Reading group session 2:
Writing together: Access-led (de)scripting
Wednesday 3rd June 2026, 10am-12pm (AEST)
Quick links
Reading group plan: What to expect over the two hours we are online
Jump to plan
Recap of reading group texts for session 2
Jump to texts
Shared document for longer reflections, or post-facto responses
Open the shared document
Reading group plan
This reading group plan may be adapted during our time together, as access needs emerge and change. The plan has been developed in response to some participants’ expressed access needs.
Throughout the reading group, you are encouraged to move, lay down, sit, have cameras on or off, and any other mode of presence that supports your participation.
We have created a shared document that anybody with the link can edit. You may use it to participate non-verbally, to write longer thoughts and reflections, to share links or references to other readings or artworks, or simply to contribute to the reading group discussion in your preferred manner and pace. You can also write into the document after the session is over, if you wish.
10:00am Introduction (10 minutes)
10:10am Summaries of texts (15 mins)
- Summary of ‘Chronic Illness, Slowness, and the Time of Writing’ by Mel Chen
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Summary of ‘Inventions in Sound’ by Raymond Antrobus and Eleanor McDowall
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Summary of ‘Crip Making’ by Aimi Hamraie
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Reflections on the prompt for rest
10:25am Discussion (10 minutes)
10:35am Languaging and captioning sound exercise (20 minutes)
10:55am Break (10 minutes)
11:05am Image description exercise following a method by Joseph Rizzo Naudi and DesCript (20 minutes)
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You have the option to engage visually or not-visually. If you’re engaging not-visually, ignore the following link to the image.
For those who are choosing to engage visually … open the exercise here. - Those who are engaging visually, propose nouns that describe objects in the image.
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Those who are engaging not-visually, ask questions about the objects to build up an impression of the image.
- Those who are engaging visually, take turns responding to the questions.
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Those who are engaging not-visually, offer a sentence to describe what they imagine is in the image.
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Both groups: open speculation. What is happening through this space-time? What is not in the image?
11:25am Sensory description and inter-sensory translation (15 minutes)
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Are ‘original’ forms as stable as they are often assumed to be?
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How are notions of transcriptions, translations and scores related?
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How could access and inter-sensory translation form the basis of new texts?
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How do you think about the relationships between access and language?
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How might access incorporate — and complicate — authorship, auteurship and artistry?
Recap of texts for this reading group
What we will be discussing
How can access suggest different strategies of writing and collective authorship? How do we give language to sensory experiences, and how might we think about describing sounds, movements and images? In this session, we’ll discuss and challenge assumptions about accessible writing and reading — for and by whom? Together, we will try a diversity of methods for sensory descriptions and inter-sensory translation, and discuss how these might be employed in making and presenting art in galleries, museums and beyond.
This week's readings
- (Essay) ‘Chronic Illness, Slowness, and the Time of Writing’ by Mel Chen, in Crip Authorship: Disability as Method, edited by Rebecca Sanchez. New York, USA: New York University Press, 2023
- (Captioned video) ‘Inventions in sound’ (28:24) by Raymond Antrobus and Eleanor McDowall, Third Coast International Audio Festival and Falling Tree Productions, 2023
Or, if you have more energy:
- Read both of the above with: ‘Crip Making’ by Aimi Hamraie, in Crip Authorship: Disability as Method, edited by Rebecca Sanchez. New York, USA: New York University Press, 2023
Or, if you have less energy:
- Consider the following quotes:
“I want to be with you. If you can’t go, then I don’t want to go. If we are traveling together, sharing political space together, building political family together, then I want to be with you. I want us to be together.” Can we imagine this way of being as a mode of crip authorship? And how might such being make space for more expansive, capacious approaches to collaboration? We learned to wait on each other — for the migraine to lift, the fatigue to ease, the energy to return — as we wrote the introduction to Crip Genealogies together (with Eunjung Kim and Julie Avril Minich), in spite of our training to do other wise. Inspired by those experiences, we invite an explicit turning toward collaboration and acknowledge the fundamentally collaborative nature of thinking in making that collaboration known. From this perspective, cripping authorship might mean cripping single authorship, even as we recognize that it must not be a cloak indictment: that in fact, single authoring may necessarily be someone else’s best and only crip mode. But when single authorship is a proprietary accumulation of intellectual property that should have been shared (which, we note, goes hand in hand with intersectional theft), then it could be seen as “ripping off.” Instead, we wonder what possibilities are made by messing with this formula, with unknown risks, erotics, and consequences: “cripping off.” While the risks lean toward precarious positions vis-à- vis the academy, we commit to making more and more places where cripping off is imaginable and recognized."
(Mel Chen 2023, p35)
"My first book, Animacies, has been described as a theoretical text. It has also been described as a difficult text, perhaps for some impenetrable. But I think back to the sense, while writing it, that it was all I could do... It was written in the brain fogginess of my most marked period of immersive illness, and came about in part by an act of desperation— not just to keep my academic job, where I nevertheless found some kind of fit (the equation wasn’t publish or perish so much as publish while perishing, or perishing for publishing!) — but also to let in the sensemaking of the sensory, cognitive, and emotional elsewhere where I lived... At a basic level, the phrases that came out were the only way for me to imagine. They came out as I did — evasive to the command, reluctant to the mastery of the word, always at a side reach, equivalent in some coarse way to my inability to experience a direct gaze without great risk. “It was all I could do.” But I also knew the resultant text would be “difficult,” and I felt shame. After all, I was committed to some form of disability studies and had the sense that “accessibility” was something to strive for..."
(Mel Chen 2023, p36)
"Eventually, a member of the disability studies circles I was part of, and a friend connected to a publisher, approached me and quite generously welcomed me to pursue another publication, but this time rendering Animacies in the most accessible language possible. This was someone who, at least at that time, advocated for “plain language” scholarship, the idea being that there existed some form of common language that could be called plain, presumably also maximally shared by virtue of some lowest common denominator. It’s not my place to scoff at this, perhaps, because I see where it comes from, and I write as someone who is highly trained, has credentials, is at ease in many academic languages, and, despite childhood troubles with reading, writing, and hearing, is given the “model minority” benefit of the doubt as an East Asian American person writing puzzlingly rather than being punished for it. But I do have some distress at “plain language” nevertheless, the first reason being that the plain language expected is a truly, honestly, still- colonizing language called English, with coercive grammaticalities that I wrote about in Animacies... Plain language, to me, with its commonest goal, is kin to clarity, which has been weaponized against so many even as it has assisted others.. While many, including me at times, have felt great relief when clarity was needed at a given moment, others have been traumatized by its demand... Standardized language — too clearly the source of plain language, even if they are not the same — has killed living languages, small and large, in cities, suburbs, and plains, at borders, minoritized or assaulted by colonization and domination. Indeed, “accessibility,” which disability studies scholars all too deeply understand to be a vexed wish, has too easily conspired with an unthought universal standard. Asserting the dominance of plain language (not what my colleague was doing at that moment, which was simply a sweet invitation) in access contexts, in the name of access, is a lot more racialized and nationalistic than the modest image of its presentation. As my dear and, for the purposes of this text, anonymous disability studies colleague wrote me the other night: To hell with accessible writing."
Or, if you have no energy:
Rest comfortably. Think of a word that describes how you feel. Where are you? Are people moving around, or is it quiet where you are? Think of a word that describes what you notice.
If you wish, think of more words, flowing back and forth between how you feel and what you notice.
Let the words wash over and through you. If no words come to mind, just rest.