit the injustice that we have perpetrated, or been complicit in, and then participate in reparation, reconciliation, and a radical restructuring of power. It requires the systems and practices that those in need rely upon to undergo radical change.”

• Jon presents summary of Andy’s Tik Tok descriptions, and connect to ‘collectively-held space’
  
  In 2023, in Montgomery, Alabama, a 40-minute long argument between the black co-captain of a 227-seat riverboat and a group of white boaters blocking its dock space erupted into a well-known brawl. It was filmed from multiple angles by many bystanders, noting particular details like the way the co-captain threw his cap in the air as the white men began pushing him. (Owing to its prominent role in the slave trade, and the subsequent Civil Rights Movement, Montgomery’s racially-charged history was cited as a potential factor in the brawl — because many of those fighting were divided along racial lines.)
  
  This caught Andy Slater’s attention, but at first he wasn’t able to experience it. Andy is white, lives in Chicago, is a musician and sound designer, and he’s blind.  He couldn’t really experience the brawl the way sighted people watching video footage of it could, so he asked TikTok to ‘write and record some kind of image description, narration, some audio description’ of the fight. Hundreds of people responded with videos for Andy.
  
  He told the Washington Post:
  
  ‘People showed up for me and for the rest of the blind community. I cried as I watched them … These people didn’t know me. But that didn’t hold them back from making all kinds of videos, some were very neutral and polite, some were absurd and creative, but all of them were so wonderful.’
  
  The Post article adds that Andy often asks his family to describe things like news events on TV, and ‘Slater said he wishes that more people whose job involves disseminating the news would create nuanced audio descriptions of events that are of national importance.’
  
  This is a short section of a five-minute video made by Wildin Pierrevil.
  
  (Discuss collectively held access)
  
  
  Easy English summary
  
  This is a four-and-a-half minute TikTok video. In 2023, there was a fight in Alabama. It was on the river, in a town called Montgomery. Montgomery has a lot of history. It was a big part of the US slave trade. It was also part of the civil rights movement.
  
  This fight happened because of a boat parking problem. A big boat needed to park at the dock. A small boat was in its parking spot. The big boat’s captain was black, and the small boat’s passengers were white. Many people noticed the conflict seemed to be partly about race. Lots of people talked about it online. They were sharing the videos.
  
  Andy Slater is a musician and artist. He is blind. He wanted to know about the fight too. But he could not see the videos. He asked his followers on TikTok to help him. Lots of them recorded videos describing the fight. A newspaper called Washington Post wrote about this.
  
  The video we are sharing is from Wildin Pierrevil. He is a young black content-creator. In the fight, the black boat captain threw his hat in the air. Wildin wrote about the fight as though he was the hat. It is a very creative description. In his video, he is reading from his computer. There is soft piano music playing in the background. He talks about everybody doing their jobs. The boat captain being a boat captain. The hat keeping the sun off the captain’s face. He describes the fight using his imagination. He imagines people from black history there too. It is poetic and moving.
  
  
• Fayen invites anyone who participated via the rest prompt to summarise thoughts that came up for them.
  
  Rest in a place where you can feel a soft breeze or other airflow. Does your sense of this place change over the minutes or hours you are resting? (How might this place change over seasons?) Does your capacity to participate ebb and flow over time?
  
  

• Invite wider group to share thoughts or questions that came up while they were reading.
• Invite them to share brief reflections in the chat, or if they wish, longer reflections in our shared writing space, which will also be available after the session, throughout the weeks of the reading group.
• Intermittently summarise any themes emerging in the chat.
• Invite elaboration of points from some of the participants who shared thoughts.

• How might access needs, desires, and responsibilities shift with place, with seasons, with community?
  
• What examples of very situated access can we think of? 

• How might access needs and desires be approached in practice as a collective responsibility?

• Access check-ins (Jon: methods of engaging and producing responsibility in classes etc)
  
  ‘Access Check-Ins gives space for people to name access needs which may differ from the current setting. They can also help folks realize the needs they have which have already been met.
  
  An Access Check-In is a practice that comes from Disability Culture and the Disability Justice Movement.
  
  While Access Check-Ins cannot solve all oppression, they can cut through the unspoken ways non-Disabled people and ableist culture control a space to make room for play, enjoyment, and empowerment. They can make it possible to center the needs of people present, and shift power dynamics so marginalized people are invited to participate in deciding how things are done.’
  
  — The Curiosity Paradox
  
  
• Access attendant — Tallara, for eg. 
• Writing access (eg live access principles document — Listening Through?)

• Adapt the access desires exercise from the reading for zoom/shared doc contributions
  

• Open discussion considering access in place, and access and community

• Closing remarks
  
• Show slide for workshop and performance