July 2022 marks 32 years of celebrating Disability Pride Month, which began after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Tab Journal joins the disability community in appreciating and understanding the range of human ability and the diversity that can be found within the disabled community. We think it fitting to discuss the steps some of our staff are taking to create more inclusive experiences.
Tab Journal’s Creative Director, Claudine Jaenichen, piloted a course this past spring at Chapman University entitled “Disability, Accessibility, and Design.”
[This course] presents a body of work, methodologies, and creative scholarship from a diverse group of designers, creative practitioners, and researchers representing neurodiversity, sensory, physical, cognitive, and cultural diversity within the visible and invisible disabled community. The course uses project-based learning focusing on the foundations of design. Students learn the fundamental principles of accessibility and prepare for further study in inclusive and collaborative design work.
Designing for the disabled community is important for representation and understanding. The human-made world in which we live is most often built with normative bodies and abilities in mind. Claudine Jaenichen’s class is exciting because it challenges these assumptions. Students are calling for it to become a required course in the Graphic Design major.
Meanwhile, Tab Journal‘s Editor, Anna Leahy, has spent the last two years heading the effort to launch a Health Humanities program at Chapman University. The minor in Health Humanities complements the long-standing Disability Studies minor, and the college’s annual Engaging the World program will focus on health equity in Fall 2023. Leahy committed herself to this effort while working on her article for The Washington Post celebrating the 30th anniversary of ADA.
In addition, this year, Editor Anna Leahy and Creative Director Claudine Jaenichen have been awarded a Scholarly/Creative Activity Grant from Chapman University to explore “Crip Time, Poetry Curation, and Design Thinking: New Directions for Tab Journal” in 2022-2023. As part of this exploration, Leahy and Jaenichen are meeting with a disabled designer this month, considering how we can avoid putting time and effort into disability dongles (see Liz Jackson’s work), and investigating best practices for visual poetry. We’re also seeking out language and developing practices that reflect our varied abilities and schedules as staff, contributors, and readers.
Though Tab Journal has not explicitly recruited staff who identify as D/disabled, our survey last year indicated that many of our staff identify as having a disability. By representing the disability community in our staff demographics, we hope to ensure a range of perspectives and ideas at play in the literary community.
How are you celebrating Disability Pride Month?