Gerard Goggin talk talk for 'Aisthesis and the Common: Reconfiguring the Public Sphere', 2016 Media@McGill International Colloquium

1. Disability Commons: Culture,
Technology, New Publics
Gerard Goggin (@ggoggin)
University of Sydney
talk for Aisthesis and the Common: Reconfiguring the Public Sphere
2016 Media@McGill International Colloquium

2. Thesis 1: public spheres after disability
disability is still often a neglected topic in discussions of
publics and public spheres
disability is one of the multiple publics that comprise
our public sphere.
disability offers us very important insights for the
principles, models, and imaginaries of how we
reconfiguring public spheres

3. Thesis 2: aisthesis with disability
the work of people with disabilities, and others, that is
underway in reconfiguring the political public sphere
has generated great energy and richness from the
disability culture sphere.
disability requires and engages aisthesis; and also adds
to our understanding of its value and uses.

4. Thesis 3: disability digital spaces
disability ‘inventions’ of digital technology, formats,
spaces, & associated social and cultural practices, help
us understand pitfalls, potential, and directions for the
public sphere
these new kinds of digital disability media use prompt
us also to rethink nature of media themselves; & also
norms, values, & architecture associated with
communication in public spheres
(= how we design conversation & exchange)

6. Source: Violeta Blue
Ayalay Facebook post

7. More and more people now believe that
disabled bodies should not be labeled as
defective, although we have a long way to go,
but we have not even begun to think about
how these bodies might represent their
interests in the public sphere for the simple
reason that our theories of representation do
not take account of them.
Tobin Siebers, “Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the New
Realism of the Body,” American Literary History, 13. 4 (2001): 742.

8. … many situations in which the disabled are
made invisible, particularly
institutionalizations, are clearly the result of
the ways in which social resources are
allocated and social relations are organized …
invisibility is a function of the ways in which
treatment of the disabled is structured …
Nancy J. Hirschmann, “Invisible Disability: Seeing, Being, Power,” in Nancy J. Hirschmann and Beth
Linker (eds.), Civil Disabilities: Citizenship, Membership, and Belonging (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 212

9. Assuming that a body is disabled without knowing
what impairment(s) that body has would yield a
different way of thinking … Recognition of the
temporality of ability, the uncertainty of ability,
and the undecidability of the body is vital to the
full inclusion of disabled individuals in the body
politic.
Hirschmann, “Invisible Disability,” 222.

14. Scene from production of
Restless Dance (South
Australia)

15. ‘O brave new world, that has such people in’t!’,
Miranda, The Tempest
Nicola Miles-Wildin as
Miranda, London
Paralympics Opening
Ceremony, 2012

16. ‘Handhelds aided hearing
impaired-protestors’, MSN, 8 Nov
2006

22. “micro-affordances of disability”
“non-normative ways of moving, sensing, and being in
the everyday … potentially transformative actions in
the world”
“disabled individuals … are forced to seek new niches
to occupy and create new affordances within which
their corporeal difference would be accommodated”
Arseli Dokumaci, “Micro-Activist Affordances of Disability: Transformative Potential
of Participation”, in Mathias Denecke, Anne Ganzert, Isabell Otto, and Robert Stock
(eds.), ReClaiming Participation: Technology, Mediation, Collectivity (Bielefeld:
Transcript, 2016), 80.

24. ‘Muscular dystrophy robot-building twins enable themselves through
3D printing technology’, 20 April, 2014, 774 ABC Melbourne