Disability Arts History Australia

Items

• "SENSORIA: Access & Agency. ArtLink Magazine Issue 42.2, Spring 2022."
  Reads, in part "This issue platforms a range of contemporary art practices and debates written by and with artists who identify as part of the disabled, d/Deaf, vision impaired or neurodiverse communities. The commissioned essays, profiles and conversations offer diverse perspectives of lived experience and (in)visibility in the art worlds of Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand and the UK."
• "Sally Northfield (2014) Canvassing the Emotions: Women, Creativity and Mental Health in Context" PhD Thesis Victoria University, Melbourne,  https://vuir.vu.edu.au/29985/, Australia, https://vuir.vu.edu.au/29985/1/NORTHFIELD%20Sally-thesis_nosignature.pdf "
  Reads, in part, "A multimedia movement-theatre show, incorporating dance, video- and slide- projections, a life-sized puppet and an original soundtrack. A diary come to life, portraying the true story of an Australian dancer who – after paralysing one of his arms in a motorcycle accident – journeys through the worlds of medicine, rehabilitation and disability, in recovery of self-expression. He finds new angles on perceiving the body, and new ways to move. "Body image" and concepts of "normality" are questioned."
• "DADAA Art Works Key Findings: Employment in the Arts for People with Disability – Current Status, Barriers and Opportunities (2012)"
  Reads, in part, "This document provides a short overview of the full Art Works report, which captures the results from national research into employment levels, barriers and strategies around employment in the arts for people with disability. The report was produced in response to one of the key focus areas of the National Arts and Disability Strategy, released in 2009."
• "Kath Duncan, Gerard Goggin (2002). 'Something in Your Belly': Fantasy, Disability and Desire in My One Legged Dream Lover. Disability Studies Quarterly 22 (4), pp: 127-144."
  In this article we explore fantasy, disability and desire in the groundbreaking 1998 Australian TV documentary My One-Legged Dream Lover. Based upon self-reflexive documentary conventions, the video uncovers journalist-cum-freak raconteur Kath Duncan's explorations into the world of amputee fetish. Duncan is a double congenital amputee. She says," I've tried most things men, women, sex toys, unusual locations, dominance and submission games but I wanted to know what it was like to be desired because of my impairments." Gerard Goggin is a temporarily able-bodied (or TAB) academic with his own history of queer desire and a personal investment in exploring issues of difference. Duncan's and Goggin's collaboration includes accessing each other's edgier fantasies, aiming to give voice to some of the negotiations, anxieties, pleasures, and risks we have taken, speaking across the chasm of our personal histories, different genders and respective bodies.
• "Liz Ferrier (2000) Vulnerable Bodies: Creative Disabilities in Contemporary Australian Film. In Ian Craven ed. Australian Cinema in the 1990s. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203045022"
  Reads, in part "The internationally-acclaimed film Shine is one of a number of contemporary Australian movies which portray embattled artists or performers. Reminiscent of earlier works such as Starstruck (1982), Man of Flowers (1983), Malcolm (1986) and Sweetie (1989), and several more recent productions – Proof (1991), Strictly Ballroom (1992), Bad Boy Bubby (1994), The Adventures of Priscilia, Queen of The Desert (1994), Muriel's Wedding (1994), Cosi (1996), Lilian's Story (1996), and Jane Campion's New Zealand/Australian films, An Angel at My Table (1990) and The Piano (1993) – it depicts a disadvantaged individual overcoming setbacks through the passionate and eccentric expression of his creativity. The film and the cycle to which it belongs offers a peculiar vantage point from which to examine the problems and possibilities of Australian cinema in the 1990s."
• "Simon Darcy, S., Hazel Maxwell, Simone Grabowski, Jenny Onyx (2019). Artistic Impact: From Casual and Serious Leisure to Professional Career Development in Disability Arts. Leisure Sciences, 44(4), 514–533. https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400.2019.1613461"
• "DADAA Inc. (2014). An evaluation of a year-long mentoring program for artists with disability in western Australia. Perth, Western Australia: Department of Family and Community Services."
• "Catherine Grant (2013). Participating in arts- and cultural-sector governance in Australia: Experiences and views of people with disability. Arts & Health, 6(1), 75–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/17533015.2013.826259"
  Reads, in part "This study sought the perceptions and experiences of people with disability relating to their potential or current involvement in the governance of arts and cultural organisations in Australia. Methods: A total of 32 people participated in an online survey, and results were analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. Results: The findings revealed that those participants who had been involved in governance benefited from it in terms of self-esteem, participation in society and well-being." Contains tables with survey data.
• "Australia Government (2019) My Art Goals: NDIS and the Arts. Canberra: Department of Communication and Arts."
  Reads, in part "My art goals shows some of the ways National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) participants who have creative or cultural jobs, or who want to participate recreationally in the arts, can reach their goals. My art goals provides information about how the NDIS might support participants with arts goals, or about what supports or services might be available outside the NDIS."
• "Amanda Cachia (2022) Networks of Care: Collectivity as Dialogic Creative Access, in Amanda Cachia ed. Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation. London: Routledge, 219-230"
  Reads, in part "The collectives that have formed in recent years and that will be the subject of this chapter include the Feminist Health Care Research Group (FHCRG), the Sickness Affnity Group (SAG), and Power Makes Us Sick (PMS). Each of these groups attempts to be intersectional in their approach, focusing on feminist and crip revisions to health care. Feminist and crip unite in the groups as the participants all identify as both women and as disabled. In shared spaces, which can be found in physical spaces, such as an art gallery or an artist’s home, or online through Zoom, artists can offer mutual understanding of their experiences with chronic illness, disability, the medical industrial complex, and simply be a shoulder to lean on in times of anxiety, anger, and sadness. The collectives also offer an opportunity for the artists to lift each other up, creating an environment of respect, dignity, and self-worth, becoming a strong circle of empowerment, affrmation, and allyship. The proliferation of these support groups shows a general shift in social norms, where the medical feld no longer holds the only authoritative voice on health. This phenomenon also indicates how nonmedical health based groups are flling a need and making up for a lack in social support networks elsewhere, particularly within sanctioned medical arenas."
• "Screen Australia (2023) Seeing Ourselves 2: Diversity, equity and inclusion in Australian TV drama. Screen Australia"
  Reads, in part "Screen Australia has released new research into diversity on Australian screens, titled Seeing Ourselves 2: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Australian TV Drama. A follow up to the landmark 2016 study, Seeing Ourselves 2 examines the diversity of main characters in 361 scripted Australian TV and online dramas broadcast between 2016 and 2021, how this compares to the Australian population, and what has changed since the previous Seeing Ourselves report."
• "Screen Australia (2016) Seeing ourselves: Reflections on diversity in Australian TV drama. Screen Australia"
  Reads, in part "Whose stories are our TV dramas exploring? Screen Australia has benchmarked current levels of diversity in Australian TV drama and explore the challenges and opportunities involved in making TV drama more broadly representative of Australian society."
• "Amanda Cachia (2013) ‘Disabling’ the museum: Curator as infrastructural activist. J. 12.3. pp. 257–289"
  Reads, in part "This article will explore how I attempt to ‘disable’ the museum through my infrastructural curatorial practice, which is the basis for my scholarly research and writing. By infusing my curatorial projects with critical reflection and theoretical development, I hope to begin this process of building a new vocabulary and methodology around curating disability and access."
• "Katie Ellis (2019) Disability and Digital Television Cultures Representation, Access, and Reception. London & New York: Routledge."
  Reads, in part "Disability and Digital Television Cultures offers an important addition to scholarly studies at the intersection of disability and media, examining disability in the context of digital television access, representation and reception."
• "Katie Ellis (2016) Disability Media Work: Opportunities and Obstacles. London: Palgrave."
  Reads, in part "Elevates disability media discussions beyond representation and access by considering employment and discriminatory attitudes in the media industry"
• "Bree Hadley (2008) Mobilising the monster: Modern disabled performers' manipulation of the freakshow. M/C Journal, 11(3), pp. 1-7.”
  "This paper examines the risk in remobilising representations of the monstrous in performance, in that these re-representations of freak persona may still be read by spectators as part of the phenomenon they are trying to challenge, the critical counterpositions failing to register, or failing the fully disrupt the familiar scopic and discursive framework."
• "Bree Hadley (2014) Practice as method: The ex/centric fixations project. In Bolt, B & Barrett, E (Eds.) Material inventions: applying creative arts research. I.B. Tauris Publisher, United Kingdom, pp. 145-165.”
  "In this chapter, I consider the efficacy of creative practice as a research method, concentrating specifically on its applications in the performing arts, using one of my own recent projects, The Ex/centric Fixations Project (2009), as an example."
• "Bree Hadley (2016) Cheats, charity cases and inspirations: disrupting the circulation of disability-based memes online. Disability and Society, 31(5), pp. 676-692."
  "With the increasing part online self-performance plays in day-to-day life in the twenty-first century, it is not surprising that critiques of the way the daily social drama of disability plays out in online spaces and places have begun to gain prominence. In this article, I consider memes as a highly specific style or strategy for representing disability via social media sites. I identify three commonly circulating categories of meme – the charity case, inspiration and cheat memes – all of which offer representations that people with disabilities find highly problematic. I then investigate the ways in which disabled people have begun to resist the representation and circulation of these commonly circulating categories of memes, via the production of counter or parodic memes. I focus, in particular, on the subversive potential of these counter memes, within disability communities online and within broader communities online."
• "Bree Hadley (2017) Disability, Sustainability, Austerity: The Bolshy Divas Arts-Based Protests Against Policy Paradoxes. Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts Journal 18 Spring. http://www.sustainablepractice.org."
  "In this short article, I want consider some of the ways theatrical artists, activists and advocates in Australia are tackling the paradoxical relationship between sustainability and austerity discourses, and, as a result, some changes this may be starting to produce in disabled people’s aesthetic prerogatives. For the last 30 years, artists, activists and scholars in Australia and beyond have avoided casting disability in terms of trauma, crisis, catastrophe and disaster. Accounts of the way disability theatre challenges stereotypes , as well as analysis of disability signifiers in screen, stage, and social performance , have expressed concern about deploying disability as a metaphor for disaster, or defining disabled people as monstrous, tragic, stoic, or inspirational, the way the medical model of disability traditionally defines us. Instead, modern disabled artists and the scholars who analyse them have advocated for work that deploys live art, performance art, and performative intervention in public space to challenge stereotypes, oppressive institutional systems, and other factors the social model of disability sees as the cause of disability oppression .In the last few years, though, there has been an increase in work that does associate disability with trauma, tragedy and disaster, in what seems to be a response to austerity, accountability and economic sustainability agendas that call for cuts to disability services spending to make our societies more sustainable going forward."
• "Cultural Ministers Council (2009) National Arts & Disability Strategy."
  Reads, in part "On 9 October 2009, the Cultural Ministers Council agreed to the National Arts and Disability Strategy, which sets out a vision for improving access and participation in the artistic and cultural activities for people with disabilities. The Strategy provides a framework within which jurisdictions can assess and improve existing activities. It also identifies new priority projects that could be progressed as national initiatives or by individual jurisdictions."
• "Bree Hadley (2018) Disability, disabled dance audiences and the dilemma of neuroaesthetic approaches to perception and interpretation. In Wood, K, Brown, A, Waelde, C, Harmon, S, Blades, H, & Whatley, S (Eds.) Dance, disability and law: Invisible difference. Intellect Ltd, United Kingdom, pp. 293-315.”
  "In this chapter, I want to consider one emerging approach to spectatorship – the neuroaesthetic approach – through the lens of disability spectatorship. In the twenty-first century, neuroaesthetics is gaining traction amongst scholars looking to provide accounts of spectatorship in less story-based performing arts such as classical and contemporary dance, as well as in more story-based practices in drama, theatre and performance. ‘It would be fair to say that neuroaesthetics has become a hot field’, as Alva Noë puts it (2011). To date, though, the assumptions that underpin neuroaesthetic approaches to spectatorship have not been brought together with the assumptions that underpin the equally emergent field of disability spectatorship studies. As Carrie Sandahl (2002: 18) has noted, different cognitive, sensory and corporeal abilities result in a range of different phenomenologies, perceptual processes and perceptual preferences that can in turn produce different styles of engagement with experiences, events and objects. These differences impact on how people with disabilities produce and perceive aesthetic performances – somatically, syntactically, symbolically and socially, as disabled people hear with their eyes, see with their fingers, or perceive phenomena vicariously via the intervention of technologies or translators. Accordingly, disability spectatorship, and more detailed attention to the presence of distinctive cognitive, sensory and corporeal processes amongst disabled spectators, has the potential to complicate, extend and challenge assumptions embedded in emerging neuroaesthetic approaches to spectating."
• "Bree Hadley (2019) Disability arts in an age of austerity. In Hadley, B & McDonald, D (Eds.) The Routledge handbook of disability arts, culture, and media. Routledge, United Kingdom, pp. 347-361."
  "Is the current “age of austerity” (Summers 2009) impacting on art, culture, and media practices by and about people with disabilities, and, in particular, on art-based protest practices by people with disabilities? In recent years, much has been written about austerity as neo-liberal economic, political, social, and ideological agenda (Harvey 2005; Barnett 2010; Seymour 2014). Much has been written about the way groups effected by local and global governmental shifts towards austerity are protesting, presenting themselves, and being represented by others (Fritsch 2013; Goodley, Lawthom, & Runswick-Cole 2014; Runswick- Cole & Goodley 2015; della Porta 2015; Kokoli & Winter 2015; Beresford 2016; Dodd 2016; Giugni & Grasso 2016; Berry 2017). The question of whether disabled artists are adapting their practices to address these changing cultural circumstances has received less attention (Hadley 2017) and is thus the topic I focus on in this chapter."
• "Bree Hadley (2019) Advocacy, allies, and 'allies of convenience' in performance and performative protest. In Grehan, H (Ed.) The Routledge companion to theatre and politics (Routledge Theatre and Performance Companions). Routledge, United Kingdom, pp. 85-88.”
  "Though allies have always played a role in the production of political performance, analysis of the work of disabled artists, women artists, queer artists, and artists of colour has yet to be combined with analysis of the work of allies addressing the same issues. In this chapter, I consider the practice of allies in a specific context, social media performance, as a newly emerging platform for political activism. After tracing the way allies are typically involved in political performance about, with, and by marginalised people and communities, I point to complexities arising when activists, campaigners, entertainers, and pranksters use new online platforms in performance that purport to support the same cause.
• "Australia Council for the Arts (2018) Creating Pathways: Insights on support for artists with disability. 19 September 2018"
  Reads, in part "This report brings together findings and insights from a range of research undertaken in 2017–18 to inform the Council’s approach to future support for artists with disability."
• "Bree Hadley (2021) What's in a name? The politics of labeling in disability performance. In Rai, Shirin, Gluhovic, Milija, Jestrovic, Silvija, & Saward, Michael (Eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance. Oxford University Press, New York, NY, pp. 531-543.”