What is disability culture? The inaugural CUNY SPS Disability Culture Summit brought together academics, performers, and entrepreneurs with disabilities not only to answer this question, but to showcase the dynamic developments in dance, sports, music, and other elements that make up disability culture.
The summit, held via Zoom on November 21, brought together panelists including performer and artist Jerron Herman; Director of Inclusive and Adaptive Sports at CUNY Athletics Ryan Martin; and Chair of the Black Disability Studies Committee for the National Black Disability Coalition and founder of Krip-Hop Nation, Leroy F. Moore, Jr. The fourth scheduled panelist, Dr. Ashley Shew, author and associate professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech, was unable to attend.
The summit’s main focus was on how technology across disability culture addresses ableism and increases diversity and inclusion. The evening began with an introduction by Andrew Marcum, Ph.D., academic director and distinguished lecturer for Disability Studies, who addressed misconceptions about disability culture.
“I was asked by a colleague recently, what is disability culture?” Dr. Marcum said. “As if to say, does disability have a culture? And of course, when we think about disability, we often think about accessibility. Accessibility focuses on the practical dynamics of providing access to information and to spaces and to services.”
Disability culture encompasses more than accessibility, he continued. “It refers to the creativity, to the innovation, and to the lived experiences of people with disabilities. Not only to the ways in which people with disabilities contribute to culture across all cultural arenas, from music and the arts and literature to social movements and activism to sports, but also to the ways in which people with disabilities influence and are influenced by the culture.”
Dance and Disability Artistry
Jerron Herman, whose work centers around dance and disability, has premiered works at museums and cultural institutions across New York. As the night’s first panelist, Herman spoke about the Lincoln Center Two-Minute Dance Break, a project made in collaboration with Lincoln Center to spotlight disability artistry and allow a moment of rest in between other performances.
“When [Lincoln Center] came to me and asked what could disability movement be, I had to think beyond representation and think about how it could be authentic,” Herman explained during the discussion. “So the first thing we did was increase the one-minute dance break into a two-minute [break] because when you’re dealing with a disabled body, you always have to expand time.”
The piece is designed to be interactive, and includes breathing exercises and stretches that viewers can follow along with, accompanied by colorful animations and an audio description.
“I really want disability culture to be showcased in art but also influence the culture of theatrical spaces,” Herman said.
Breaking Barriers Through Adaptive Sports
From a young age, Ryan Martin’s life has been influenced by participating in adaptive sports, he explained during his presentation. Martin’s work as Director of Inclusive and Adaptive Sports at CUNY Athletics includes men’s and women’s wheelchair basketball teams, as well as emerging wheelchair tennis and track programs. Martin was recognized as the 2022 College Coach of the Year by the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, and has also served as the president of the National Wheelchair Basketball Association.
“As a young athlete with a disability, it really gave me that sense of belonging and that sense of purpose, and it gave me a place to really fit in a society that just saw me as an individual with a disability,” Martin said.
Like Herman’s practice of dance within disability culture, the body is an integral part of adaptive sports. Martin spoke about sports for people with disabilities crossing into different lanes of disability culture, as shown by a more global recognition around inclusive sports and the Paralympics online and on television. The investment of corporate dollars into this coverage is also a step in the right direction, he said.
According to Martin, adaptive sports “[allows] us to change the common nomenclature around disability to looking at what individuals with disabilities are capable of doing versus that traditional medical model approach of where we evaluate individuals with disabilities based on what they’re not able to do.”
Martin also advocated for the Paralympics as a model of what happens when policy and investment allow people with disabilities to prove they’re contributing members of society.
“I think of sport as a way of really influencing society and culture,” Martin added. “What I like about sports is a common understanding just like music, just like art, that can start to break down some of those barriers.”
Krip-Hop Nation and Black Disability Culture
In addition to being chair of the Black Disability Studies Committee for the National Black Disability Coalition, Leroy F. Moore, Jr. is the founder of Krip-Hop Nation, a movement of disabled hip-hop artists bringing the disability culture to the forefront of music. During his presentation, Moore showed a sample of his music and spoke about the need for intersectionality within disability culture.
“There has to be more than one disability culture,” he said. “Especially if you add race and open up to an international scale. There has to be Black, Latino, Asian, Indigenous, disability culture. But it’s up to those groups to do that research, that writing, that advocacy.”
Like the other panelists, Moore advocated for the social model of disability, which views disability as more of a social construct, resulting from attitudes and physical structures of society, rather than a medical condition.
Moore went on to describe Black disability culture. “I saw it in London, I saw it in Toronto, I saw it in South Africa, where Black disabled people came together. And they started their own organizations, started doing poetry and writing books and researching the ancestors. So it’s out there. We just need to continue to build it and scholars need to write about it.”
He continued, “I argue that we need more of our own Black and Brown disability terminology, theories, concepts, philosophies, art, culture, radical politics, music, history, locally and internationally. And we need to uplift more of our Black and Brown disabled ancestors.”
