Illustration: "Crip Potter's Toolkit" by Betsy Redelman Díaz
Cripping Craft
VIRTUAL CONVERSATION ON CRAFT / Wednesday, May 25TH @ 4:00 - 5:30PM PST / 7:00PM EST VIA ZOOM
Cripping Craft is the first of a three-part series of conversations on disability + craft curated by Betsy Redelman Díaz. RCI invites you to engage in this virtual roundtable with guest panelists Panteha Abareshi, Liz Jackson, Jina B. Kim, and Aparna Nair on the intersections of disability, capitalism, labor, and craft. The panel and resulting dialogue will consider a broad range of questions, including: How do we hack our production-centric craft traditions to promote access and self-care? Where do prosthetics and mobility aids end and craft objects begin? And how do we crip craft education?
SORRY, REGISTRATION IS FULL
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Cripping Craft is a free event. Registration limited to 85 attendees.
ASL interpretation, audio descriptions, and live captioning will be included throughout the program. This event will not be recorded.
Panelists
panteha AbarEshi
Panteha Abareshi is a Canadian-born American multidisciplinary artist and curator, primarily working within installation art, video art, and performance art. Through their work, Abareshi aims to discuss the questions and complexities of living within a body that is highly monitored, constantly examined, and made to feel like a specimen. Their practice explores questions of identity, race, and illness to create a visual language able to articulate their fears, insecurities and confusions around their chronic illness and identity. Abareshi has performed and exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; Human Resources, Los Angeles; and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, among others. Currently they are contemplating the prosthetic, and the simultaneous abstraction and mechanization of the “body.”
Liz Jackson
Liz Jackson is a founding member of The Disabled List, an advocacy collective that engages with disability as a critical design practice. The Disabled List examines how day-to-day practices of disability are both designerly and exploited by professional design culture. Liz is co-curator of Critical Axis, a database created to analyze disability representation in media. Liz is currently analyzing power differentials that are embedded in corporate disability initiatives: primarily through how brand partnerships with large scale disability charities serve to undermine and neutralize the work of disabled employees and independent activists. Through this process, Liz works to shift the focus from those who wield power to those who can be entrusted to harness it.
Jina B. Kim
Jina B. Kim is an Assistant Professor of English and the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. She teaches and writes about critical disability studies, feminist- and queer-of-color critique, and contemporary ethnic American literature. She is working on a book manuscript titled Dreaming of Infrastructure: Crip-of-Color Imaginaries after the US Welfare State. Her work has appeared in Signs, Social Text, MELUS, American Quarterly, Disability Studies Quarterly, and The Asian American Literary Review.
Aparna Nair
Aparna Nair is an Assistant Professor at the University of Oklahoma. Her work approaches the body and corporeal experience through both history and anthropology. Aparna's research spans disability studies/history; colonial medicine; technologies for disabled people (vision aids, hearing aids, prosthetics, etc); the histories of vaccination and quarantine in India; and the changing representations of disability and difference in popular culture. Her forthcoming book “Fungible Bodies” (2022) with the University of Illinois Press’ Disability Histories examines the relationship between disability and colonialism in British India. Aparna also builds exhibits as part of her public history/humanities work and serves on the board of the Disability History Association.
CURATEd and moderated by: Betsy Redelman díaz
Betsy Redelman Díaz is RCI's 2022 Guest Curator for Conversations on Craft. She is a queer crip artist and professor with a socially engaged and research-based practice. Her work explores the intersections between critical pedagogy, intersectional feminism, decolonization processes, disability justice, queerness, and craft, often manifesting in the form of collaborative projects, interdisciplinary courses, utilitarian ceramics, performance, writing, short films, and long conversations. Betsy received her MFA in Craft studies at Oregon College of Art and Craft in 2017 and her BA in International Studies from Loyola University Chicago in 2013. She has previously taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and recently joined the faculty at Herron School of Art + Design.