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Institute on Disability Culture
About the Institute on Disability Culture
A little HISTORY
Steven E. Brown and Lillian Gonzales Brown, Institute on Disability Culture Co-Founders, have worked in the field of disability rights for several decades, first individually, then as a husband and wife team.
In the 1980s, both Steven E. Brown and Lillian Gonzales Brown perceived a need for knowledge about the history, ideologies, and diverse expressions of people with disabilities. They established the Institute on Disability Culture, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization in 1994.
MISSION:
Promoting pride in the history, activities, and cultural identity of individuals with disabilities throughout the world.
Brief biographies:
STEVEN E. BROWN earned a doctorate in history in 1981 at the University of Oklahoma. When discrimination because of his disability detoured a career in history, he expanded his activities with a local disability rights group, and set the stage for three decades of work within the disability rights movement.
Brown's initial work in disability rights involved development of peer support and skills training programs, community organizing and public education at Progressive Independence, an Oklahoma independent living center. Subsequent positions as an advocate, then as a disability specialist providing information and referral in a statewide advocacy agency, led to a stint as executive director of Progressive Independence (PI). While at PI, Brown's unswerving commitment to advocacy and empowerment issues with all disability populations became widely known and respected .
Brown embraced the 1990s with a new role as Training Director for the Research and Training Center on Public Policy in Independent Living at the World Institute on Disability (WID) in Oakland, California. In this capacity, he facilitated planning of the 1991 international symposium, "Empowerment Strategies for the Development of a National Personal Assistance Services System," supervised an internship program for disabled college students, and was instrumental in including concepts of disability culture in WID publications and activities.
Brown, and his wife and partner, Lillian Gonzales Brown, realized their dream to establish the not-for-profit Institute on Disability Culture (IDC) in early 1994, shortly after moving to southern New Mexico.
Brown's publications may be found on the Order Page for this website. In recent years, Brown has conducted trainings and presentations throughout the United States and Europe on a variety of disability related subjects.
LILLIAN GONZALES BROWN has been on the cutting edge of various aspects of the disability rights movement such as Peer Support, Independent Living Skills, Sexuality, and Disability Culture.
Gonzales Brown joined the Independent Living Movement in the 1970's at one of the world's first independent living centers: the Center for Independent Living (CIL) in Berkeley, California. A member of the team which designed and implemented the country's original Independent Living Curriculum, she also worked with disabled people in a variety of direct services areas, such as Peer Support, Sexuality, Independent Living Skills Training, and goal planning.
A complementary background in the field of Sexuality and Disability began with training as a Disability Educator, then becoming an associate staff member, at the Sex and Disability Unit, University of California, San Francisco. Work in the field included community education, conference planning and presentations, lecturing at colleges and universities, continuing education for health professionals, and curriculum development for specific
groups in the disabled community. Offering her services as a private consultant, Gonzales Brown contributed to the early development and implementation of sexuality curricula which advocated for rights to information, relationships and privacy for people with mental retardation.
Continuing to add to her expertise, Gonzales Brown worked as a Health Educator for Planned Parenthood, integrating a disability focus into staff trainings and community education. She worked for ten years on a voluntary basis for suicide prevention programs, doing crisis intervention and training of counselors.
During her tenure at CIL in Berkeley, and later at the World Institute on Disability, Gonzales Brown also developed individualized Peer Support and independent living skills training programs for international students and visitors. Having gained international recognition for her expertise in Peer Support, for the past decade she has been sought after to conduct trainings abroad on different aspects of the disability movement. She has taught courses in Europe, Latin America, New Zealand, Japan, and Scandinavia for various disability groups and newly forming independent living centers.
What we mean by Disability Culture
People with disabilities have forged a group identity. We share a common history of oppression and a common bond of resilience. We generate art, music, literature, and other expressions of our lives and our culture, infused from our experience of disability. Most importantly, we are proud of ourselves as people with disabilities. We claim our disabilities with pride as part of our identity.
We are who we are: we are people with disabilities.
Steven E. Brown MAINSTREAM MAGAZINE, 1996
WHO ARE WE ?
The Institute on Disability Culture is a tax-exempt,not-for-profit organization. Biographies of the Co-Founders follow:
Lillian Gonzales Brown, Disabilities Scholar at the University of Hawaii and Co-Founder, Institute on Disability Culture, is an internationally renowned trainer in independent living, advocacy, personal assistance, civil rights, sexuality, peer support, public policy and Disability Culture. Demand for her work has taken her across North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Scandinavia.
Steven E. Brown, Associate Professor and Disabilities Scholar at the Center on Disability Studies, University of Hawaii and Co-Founder, Institute on Disability Culture (IDC), earned a doctorate in history from the University of Oklahoma. He directed an independent living center in Oklahoma, organized numerous community coalitions, and served as Training Director at the World Institute on Disability Research and Training Center on Public Policy in Independent Living. He founded the not-for-profit Institute on Disability Culture, with his wife Lillian Gonzales Brown, in 1994. Brown's most recent book is the well-received “Movie Stars and Sensuous Scars: Essays on the Journey from Disability Shame to Disability Pride”. Other publications, several of which have been translated into other languages, include “Independent Living: Theory and Practice”; Investigating a Culture of Disability: Final Report”, the result of a prestigious Switzer Fellowship from the National Institute on Disability Rehabilitation and Research of the Department of Education, the first funding for research about Disability Culture; “A Celebration of Diversity: An Annotated Bibliography about Disability Culture, 2nd edition”; “Celebrating Passion, Relentless, and Vision: The Manifesto Editorials”; and six books of poetry, “Dragonflies in Paradise: An Activist’s Partial Poetic Autobiography”; “The Goddess Approaches Fifty”; “Journey Home: A Miracles Poetry, Prayer and Meditations Workbook”’ “Love Into Forever: A Tribute to Martyrs, Heroes, Friends, and Colleagues”; “Pain, Plain--and Fancy Rappings: Poetry from the Disability Culture”; and “Voyages: Life Journeys”.
DISABILITY CULTURE : BEGINNINGS A FACT SHEET
The modern disability rights movement began during the 1960s when people with disabilities around the world successfully challenged dominant social stereotypes. In the United States, Ed Roberts, a post-polio, ventilator-using quadriplegic, broke American educational barriers when he became the first person with such a significant disability to attend college. Roberts entered the University of California at Berkeley in 1962. During a lifetime of fighting for equality for people with disabilities he became an international representative of human rights and overthrowing oppression.
But Ed did not act alone. At Berkeley, other significantly disabled individuals enrolled and coalesced into a group who called themselves the Rolling Quads. Providing a sounding board for each other, the Rolling Quads quickly determined their life experiences shaped a common, group understanding of the condition of disability.
People with disabilities recognized they shared a similar, but unique, history based on common perceptions about disability. An overwhelming need for political change dominated all other endeavors because of a legacy of oppression.
Political activism led to passage of national laws, like the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, and international ones, such as the 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. While political change remained essential, other avenues of expression also developed.
A significant discussion about language and its meaning raged throughout the 1980s in a relatively new outlet: the disability press. American magazines like Mainstream, the Disability Rag, and Mouth, discussed these changes in published articles written primarily by individuals with disabilities.
One of the most important results of these debates was a (r)evolution in the perception of disability from weak and discounted to strong and valued. A traditional antipathy to identification as an individual with a disability turned into pride in both individual and group strength.
The pervasiveness of this change affected multiple constituencies. Grassroots efforts, such as the development of independent living centers, organizations that believed in street protests, especially ADAPT, and groups representing a variety of constituencies, like People First, reflected the movement’s roots. Academic interest sparked the growth of multidisciplinary Disability Studies programs worldwide.
One way to approach cultural characteristics of people with disabilities is through isolating historical facts and myths into positive and negative groupings:
NEGATIVE STEREOTYPES and some POSITIVE COUNTERPARTS
Weakness Strength
Sickness Wellness
Incapacity Ability
Isolation Peer Support
Alienation Identity
Institutionalization Integration
Oppression Resilience
Victimization Choice
Devaluation Pride
Inability to New ways of act “normally” doing things
A reaction to these and many other historic negative perceptions led people with disabilities throughout the world to awaken to our positive attributes. In the process we began to recognize we have many reasons to be proud of who we are, both as individuals and as a group. In the mid-1990s I first published my definition of disability culture in Mainstream (republished in 2003), reproduced below:
“People with disabilities have forged a group identity. We share a common history of oppression and a common bond of resilience. We generate art, music, literature, and other expressions of our lives, our culture, infused from our experience of disability. Most importantly, we are proud of ourselves as people with disabilities. We claim our disabilities with pride as part of our identity. We are who we are: "we are people with disabilities".
In the first writing of this “Fact Sheet,” I mentioned several specific artists. But in the years since, Disability Culture has advanced so rapidly there are far too many practitioners to isolate only a few. In a recent web search (August 2, 2011), the phrase “disability culture” returned 12,900,000 hits on Google and 50,700,000 hits on Yahoo.
Disability Culture website
Our mission since 1994 has been to promote pride in the history, activities, and cultural identity of individuals with disabilities throughout the world.
The purpose of this site is to provide information about disability culture and to share examples of our culture. This site is currently entirely text-based. Look for changes to the site in upcoming months.
The way this site works is that all information is archived. To find a topic that interests you search the archives at the end of this message.
To see at the site clic:
http://www.instituteondisabilityculture.org/
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Date de dernière mise à jour : Samedi 11 Février 2012