Aurora Levins Morales, a Puerto Rican and Jewish disability justice activist, writer, and artist, explained, “My father … taught me this: ‘When two legitimate needs seem to be in conflict, neither side is asking for enough'” (p. xv). Thus, she urges, our job is to seek “a bigger yes”–“the spark-filled junctions where we could find ways to say a bigger yes, where we can add layer upon layer of meaning, rejoice in the complexity of our lives and use it to expand our desires beyond the limits of what we thought possible” (Foreword to Clare, 2015, p. xv).
It is notable that Morales identifies as “a bisexual, chronically ill, mixed-class Puerto Rican Jew” (p. xii), as Clare’s book, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, is a reflection, treatise, and rallying cry for the aliveness and wholeness of broken and complicated beings situated in a broken and living land. The participants in this study insisted on their wholeness–on the rare joy of being recognized and understood as “a whole person” in academia–bemoaning the one-dimensional versions of themselves that they read in many colleagues’ interactions.
This research-creation, too, sought to spark a “bigger yes” by emphasizing imagination as an under-valued or under-practiced habit in Leadership as Love (Byrne-JimĂ©nez & yoon, 2019). This work is made out of pieces from sketches, drafts, and other artworks. Fragments from the same works were also used in the piece “Product/ivity.”
Studies
Leave a Reply