Reimagining the Good Life with Amy Julia Becker

S3 E15 | Who Belongs? Disability and the Built World with Sara Hendren

October 13, 2020 Sara Hendren Season 3 Episode 15
Reimagining the Good Life with Amy Julia Becker
S3 E15 | Who Belongs? Disability and the Built World with Sara Hendren
Show Notes Transcript

How does “the built world”—the chairs, rooms, and streets that guide our bodies every day— implicitly ascribe worth to human beings? How does the built world welcome or exclude individuals in public space? Sara Hendren, author of “What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World,” talks with Amy Julia about disability and the built world, how disability is fundamental to our common humanity, and reimagining the built world in a way that gives dignity and worth to all human beings.

SHOW NOTES:
Sara Hendren is an artist, design researcher, professor at Olin College of Engineering, and the author of “What Can a Body Do?” Connect with Sara:

“The world built of stairs, the world built of sidewalks with no curb cuts—all of those things bear out a very tacit presumption about who’s going to be in public space.”

“We enter our lives acutely dependent on other people. We often exit our lives also in a period of dependence. And in between we traffic in and out of experiences of needing one another. Within our own mythology about how we don’t need people very much or our sense of autonomy and independence, we know that what makes us flourish is connection.”

“I have a body that has needs. We share that.”

“How do I want to be treated if I’m even a little bit different than I am now? The way that I treat folks who are currently acutely vulnerable is the logic by which I will be treated. We owe it to each other to be a little more imaginative than we are, and it doesn’t take an overhaul of the world. An editing of a lot of what we have already makes all the difference.”

On the Podcast:

Thank you to Breaking Ground, the co-host for this podcast.

White Picket Fences, Season 3 of Love is Stronger Than Fear, is based on my book White Picket Fences, and today we are talking (a little out of order) about chapter 11. Check out free RESOURCESaction guide, discussion guides—that are designed to help you respond. Learn more about my writing and speaking at amyjuliabecker.com.

Connect with me:

Thanks for listening!

Note: This transcript is generated using speech recognition software and does contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

1 (3s):
Hi friends. I'm Amy Julia Becker and this is love is stronger than Fear a podcast about pursuing it,

0 (9s):
The hope and healing in the midst of social division,

1 (13s):
Always excited about the guests that I get to have on this podcast. And it feels like this tremendous honor to read beautiful books and listen, and engage in conversation with this world of ideas and practical life and around all of these topics of race. And Disability in class in justice and healing. I love it so much every week, but this week is so near and dear to my heart because I am talking and I'm so excited to introduce you to Sara Hendren Sarah is a professor, she's a designer.

1 (46s):
She is such an interesting and thoughtful academic person, but she's also the mom of a child with down syndrome who is really right the same age as our daughter, penny. And so we also have that in common and talking with her about design and Disability and down syndrome and reimagining the world. It's just brought me great joy. There's one quotation that I meant to mention in the episode, and I didn't get a chance. So I'm just gonna quote her now. And it will give you a taste of the depth of insight that you're about to receive from listening to what Sara has to say about how we imagine the world.

1 (1m 20s):
So this comes towards the end of her new book, which I highly recommend it's called What Can A Body Do. And she's writing about her son, Graham, who has down syndrome. She's talking about the clock as a measure of time. That also has become a measure of our economic value and productive value in society. And she writes the clock may be every bit as much the culprit in the mismatch between a life like grams and the world, not simply his genetic status.

1 (1m 50s):
I see it clearly. Now the clock that is exactly as it is a monolith that encompasses all of us, a mechanized utilitarian, ultimately impoverished scale for human value. My son doesn't need a gentle and pacifying form of inclusion. Inclusion is necessary, but it will never be sufficient. He needs a world with a robust countervailing understanding of personhood and contribution and community in it, human values that are alive and operational outside the logic of the market and the insistent clock he needs it.

0 (2m 27s):
And so do the rest of us.

1 (2m 29s):
Amen to that. I just love the way in which Sarah is able to talk about mutuality. Talk about common humanity and at the same time, not make everyone the same. So I am certain that you will join me in enjoying Sarah's perspective as we talk together. Thanks so much for being here today. Well, Hello everyone. My guest today is Sarah Hendren. She is the author of this newly released and spectacular a book called What Can A Body Do.

1 (3m 1s):
We do how we meet the built world, and we are going to talk all about the book and the title, and so many other cool things. I'm thrilled. Sara to have you hear with us today. Thank you for joining. Thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure to be here. So I'm going to, we begin by saying, I wish that there were 10 more chapters in this book. Like it was a book, or I just wanted more because every page I felt like I, I learned something that was like quirky and interesting, but also relevant.

1 (3m 32s):
And that shifted and my thinking in the way I saw the world, and I just wanted that experience to keep going at the same time. I'm really glad that you finished the book and obviously if you'd kept writing it, I would not have gotten the chance to read it. So I'm also glad for that. And for, or the fact that even in this short conversation, I think listeners would get a taste of it, but I'm going to say this on the front end. So I hope that in the next 45 minutes or so people they're going to hear some of the really neat stories, but also applications that you have in this book.

1 (4m 5s):
And they might think, Oh great. I learned some stuff. We need to read the book now. And I just, and that's sometimes true. I sometimes feel like all I need is the Podcast version. I do not think that is true in the case of your book, because there's way too much, really rich and insightful material. So I'm just gonna say on the front end, I'm going to finish it. The mode that if this even like begins to spark your interest as a listener, then you should by the book and read it in his called What Can A Body Do How We Meet the Built World is buy Sara Hendren we're going to put all those in the SHOW NOTES but I just want to underline that.

1 (4m 38s):
All right. Sara you are an artist. So you're a teacher for engineering students. You're a mother, and I was thinking about how those threads of your ideas and existence come together in this book. So I thought that might be a good way to introduce you as well as what you've written to tell us, you know, what his, the book about, how is it, how did it come to be out of who you are? You thank you. It is such a good question. And it is true. It's kind of, I'm a kind of outsider insider, a translation that you kind of book and a number of directions.

1 (5m 8s):
So I am trained in the arts and humanities entirely, and I teach kind of Disability studies, but in an engineering context and in a design studio. So I find myself as like a productive kind of misfit in my day to day work life. And I find that I do find that so productive. So day in and day out and professor at Olin College of Engineering, which is outside Boston, it's a tiny little kinda laboratory experiment to a school for engineering's. We have students and building things from day one. And we think a lot about engineering as it's applied science, right?

1 (5m 41s):
Meaning it builds, lends, and people's lives. Fundamentally. It is not a bench. Science is stuff that goes out to the world. So that means it has to involve people from the beginning. We are a number of years. I have taught what engineers think is assistive technology. So they think of it in this very technical sense of kind of prosthetic

2 (5m 58s):
Lens and sorta, you know, high tech brail, and those kinds of affiliations that they have with where a technology means Disability. But I use that laboratory and studio setting to actually have students meet people who would call themselves as disabled people, disabled, not by the shape of their bodies, but by their interactions with a world that isn't a fit for them. And I set up that encounter in the laboratory to try to actually help students turn their attention away for a bit from the shininess of the technology and its promises, and instead to pay attention to people and their bodies, and they have to say, and their needs yet, but also their wishes.

2 (6m 37s):
So at the beginning of the book, which is about design and Disability, but really about how all our bodies meet the world. We drop in on that laboratory just to set the stage and we need named Amanda is a little person. So she is around four feet tall and she came to my laboratory and in need of a lectern for short stature. So you can imagine, right, that Amanda, as a little person, it doesn't fit the standard, you know, just the design of the world. And so when she walked into my classroom were thinking about the Heights at the tables, in the chairs and the light switches.

2 (7m 9s):
And this was in the context again of an assistive technology class, but it was doing that this request from Amanda was not for a kind of like what's a rescue tool for me, but instead it was this very singular request for electronic, a piece of furniture that was absolutely bespoke, you know, just for her at her scale, she was asking us, in other words, to make the world actually come toward her a little bit, rather than make her taller. Do you know? So we've built a collapsible portable lectern that you can travel with when she gets talks, she's out, she's an art historian in the curator by profession.

2 (7m 41s):
So if she needed one of these, and so students built this very clever, you know, folds out in three moves, lectern carbon fiber, which has got a super high strength to weight ratio. So it's really lightweight, very strong. And in the process of that encounter, students write are undoing their ideas about normalcy, their undoing, their ideas about this stuff, going to be rescued right by technology, as opposed to their undoing, their own ideas about Amanda's own a role in her own life.

2 (8m 14s):
If you knew that her capacity to say, I would like the world to be a little different, not I'm looking for some assistance from some engineers. So it is a frame for the book that then explores all the ways that lots of bodies meet the built world in what Rosemary Garland Thompson, who the Disability scholar calls a misfit. And she says ability his no more, no less than me, a square peg and a round hole. Let me talk about that. That is quite profound because what that means is not, I have a property have a body that is non normative. It means in my body doesn't fit that dominant shape of the World.

2 (8m 46s):
It's a square peg and round hole means the misfit. This is actually running both ways, right? Not clear whether or not body needs to com a little bit more to the world or whether the world actually needs to elasticize and bend some of its structures. So this is a really productive question for me in the laboratory. And again, it sets out this book looking at limbs, but also at furniture and also rooms and also streets. I wrote it to expand in it at scale that way misfitting, but I will also say that I went on this whole trajectory, being an artist who lands in an engineering school, which no one could have told me even 10 years ago would happen, but in, but the catalyst for that was my son's birth.

2 (9m 27s):
So Graham young syndrome. And that's how I know you Amy Julia Becker so we both have teenagers for now.

1 (9m 35s):
Yeah. They're almost exactly the same age. They're right. Yeah. Yeah. Penny was in 2005 and I think Graham was born in Oh six.

2 (9m 42s):
Yeah, January the six. So there really is.

1 (9m 44s):
Petty is December of five. They're a little bit of a month apart. I didn't even know that. Okay.

2 (9m 49s):
So that was, you know, for me, I'm, I'm I know for you, you know, just the absolute, a powerful reorganization of how the world works, right. You counts and who is normal and misfitting that it didn't have language for a course when Ground was born. But that I have learned in a decade of study since then, that that misfitting is both deeply, deeply creative and adaptive, and also an urgent matter of politics. And I find actually the people miss one of the other, they can even think that, you know, the politics of Disability is very real, but they don't think of the creativity in the adaptation.

2 (10m 28s):
So you want to just not to speak too long right now because I'm running on. But just to say, the book is driven from those engines, this kind of like, where does art and the question asking of art arrive in the Engineering laboratory and how does familial attachment and, you know, and those relationships actually drive also what we do with our lives anyway. So

1 (10m 49s):
No, I, no. And you could tell they're is I loved the perspective you are able to bring in terms of this real lived experience in your own family that has, I think, informed and shaped some of the questions you're asking, but at the same time, I think your also really clear that like having a child with down syndrome is not the same as being a little person is not the same as, you know, being, I mean, you've traveled all over the world to investigate and explore and imagine, I mean, what I love is just that creative, the role.

1 (11m 22s):
I don't even know if you use the word imagination, but I just thought about the way in which the imagination is. So at work and your prompting that in your student's and in your readers, 'em, it was really beautiful. And I'd love to have you just from the get go, because as you said, so much of this book is about framework. So I love the square peg round hole in terms of wait, which one of these is wrong. Like, that's kind of how we're almost taught to think about this is like one of these. And it's like, well, what if the square peg is supposed to be square? And the round hole is supposed to be, and we still and were going to fit together somehow, what would that mean?

1 (11m 57s):
So I love that question, but could you Within that you mentioned a new book, like to different models that disability studies identifies, and I'd love to just hear some, what those models are, as well as some examples that help. I know when I first had a penny in my life, it was literally as if I was in one of those, I dunno, those 3d pictures where you're trying to see the dolphins that are, you know, flying out of the water, but you can only see the water. And then when you see it, you're like, how could I not have seen that all along?

1 (12m 27s):
I feel that way when I'm thinking about Disability from these two different frames of reference, and I'm sure that's true for many of our listeners. So I'd love for you just to explain those reference points and then give some examples to help us

2 (12m 39s):
Really dig in. Yeah, absolutely. And I should say my book is written kinda for a non-expert Reeder who might be thinking that Disability is not part of their lives right now. And it is a kind of invitation to be thinking about Disability as a natural form of, you know, human variation that will arrive in your life at some point is just by the ageing process, but probably less people, if people are thinking about this right now, just thinking about your near circle's and loved ones that people with conditions of misfitting like chronic depression, but also right.

2 (13m 10s):
Having a broken arm for two months out, you know, in some given year to things like parents who are thinking about a new diagnosis, that's difficult to pin down. Now, let me just invite all of that to be part of the text, have this conversation in case people are not seeing the connections. They really are. There Disability is in every life. And so Disability studies is in this field of academic research. And I try to just translate in very lay person's terms, this rich, you know, a repository of wisdom, including naming as a medical model of Disability and then distinguishing as a social model of discipline and a medical model.

2 (13m 45s):
We are, this is very natural to us, probably the, you know, how you live with the body that may be, has an impairment, which we would call him, maybe in passing him out and called it a handicap or some kind of non normativity. So, you know, you don't hear with your ears or you don't see with your eyes, but in the medical model, it's purely that those things, they are biological fax, for sure. But if you think only of Disability as a medical model than you think, well, that's that person's problem. And it's their job to figure out how to quote, overcome it or to see the right doctor as well or whatever, but it does, he was just on a body and in the social model of disability, the invitation is just to widen the lens a little bit.

2 (14m 24s):
So if you think right now about somebody in your life who made use a wheelchair temporarily or a longterm, some of the time, all the time, folks that I know my friends who use wheelchairs would say, I'm a disabled person, but they would say I'm not disabled because my legs don't ambulate and lock down the street. I'm a disabled actually, because I live in a world built of stairs in it, which is an arbitrary architectural choice, right. That doesn't have to be that way, but that has a disabling effect on my body. That doesn't mean, of course, that's my legs. Don't have a biological conditions. Of course, all that's very real.

2 (14m 56s):
But its to say, when you widen that lens and I'm just expanding my hands out from my body right now, what that means is Disability lives between this body and this desk in front of me in between my body and the computer in between my body in the chair. So that is that square peg round hole thing where you go, Oh my goodness. Well, or is it that we need a better wheelchair or better medicine for that wheelchair user? Or is it that the ramp might be something that's needed for that building right as an alternate form of access. Yeah. And when changing that question then change as your utter mental model of the world, right?

2 (15m 28s):
Suddenly now, now you're thinking about the sizes of your door's and there are thresholds and you're thinking about how easy or hard it is. Some of your listeners are thinking about, Hey, you know, how easy or hard it is to manipulate kitchen tools, right? Or how easy or hard it is to type on an ordinary computer or to walk long distances with or without a cane. What could the worlds shapes and structures be liked that made that a little bit more friendly. And we see of course, examples of this all the time now. So I tell him a book, the story of how curb cuts came to every city coroner in the United States and lots of other places around the world.

2 (16m 3s):
And so curb cuts, right? Or just the, the diagonal cut that goes between the corner of us, have a sidewalk in the street. So you can go down that smooth passage, just bumping up one step down. The people forget that this has actually a very new thing and the built environment, right? The results of the Americans with disabilities act, which has the 1990, that's an antidiscrimination law that has an architectural code because if right, the idea that actually bias and discrimination might be in are very hardware in, are concrete in are steel like in, are actual structures.

2 (16m 36s):
And some think about how I'm probable. That was what that law said. Know you're going to go round to every corner and cutting out, you know, that it's fileable and yet that's profound write. So now if you're a wheelchair user, you can get down the street, but not just down the street means you can get to the voting booth and to listen to your school. So we've done, we have actually asked the built environment to flex and bend and some of your readers or your listeners need to be thinking about, you know, maybe they use speech to text on their phone and in a lots of people who don't have the difference to type, it's just Built in on your smartphone and you don't have to be tutored in how to do it.

2 (17m 14s):
It's a builtin, you know, intuitive kind of feature or a lot of our listeners probably watched TV with captions on, or even though their people. And that's a way that was also the work of deaf advocates, you know, TV Watchers who insisted that all standard televisions come with a closed captioning as a Built part of the technology and not as an extra appendage. And we don't even think about it now, you know?

1 (17m 36s):
Well, and there are benefits to not only the people who are specifically advocating for it from some position of Disability, but actually, I mean, as a mom who has pushed a stroller as, and even, I mean, not to mention the fact as someone who would like too as a, you know, I can walk on my two legs and I'd like to be able for my friends and relatives who use wheelchairs to be with me, like I'd like to be together in that. Right. And so there all sorts of applications and implications socially from considering a social model of disability, I was struck by a couple of things that I just noted in reading.

1 (18m 16s):
One was when you're talking about the deaf community, you know, the difference just in the term hearing loss and deaf gain. Can you say a little bit about that because I thought that kind of encapsulated this medical model right. Of hearing loss and social model of understanding Disability in terms of the words deaf gain, which for some listeners might not even make sense without an explanation.

2 (18m 40s):
Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, that's a beautiful as a sort of example of shifting from an it's just expanding from a medical model of disability, two, a social one, because it gives us better questions about the world. We all want, there's a chapter called room wear that opens at Gallaudet university and Gallaudet is an all deaf and hard of hearing campus in Washington, DC chartered by Abraham Lincoln, actually the 1860s around a long time. And there are all kinds of clever architectural adaptations to deafness on Gallaudet's campus.

2 (19m 10s):
So there used to be a somatic doorbell are, so you have a visitor to what you would approach a building and he would pull of a chain and a stone would drop a, that would register by the, of the vibration. You know, instead of sound, it's a really clever and write. Now, if you go in, you're going to knock on somebody's office door, you flip the light switches off and on they're all outside the doorway. So there's really clever things like that all the time, but a a a dozen years ago or so an architect named Hansel Bauman, who's an architect on campus and a bunch of deaf students, Gallaudet students and alums and faculty got together to say, what would an architecture, a new architecture look like?

2 (19m 50s):
That's actually wrapped around the condition of deafness because remember that Gallaudet is not interested in curing deafness in the, in the motion of hearing it in a proudly signing community. It's also bilingual and uses English as one of its languages, but it's primarily assigning community. And it is a deep celebration at the integrity of deaf experience and an ASL as a beautiful visual spatial language. So the result of that architectural research was to come up with like, I think a hundred design principles that came what's known as deaf space.

2 (20m 24s):
So it was an idea that actually the shape of the room could actually be modified such or thought about ahead of time to actually honor all the ways that ASL plays out as an, as a spatial language, but is also like a way of being. So I'll give you some examples in a lobby, there have a dorm, a dev space dorm. You've got, you know, a long open lobby with these little pots of rooms for a meeting. And each of those pods has a half height wall because you don't need it. You don't need a full height walls for a sound barriers there and write so long site lions to communicate across distances.

2 (21m 0s):
And the materials are made out of wood, which has a nice strong resonance because you might tap or a slap up to, you know, what to feel that sematic signal again, to call and group to order food. And the upholstery in the walls are always in solid colors, greens and blues, because they provide the best kind of contrast for the intricate, you know, like the little gestures of sign that you're doing, right? So you don't want, if you don't want that glare of harsh white, so, and things like the doorways are extra wide sort of double doors, because you can think about how the distance between you and a person, if you're signing to them and also looking to them, they're our doors that open up at the same time for you.

2 (21m 39s):
So that kind of extra berth, and there are coroners that wrap around in a curve rather than meeting at a hard 90 degree angle, right? Because you, if you're listening for footsteps than you can avoid a crash, if you can't stop. So, you know, this is kind of solid curve around and it was the most fascinating thing was actually going actually to the, in the neighborhood of Gallaudet, to the signing Starbucks, which is nothing more, nothing less than a regular Starbucks recognizable as such, but with all deaf staff behind the counter.

2 (22m 10s):
And I went in there as a hearing person and I didn't need any instructions at all about how to behave there that had the kind of quick White electronic tablet's to write my name in my order down. And then of course, all the payment is automated as it is everywhere with credit cards and such a We gestured and looked at one another, but no one made an attempt to voice. And I did not make an attempt to sign. We had an exchange right silent one. And then my name came up on a monitor down the unit on the counter and just think about how you switched the dynamics utterly with very low tech actually moves.

2 (22m 43s):
Its really just,

1 (22m 45s):
And what makes that last example makes me think about is, and I'm back to, well, the kind of the question implicit in a, I guess you actually nailed this in your book at one point you say, who is the world built for? And in that case, on the one hand, you can say that Starbucks is Built for the deaf students from Gallaudet and who are in that community. And yet you still have belonged they're it wasn't as though you were excluded from that space in how they had been able to welcome you into it. And I think, again, for those of us who are in this kind of able bodied neuro-typical, which, you know, is the predominant a set of spaces, certainly how we think I'm most of the time and in our institutions for us to try to be doing that question of who belongs here and Y who would we built the space for and the space certainly in these physical and architectural ways, but also, and I think you get at this in the ways in which we are designed to greet one another to think about one another, right?

1 (23m 47s):
I mean just the, again, language attitude in the book, you have an example. If someone who was starting out, he was a college in California anyway, the, Oh, you anyway, the headline was helpless. Cripple attends. You see classes here in wheelchair. And you're like, Oh my gosh, the story of this man,

2 (24m 10s):
That was great, that he has been called a helpless cripples. Like it is

1 (24m 14s):
So almost a satire now. And yet, clearly that was the perception, which on some level is still carried. And so I think that sense of like, how do we think about belonging and how does the, how do our spaces and our interactions change when we start imagining it differently is a lot of what gets prompted by reading about places like Gallaudet and what they've done there.

2 (24m 44s):
I just, you know, it's not a call to site to, to remake the world in the bespoke shape for each of us. Right? It's not that. And I think it, you know, just shifting the whose behind the counter at a Starbucks, it's just a way to C one another better write. It's just a way to shift the dynamic. So that folks are not always coming to the hearing world and saying like, okay, I'm going to figure out how to do all of the, you know, writing down myself, I'm going to do to take on all that work. But to let that be that redesigned via a kind of opening to R wonder, you are wondering about how different people or having an alternate sensory experience of the world and have a beautiful alternate way of communicating and at the Starbucks have all things could be a mix of the public sphere.

2 (25m 26s):
You know, like it was a half hearing people and a half voicing people and hearing people and half deaf folks in that space. Then we were mixed in the public sphere in a way that is often the case. So, sorry, go ahead.

1 (25m 37s):
No, no, very cool. I would love to hear you talk a little bit about, you've mentioned the words normal a couple of times, and then you also, and you talk about that idea of even in the norm came from, and then later on you write about the idea of average, which I also found so fascinating.

2 (25m 56s):
We love to hear a little bit of like, what are, what's the history of the idea of normal and the idea of average

1 (26m 3s):
And how have those things play themselves

2 (26m 5s):
Out in our Built environments? Yeah, for sure. So normalcy certainly for kinda, you know, industrial cultures, but you know, operating on high technology and market economies like ours in the U S are built on a normalcy as a product have social sciences. So we think of NORML and percentile's and standards that, or that, or you talk about in terms of normalcy as like eternal and inherited, but really there just about a couple centuries old.

2 (26m 36s):
So the social sciences are kind of an early 19th century way of applying scientific accounting and tabulating and comparisons take it from the natural sciences and apply it to social characteristics. So that's how we measure populations at scale. It's how we describe the behavior of groups. It's how we quantify, you know, the features of the Body, that kind of thing. And so, you know, statistics of course, our useful to us, right in social sciences. And we need actually to understand populations at scale, we need to understand in group behavior, we are over in the middle of the pandemic right now.

2 (27m 8s):
We, you need to trace right, the flu transmission. So on the problem becomes what, what social scientists called the aggregated fallacy when we let actually the comparative number, right where I belong in the group relative to other people, the aggregated fallacy tells you that that's the only thing that matters. So therefor, to think about it, if they are folks who are parents or they are children ones and the, and the pediatrician's office, the measurements there are about height and weight and other kinds of features compared to other kids' to compare to other babies, right?

2 (27m 42s):
The way that, the way we talk about where are we land is always on scale compared side by side, looking to either side, right? How do I stack up against other people? Again, that's useful for scientists to understand, but we, when we experience that in the pediatrician's office, it invites us to think about our child or ourselves only in, in relativity to other people. And so normalcy became this kind of, you know, what, the standard way we talk about one another, how we measure up, compare to the people. And it's a long and complicated history that I'm not doing full justice to.

2 (28m 15s):
You you'd have to really read deeply in the history, but over the course of the 19th century with kind of misinterpretations of Darwin's idea of survival, of the fittest, again, a misinterpretation of that, but taken up and then this is kind of nationalist, you know, regime's around perfecting human populations as it gets really ugly in the early 20th century with what we know as eugenics, right, or normalcy is not just how you generally measure up in the croup, but it's like, how do you enhance and actually optimize for that kind of, you know, the achievement I'm putting in quotes of normalcy.

2 (28m 50s):
And so that, that got quite, as we know, right from Nazi Germany and so on, that gets quite ugly, right? When we apply it as a, as an ethic, there is an ethos for How how we got to be, but the way, so maybe that the ugly history is mostly behind us, but I do think we feel the long tail of a kind of eugenic way of thinking that sort of soft eugenic way of thinking about one another. And, and, and you have, and I, of course our, in a very particular eugenic politics, it is eugenic, right?

2 (29m 20s):
That is the, the calling of populations on the pro choice mother, as a person who is concerned about selective termination. So just to go right to the heart of the issue, we do have a lot of eugenics with us and people sort of want to say like, well, if it's a matter of private choice, then what can be done. I agree that private voice is important. And yet how many private choices at

1 (29m 42s):
A time we were making choices right now about who is worthy to arrive in on the planet. Yeah. And I, I mean to that point, which I am glad you raised in the book as well, and there is this sense of every private choice is made in the context of a social environment. And So you sure we can point fingers at individuals who make private choices that we disagree with and say that's discriminatory, right? Or what, but that, to me is almost beside the point, right?

1 (30m 14s):
In terms of what does that mean for our world, our Built world, but also are felt World write our social and emotional World to be a place where when women are looking at a prenatal diagnosis of down syndrome, instead of thinking in only negative medical and negative social terms, they can think in terms of possibilities and opportunities. And I think I'm skipping ahead a little bit, and maybe we'll get back to this, but at the end of the book, when you write about gram a little more specifically, and about the idea of the clock and the ways in which we have started to let time and productivity within time, be a way a short hand of valuing people.

1 (31m 3s):
And so I do think that a sense of the ways in which we value one another coming out in, even just the assumption that every woman would do some form of prenatal testing and have a choice about whether or not even with a wanted pregnancy is going to continue. So I'm with you. I think those questions are I'm really tricky, but I, at the same time really important to keep saying, Hey guys, remember eugenics.

1 (31m 33s):
And remember also even just this sense that there is this history have people with disabilities down syndrome, specifically who were sent to institutions. And I think we tend to talk about that as this horrific time. And it's like, well, guess what family is, don't have people with down syndrome now. Like this keeps moving in much the same way that I think when we think about race in America, we move from enslavement to Jim Crowe to mass incarceration. Its like we just keep switching the way we are going to try to control these bodies out of quote unquote the norm, as opposed to saying, what does it mean to actually expand our welcome so that everyone is changed by that and that, you know, I think there's real parallels.

1 (32m 17s):
They're not the same thing, but there's some parallels there that are important and glad you bring it up. And it will say just to give it back to that original spirit of your question are we can talk a lot about down syndrome further if you like, just to go back to like the legacy of normal on the average. Yeah. Yeah. The world built of stairs, the world's built of sidewalks with no

2 (32m 40s):
Curb cuts. All of those things bare out of very tacit, you know, not probably witting or unwitting, right. That bare out this presumption about who is going to be in public space and anyone who has approached a big court house or a big, you know, government building, which, you know, 30 stairs, no one who ever hold the hand of a toddler learning to walk, thought that this was on the team of architects only the best, you know, no one accompanying there or their aging parent, right. Who could slip easily on the ice was thinking about this per this kind of use case of the city.

2 (33m 16s):
Right? And when you look around and you can see there's so much of what's been designed, it has been by sort of ambulatory and physically strong men designing for other, for other men and not with the built environment that works a little more flexibly for conditions of interdependence, for conditions of assistance. And certainly not for conditions of non-normative bodies. And yet what I'm showing in the book is that the, the built world again has been remade. And so many ways I've been thinking about the kneeling BAS you know, like just getting out of air or you know, and six inches down wear the bus comes down too.

2 (33m 48s):
You too, to get on. If you were an older adult, you are using a cane. If you are a wheelchair user in my own city and Cambridge, the women's center, once those, those kneeling buses came out that the one in the center lobby to have it made policy that you would also kneel the buss for a stroller, all of those, or just these ways of, you know, thinking about the build environment in ways that can be remade actually, and in the service of a more desirable world. And I point to the, those examples as much as I sort of say, well, wow, this is legacy of NORML as something to continue to be worried about the shining points of light throughout the book in design or an index of our ideas about each other and about the way those ideas can change.

2 (34m 28s):
I mean, it's just remarkable.

1 (34m 29s):
Yeah, absolutely. And I, I'm thinking about also the difference between universal design and the more bespoke, and I don't know that you have a name for that design, like individualized design or these different, because there's these various things like the kneeling

2 (34m 51s):
Or the curb cuts or a ramp. I mean, any number of things that actually enhance the experience of the Built world for many, many people, not just people who we would say, Oh, disabled person. Umm, but in various ways I want to ask you about the difference between

1 (35m 8s):
Universal design and more individual

2 (35m 11s):
Design or bespoke does it

1 (35m 13s):
And the advantages and disadvantages.

2 (35m 16s):
And I dunno if disadvantages is even in the right word, but this is what are those two things and why would we think in one term or the other or one yeah. And universal design's that those are examples of curb cuts in close captioning. If people are used Oxo, good grips kitchen tools, you're participating in those universal design stories and they tend to, yes, they tend to grow out at scale, tend to be kind of quote for everyone. But so we should be celebrating these things and I do in the book, but there's so much more, there's so many more ways in which we can look at the particular ways that people tinkering in their own living rooms, people doing very localized kind of work and people doing in the 21st century, which sometimes called diffuse designs had a networked practices are a little local practices can be shared online.

2 (36m 3s):
We don't actually have to think at that scale. So if you build a widget that then only matters if a 100,000 people who use it or are a million people used it. I also think from a civil rights and a perspective of the universal design works in a market economy. And again, we can be happy about it. The kitchen tool that arrives for, you know, under 10 bucks at the big box store, what's the right thing to do it's to build a democracy that actually has flexibility and it, because it's in it, that's what a democracy does. In other words, you can't, you can't have a design world that only rationalize itself rationalizes itself.

2 (36m 34s):
Is it benefits everyone, quote unquote, you see it? I mean, it's I do, you know?

1 (36m 39s):
Yeah. And I appreciate that point, like thinking, because I'm thinking about how often I have almost felt like I'm able to make a case

2 (36m 49s):
For whether it's so

1 (36m 51s):
Oh, or like inclusion or something like a curb cut where it's like, look, this is good for me as a mom with the,

2 (36m 59s):
As opposed to wooden, I just want it as well.

1 (37m 3s):
Ashley in a society that does have the means wouldn't I want someone who uses a wheel.

2 (37m 7s):
We tried to be able to get to work. Yes.

1 (37m 9s):
So I would, I not want that even if it does not, it does benefit me, but even if it does not directly benefit me and that is a more universal design today

2 (37m 17s):
Situation. But I just think that one of the quotations I was really

1 (37m 21s):
Struck by, and I think you're quoting another story

2 (37m 24s):
Or by you wrote this,

1 (37m 26s):
Some scholars claim I'm quoting here, the fundamental well

2 (37m 29s):
Expect of human embodiment is Disability.

1 (37m 34s):
I am curious about this sense of Disability as well.

2 (37m 39s):
The, I mean, one it made me

1 (37m 42s):
And wonder is, is Disability the way in which our common humanity is displayed more so than in what we would tend to think like, Oh, normal or average, as opposed to Disability as what is common about us in our humanity. And I think especially at the time

2 (37m 60s):
Vulnerable and interdependent

1 (38m 2s):
And, and aspects of our humanity. So I don't know what that means.

2 (38m 5s):
What I'd love to hear what you think. Yes. I mean, thank you for that question because it is so foundational and I find people, even people who can come along and say, Oh yes, we need an accessible world. Tend to avoid seeing their own connection, right. To this profound idea of being interdependent. Because right. Think about it. What is the Ground of how we know a human is, right. When we say it's cognition, we wouldn't want to go there quite right. We want to say it's higher thinking are abstract reasoning, right? If you cut out a whole lot of people, when you do that.

2 (38m 35s):
So philosophers have lots of arguments about this, but those scholars, Brenda BrueggemannSharon Snider and Rosemary Garland Thompson were saying alongside lots of other scholars in disability studies, but it's actually, it has our need for one another. So we enter our lives acutely dependent on other peoples. We often exit our lives also in a period of dependence. And it's an all in between we traffic in and out of experiences of needing one another. And that actually it's loneliness and depression in old age, right.

2 (39m 6s):
That, that gets people that has really poor outcomes associated with it. And so much of our ideas about our own mythology, about how we don't need people very much are our own sense of autonomy and independence. We know that actually what makes us flourish is a connection, right? That is the giving and the receiving of power. Right? And so you might say even the Disability is no more and no less than a personal and political needfulness. We can actually let that be visible and unifying, right.

2 (39m 36s):
Without romanticizing it right there, there are conditions that are disabling that we would want to cure for tomorrow. It's no accident, but this whole discussion that you are describing comes at the end of the room chapter with a discussion with Steve saling, who has an advanced ALS and Who upon getting a diagnosis of a dozen years ago, went about the project and designing an independent living space for herself and a number of other people with ALS and ms. And I described in their, the sailing house residents, which is on a technological level from an independence standpoint is quite remarkable.

2 (40m 8s):
So Steve has a little cursor on the bridge of the glasses, on his, you know, the, the nose bridge on his glasses that talks to a wheelchair amount of a tablet that allows him to open all the doors and to some of the elevators and to run the media and the HVAC and stuff in his room, which is a beautifully designed space funded by philanthropy and Medicaid here in Boston. And you know, the thing that, that ALS really troubles us, right? Because it is a restriction of mobility. That is a really hard diagnosis in his body, has very little mobility in it now.

2 (40m 42s):
And I try to invite the reader to say, it's a look at Steve's life. It's Marvel at that technology to Marvel even more at the ecosystem of care in which he lives his life and to hold two things together that can both be true. One is that he would want a con a cure for ALS tomorrow. We all would rejoice. And that as a life worth living can be built. Like those things can both be. And Steve would say that in the absence of pharmacology, that technology is the cure. And I never stopped sort of thinking about that, the mystery of it, but it's the, the technology is the cure for making his life convivial write with other people.

2 (41m 21s):
There's no way there's not this mythology that somehow he is escaping the difficulty. So in other words, when they say that Disability might be the fundamental aspect of being human, that's quite a provocation because it, the invitation

1 (41m 34s):
To think of our own needs as well as really just fundamental to our survival. And so we can spend our lives rushing away from it, or subtly discriminated, you know, sort of distinguishing ourselves from those of others and thinking, Oh, how lucky we are and all that, all that's just noise that is noise. Or we can just say, I belong on that planet. Two I have a body that has needs write. And so that's a marvelous thing and distinguish like the distinctive and, and, and, you know, varied between us. We are not the same, but we share that.

1 (42m 6s):
I mean, it's just a profound idea that I learned from disability studies. Yeah, me too. I think I have been trained in how to hide my humanity in being trained in how to become more of an individual, more of an productive, efficient, or more of an isolated human. And in really asking that same question for me from a theological perspective, because I was in seminary when penny was born, but similarly being like, well, wait a second theologians have said being made in the image of God is the ability to reason.

1 (42m 41s):
I mean, all those same things that philosophers have said, right? And so what if being made in the image of God has the capacity to give and receive love if God is love, what if that's what it means to be human? What if that means? And so how does that actually change my understanding of the deepest aspect of my humanity and the ways in which penny might actually have access to that that is somehow easier because her needs are so much more acknowledged by our society, obviously, sometimes in a very dismissive way, but that to me has been a gift because it has slowly opened my own heart too, my own needs.

1 (43m 20s):
And those of others, not as shameful things that should be cured, but actually as the ways in which we can begin to relate to one another with love and care. So yeah, I really resonated just with that thought of Disability as actually fundamental to our humanity. And even for those of us who would, you know, not be diagnosable as people with disabilities and yet who nevertheless find ourselves as needy creatures in, you know, potential relationships with care, have a couple more questions to ask you.

1 (43m 56s):
And one is just, okay, so in all of these conversations, I think it's really easy to imagine the cynic who says, okay, if we're thinking about addressing and these needs that are not the mainstream predominant majority culture needs, won't it just cost too much. Like just from a very practical the money, its like our taxes are all going to go up in order for this to happen better, like on a political level, on a social level.

1 (44m 26s):
That all sounds wonderful, but you know, you shouldn't, we be doing more good for more people than

2 (44m 32s):
Designing for an individual needs or for my Newt portions of the population who need more. So I would love to just here how you responded, I'm thinking especially about your chapter.

1 (44m 44s):
If you're on time in talking about the value

2 (44m 46s):
We use system of our economic life in terms of the work,

1 (44m 51s):
What we value and what it costs in actual dollars an acre,

2 (44m 55s):
It helps in other ways as well. Yeah. Well, well, so many things, I mean, listeners will find, if you read the book, you will see just as many quite low tech and affordable design and people are working on it that are profound impact on their lives. So a little $10 objects and also low tech practices that are So nimbly and cleverly done and distributed for free. There's a whole, you know, profile have a low tech prosthesis set of clinics in India called the Jaipur foot organization.

2 (45m 26s):
It gives away a load, lower leg, press the seas for free so we can find on Januzzi we can find innovation re truly everywhere when you even,

1 (45m 36s):
And a reference second. Cause you also give the example of, I think it's a woman with a prosthetic arm where it's like actually the Velcro and the rubber band is what I need. And I'm sorry if it makes you uncomfortable. I'm no, not really sorry, but it might be, are you uncomfortable that you don't see an arm? Where do you think you're supposed to? But this is what actually allows for me.

2 (45m 55s):
We had a function in the World and right. That's right. Anyway, that's on the side, but it was a great example. Yeah. And so, so people, I think I also in the chair chapter or profile have a workshop in Manhattan that builds low-tech cardboard, carpentry furniture for kids with disabilities all over in New York with the most just stunningly, you know, inventive materials. And the thing that the director they are said to me that I think is relevant here that I never forgot is she said, you know, there will always be people who have needs for adaptations.

2 (46m 28s):
You remember right. If you're thinking this about the cost issue that you just named, each of us, our bodies can change tomorrow, right? So we'd want a world with some of that safety net in it. But she said like the World will always have people who have needs and Misfit's the world will also actually always have a very inventive tinkerers and their garage is in living rooms. And also high tech laboratories is doing really amazing stuff. She said, actually, what's in short supply. I just think this is amazing is the person in the middle who is willing to ask for something different than is already on offer.

2 (47m 0s):
Like the person understands that the status quo doesn't have to be accepted and that something else might get born. So I'm thinking, for example, Amy, Julia have the dementia village in Vespa, the Netherlands, which is, was a regular nursing home. So to think of a nursing home with a long day, you know what, or, you know, a memory care. So extra, a locked facility of a nursing home and the board of directors there 20 years ago or something looked around and just thought, if we develop dementia, is the place there we want to live.

2 (47m 31s):
This is just status quo moment, right? Will we say it's regrettable that it can't be helped? Or when we say it couldn't be otherwise. Right. And they are that the answer was clearly no. And they developed a set of priorities. Like what are the things that we value? And one of many was what they call favorable surroundings. And for them that meant engaging with an architecture firm and building a model village, a simulacrum of the village as a nursing home. So it's got streets and shop's and a restaurant and a theater.

2 (48m 4s):
Now there are under the same kind of state controls and state funding as other nursing homes that look like those are the standard issue of nursing homes. So that is not something where they do actually cleverly raise money by having a theatre that is both for the residents and also is rentable from the outside. They also have a restaurant there, which is like a Horace it's partly open, partly closed. Or if this is an ingenious write, so folks from the town can come eat it, this restaurant. And they just expect that they're will be folks wandering in cars, wandering as part of dementia and that everybody will behave and a respectful way and it works for them.

2 (48m 38s):
But so, and in that way, that also maintains a kind of continuity for folks in dementia care. And we can hardly imagine that in this country, right? Not folks are not being, you know, just cloistered away, but they do that as partly a fundraising gesture, I guess I'm just saying there's actually good ideas everywhere truly. And there's actually, you know, the right, I tell a couple of examples of what the best that money can buy the $80,000 universal prosthetic limb. I can think of as many cases where folks didn't make use of those as for those who did.

2 (49m 8s):
So its a very American market economy assumption that if you're going to do the best for people that are the best, it will be expensive and will come, right. You know, via a specialists in high-tech laboratories of science, that all of that, that is such a bundle of assumptions. Then you make that regular people and And and franchise citizens come together to remake their streets all the time to think about the ways that bike lanes arise in cities, across the United States. That's a lot of times it's biking advocates who go this way, this lane right here, right?

2 (49m 38s):
And they even pick a temporary one to show, you know, the kind of proof of concept. That's a subtle reshaping that changes everything in terms of transportation, but doesn't require a huge amount of dollars. So I feel like when folks go there, some things do require dollar's and this, again, you don't have to be a kind of revolutionary about a market economies. For example, you can be revolutionary and think less of a burn it all down and recreate the World. You can actually, that will be quite a reformist and think all I want is an investment in neighborhoods, some good afterschool care, like not letting folks fall through the cracks who have disabilities building good, you know, quality transportation it's actually that is not such a radical idea.

2 (50m 18s):
You know,

1 (50m 19s):
One of the people I read a lot is a guy named Eric Carter who thinks a lot about faith communities and architecture. And he said, yeah,

2 (50m 26s):
Yes, of course don't put your ramp,

1 (50m 28s):
You know, near the dumpster. And in terms of like communicating welcome, but the most, and like, you know, there might be a few things that will cost money, but the biggest thing for your faith community to do is change the posture of the heart and mind of the people who are there in terms of what does it mean to welcome? What does it mean to welcome this person into my classroom? What does it mean to welcome this person into my sanctuary and to my civic organization or whatever it is. And I think that, ah, on the one hand, yeah, if we value life, then we can put some dollars behind that as a society.

1 (51m 6s):
But at the same time, let's be clear that the dollars are not what we need as much as we need that human investment in one another in, in order for this to happen. So I've one final final question, which in some ways it's probably just me as one mom asking another, I was struck in how you wrote about the, why you wrote about Graeme and just the propensity of people to kind of celebrate achievement in, in two ways, one in kind of a PA patronizing like, Oh look it, you gave an example of a guy who like was an adult who would eat the broccoli or for the first time then people cheered and then, and then you also wrote about, I might even find the quotation.

1 (51m 48s):
All right, I'm going to read this. Graham helped bring it up. And so if any, instinct's to make him into a scripted success story project and I'll do common and benign seeming determination to beneficence, prove his worth by hoping he might be exemplary among children with down syndrome, a certain kind of achiever that other people would understand. This is a negotiation. Every family must work out with clear-eyed assessment. Who is it the child wants to be. And where might the advocacy efforts of parents proceed wittingly or unwittingly from what are actually parental needs, perhaps prescribed ideas about familial success and happiness rather than from radical acceptance and support.

1 (52m 29s):
And I similarly find myself wanting to prove pennies worth in the eyes of our society. Sometimes in my own eyes, probably in terms of the parental expectations. But other times I'm like, I don't really care, but these people do. So you've gotta, you know, and wanting to prove your worth in. So I'm just curious how you have navigated those boundaries or how you've seen other things. Certainly you are not only righting from your experience here. Other people navigate those boundaries and what it means to be in that posture, not only as a parent, but honestly as a fellow human beings of radical acceptance and support, this is, so this is the chapter as you mentioned.

1 (53m 7s):
And so other chapters are about object's and the clock as this conceptual logic to of time. And by the way, are kids misfit. Rite is not so much about replacement parts or prosthetics or a sensory difference. It's about their misfitting with economic time. It's about there with non-normative intelligence in not being a kind of economic unit at the end

2 (53m 26s):
Of their education that is recognizable in the culture. And that is if you think about it, that is the presumption of a lot of education in a lot of hustling that, you know, sort of good parenting looks like. It's sort of like, what's the way for my child to sort of best be set up to compete, right? That's the way a lot of talk about it. And what they mean is the that to be on the clock, right. To be measured in our worth is fundamentally as folks who produce at 40 hours a week and paradoxes and, and therefore find are our, the Ground of our existence, right?

2 (53m 56s):
I'm not knocking work in 40 hours a week. Its just, is that how you want the entirety of your worth to be housed? So having a kid with, with down syndrome yes. Does break. You have all of that. There are a lot of messages I wrote and rewrote that passage that you read and Sibley to try and get the tone. Right? Because I do feel, I feel quite a lot of anger about the way those stories play out and about the kind of internalized ableism that a lot of parents can just replicate over and over by saying, my stunt is not defined by his disability.

2 (54m 30s):
And here's how well he's doing for a kid with down syndrome compare to all these other folks trying to win over the hearts and minds of folks by his performance. And here again, folks might be like, yeah, that's, that's ugly. We don't want to do that. But what is the Ground of human work, right? If its not that economic productivity, then what is it? And I would just leave it open as a question to me that is a rich and mysterious question. And it's one that Graham being Graham's mother has helped me think through in the most incredibly imaginative, you know, sort of wide open way.

2 (55m 3s):
And it has helped me be a better parent to, to all my kids. You know, I just think all the time now about what is it that I hope he feels at the, you know, in adulthood? What does it that I, what is it that I want to feel from other people? I actually don't want to be designed on the clock either. So how can I build the kind of culture that, that, that fortifies those other kinds of values and no, I mean Julia Lake is not, it's not like the philosophical RESOURCES are that, I mean in theology you have a rich tradition, right?

2 (55m 34s):
In global wisdom traditions, you do have alternatives, but widely available. It's fairly, it's fairly thin out there.

1 (55m 43s):
Yeah, no I agree. And, and yet I think it's fairly deep within us to acknowledge the worth of other human beings, even in a misfit bodies and until the atypical minds. And I think it applies certainly within the realm of Disability. But I think about, you know, people who have relatives with dementia well, and it's like, but the person who is not the same as my mom 10 years ago is still a person who has dignity and honor.

1 (56m 17s):
And how, how could I can't measure it anymore in the way I thought I could, or even I was listening to a man earlier today, talk about a prison reform. He's a correction was a corrections officer and now is the head of the prison system in Connecticut. And just talk about like, do we actually, even in the idea of correction, like we don't believe in incapacitation, which is how we treat most people who go into prison as opposed to you're a person who potentially could be corrected.

1 (56m 47s):
And obviously there's some problems with that word too, but even just that sense of what does it mean to believe in people? It means to believe that they have value that matters to all of us, whoever they are. And so I think there are applications for, I think there are negative applications for that economic productivity model of worth that come out, even in the, in and among the most economically productive of us in terms of how we see ourselves. But then I also think that if we can reframe what it means, and this actually is where I think that the wisdom, traditions and religious traditions, if we can actually call from this understanding of humanity, you have so much to offer in a world where there is this misfit between what our world tells us as valuable and yet what we intuitively understand about each other and they don't fit together.

1 (57m 41s):
And we often go with, well, money is how I know how to make it all make sense. So I'll go that way. But there's some discord with that. All of a sudden, we're just saying like, well, I'm a realist, you know, like I really read this book to try and be as pragmatic and also as imaginative as possible because I do sense that people will say, well, I'm a realist. I live in the real world. And so therefore, you know, to, to kind of this standard, but I think then this goes back to your money questions just to ask yourself in the way that those two of you know, the designers of the dementia village did, how do I want to be treated if I'm even a little bit different than I am now?

1 (58m 15s):
You know? And the way that I treat folks who are currently acutely vulnerable is the logic by which I will be treated right. That's we know that to be true. So I think in the most pragmatic sense, if you're even the basic believer in a democratic flourishing, right, that isn't built on an absolute power, then we sort of Brut force, you know, measurements of our worth. Then we owe it to each other to be a little more imaginative than we are. And it doesn't take an overhaul of the world. It's an editing of a lot of what we have already done.

1 (58m 46s):
What makes all the difference? Thank you. I think this book is a wonderful, you said it was both pragmatic and imaginative and I think that's probably one of the reasons I'd loved it so much. So thank you for your time and for your wisdom. And I will, so look forward to returning to your work and I hope there is more to come so good to be here. Thank you for listening to love is stronger than fear. We will be sure to note all of the references in the SHOW NOTES and again, as always, but especially this month, which has down syndrome awareness month, I would love for you to share this episode.

1 (59m 23s):
I think it would give people who are not within the Disability or down syndrome community as a taste of the richness and the depth and the joy that is possible and engaging with the world have people who are aware of what it means to be deeply, fully human. So in addition to asking you to share this episode, and of course, as always subscribe to the podcast, gives a quick rating review. Please just help people to benefit from these conversations.

1 (59m 53s):
If that's something that you have been able to do yourself, I'm grateful to our cohost breaking ground, to Jake Hansen, our editor to Amber bury my social media coordinator. And to you, my fate for the listeners, its really fun to meet with you a week by week. Even if only it, through these words coming in through your phone, through your computer, however you listen to your podcast. Let's see next week, who do I get to talk to? Oh, that's right. I get to talk to Kurt, Neil and Anne Marie Kerrigan about the film normy.

1 (1h 0m 23s):
And I'm really excited if you've listened to this for your getting a real bonus because we are going to make normally available for viewing. This is a wonderful documentary film that some of you might remember we've talked about here before and our family is actually featured in the film. So I'm going to talk to Ann Marie and Curt about making the film. And Marie is the star, the kinds of the central character in the film. She's a young woman with down syndrome. Who's really coming of age in this movie and we are going to have that available for viewing from October 20th, I think until October 31st.

1 (1h 0m 58s):
So tune back in for more details on that, you can also check me out, check me out on social media, but yes on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, there'll be more details as well as on my website. Amy Julia becker.com about that opportunity as you go into your day today, or I do hope and pray that you will carry with you. That piece that comes from believing that love is stronger than Fear

3 (1h 1m 22s):
<inaudible>.