{"id":122,"date":"2025-08-19T17:13:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-19T16:13:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/library\/?p=122"},"modified":"2025-09-01T12:23:42","modified_gmt":"2025-09-01T11:23:42","slug":"reflecting-on-disability-neurodiversity-joy-and-justice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/library\/2025\/08\/19\/reflecting-on-disability-neurodiversity-joy-and-justice\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflecting on Disability & Neurodiversity: Joy and Justice"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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A picture of the whole curation display, featuring two posters, books at varied heights with corresponding blurbs, open poetry books, and QR codes to different media.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I am feeling incredibly bittersweet about my time as a Student Curator coming to an end. I have loved working on this curation, and it has felt incredibly gratifying to pull it all together with the digital Libguide and physical display in the library. I feel as though I have had this curation brewing in the back of my mind for a while, and being given the resources to actually create it has been incredible. I finally got to put my incredibly niche goodreads shelving system to good use! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, my issue is I really do not want to stop<\/em> working on this curation. Disability and neurodiversity are quite key to my self identity, and so I consume a lot of content in all forms around it. It is really hard to now turn off my curation brain when I see something on youtube or my for you page, thinking \u2018let me just add this\u2019! I hope that this curation keeps living on, with people adding to the curation padlet and sharing their own Disabled joy as well as that featured in the curation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Setting up the physical display was incredibly fun, and it was great getting to organise it spatially to reflect how my research was carried out. If you visit it in person, you\u2019ll see that there are books, but also little signs with QR codes to videos, art, articles, and ebooks. Lots of these are put in a spot deliberately; such as Alice Wong\u2019s interview QR code going next to her memoir. I really hope that this makes the physical display fun to explore. I have also included a QR code to the Hannah Gadsby standup on my libguide, but don\u2019t blame me if you are laughing next to the Burton. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have aimed to make the physical display as easy and accessible to peruse as possible. There are ebook versions of physical books\/standalone ebooks where possible to allow for reading aloud and changing formats, I have included a wide range of text difficulty, and included social media accounts for low effort perusing. I wanted to make sure there were materials for all spoon levels!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I also wanted to make the physical display and online libguide as similar experiences as possible, so you won\u2019t be disadvantaged if you can\u2019t physically get to the library to view the curation. All the videos and artwork you can view at the physical display are on the libguide. The only thing you need to be in the library for is to borrow the physical books. 
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On the actual content of the curation, it has definitely shifted from my initial thoughts. I definitely did not expect to find as much incredible poetry as I did, and was incredibly excited by how much Disabled, anti capitalist, political thought I found. I did expect to find many memoirs, and initially I was quite set against not including them. My perception was that Disabled people are often only published in memoirs, as a way to package up Disability and sell it to an abled audience as inspiration. However (from scouring many Goodreads reviews) I believe all the memoirs selected for this curation are incredibly valuable and we can definitely get joy from them too. I really liked the wording of Judith Heumann\u2019s; \u2018the unrepentant memoir of a Disability Rights Activist\u2019, and Harriet McBryde Johnson\u2019s \u2018Too Late to Die Young\u2019 seems to really stem from a joy for living life being Disabled. Rebekkah Taussig\u2019s memoir \u2018Sitting Pretty\u2019 aims to directly refute the media\u2019s one dimensional portrayal of Disability. I therefore thought it would be a disservice to exclude these authors simply for their genre.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The memoir section of the curation is along the back row. Loosely defined as Alice Wong’s memoir sits in the Alice Wong section (I am a bit of a fan…)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n


Overall, I have strived to include diverse perspectives in the curation. Disability and Neurodiversity are incredibly broad topics themselves, and it was especially necessary to curate an intersectional reading list as experience of Disability is undeniably shaped by race, gender, sexuality, and background. Queer of colour organising is, and has always been, at the heart of the Disability Rights and later Disability Joy movement. I hope I have managed to capture that in my curation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When purchasing books for my curation, I sometimes struggled with the question \u2018is this joyful enough?\u2019. This was particularly true for some books detailing traumatic events, such as Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha\u2019s poetry collection Tonguebreaker. I generally ended up including them, as it would feel dishonest to completely ignore any mention of hardship. Tonguebreaker details surviving hatecrime and other traumatic events, and in the midst of it all finding love. I think that encapsulates the theme for me; our resilience and joy in community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While setting up the physical display, someone came over to talk about her son\u2019s potential ADHD, and whether I had any recommendations. We had a really lovely conversation and it really proved to me the importance of Disabled and neurodivergent spaces and visibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This photo shows books from Alice Wong and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. There are QR codes to art and articles linking to the various books, an ebook, and Leah’s poetry collection Tonguebreaker is open. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Finally, I could not have done this curation without help from a brilliant team of people. Thank you to Antonio, Ilka, Dave, and Kirsty for your help and support. Thank you to Ned for posting my many instagram stories, and Ben for answering my many questions about copyright. Steph and Siobhan were incredibly helpful in all things libguides and HTML coding. And thank you to Jessica for setting us up with reading lists!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Me standing by the curation’s physical display<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am feeling incredibly bittersweet about my time as a Student Curator coming to an end. I have loved working on this curation, and it has felt incredibly gratifying to pull it all together with the digital Libguide and physical display in the library. I feel as though I have had this curation brewing in … Continue reading Reflecting on Disability & Neurodiversity: Joy and Justice<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"custom_fields":{"_edit_lock":["1763550284:156"],"_wp_old_date":["2025-08-16"]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/library\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}