KPFA - Pushing Limits

Pushing Limits is pleased to present an interview with cultural and visual anthropologist Karen Nakamura who recently accepted the position as Haas Distinguished  Chair of Disability Studies at UC Berkeley. She is a highly-educated, skilled woman who is deeply immersed in the disability community.

Dr. Nakamura, who formerly taught at Yale, will be  working on projects using robotics and prosthesis to address questions of aging and disability in Japan and the US. She is building an accessible makerspace on the university campus.

Topics range from the role of Anthropology and Ethnography to the disability community to prison-caused disabilities to corporate funding in the academic world.

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A hour-long fund drive episode in which we dissect the fascinating intersection of fundraising and disability with Catherine Kudlick, editor of Telethons: Spectacle, Disability and the Business of Charity by Paul Longmore.

From Jerry Lewis – to the cancer survivor runs – to the many disability non-profits desperately hoping for support, money raising is part of our community.   We laugh, poke fun at ourselves and other people, and shed some tears for the complex and often exploitative ways people with disabilities have been part of the fundraising world.

Read Catherine Kudlick’s excellent essay on the topic here.

We also play excerpts from the short comedy film, “The Scary Lewis Yell-a-Thon” and other films from the DVD,  ?Mickee Faust’s Gimp Parade”.  All this as we tell you the hundred and one reasons that KPFA deserves some of your hard-earned dough.

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A spirited discussion of #CripTheVote,  (an online non-partisan campaign about voting and disability issues), the Disability Visibility Project and media for disabled people.  We talk to disability mover and shaker, Alice Wong.

Alice Wong is the founder and Project Coordinator of the Disability Visibility Project, a project collecting oral histories of people with disabilities in the United States that is being run in coordination with StoryCorps.    Alice Wong also serves as an advisory board member for APIDC, Asians and Pacific Islanders with Disabilities of California.

Wong was a Presidential appointee to the National Council on Disability an independent federal agency which advises the President, Congress, and other federal agencies on disability policies, programs, and practices.  In 2015, Wong attended the reception at the White House for the 25th anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act via telepresence robot. She was the first person to visit the White House and the President by robot presence.

Adrienne Lauby produces and hosts.

The post Alice Wong, Disability Media Maker appeared first on KPFA.

How  do sports effect you as a disabled person?

Don’t give a damn? Is this all just a bunch of hooplah that means nothing?

We tackle how sports effect people with disabilities and take call ins.  It’s a participatory sport. No losers possible.

With essays by Doyle Saylor, Tangikina Moimoi, and “Bob.”

Produced and Hosted by Sheela Gunn Cushman, Co-host Mark Romoser.   Audio narration by Adrienne Lauby.

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Who is Mary Lambert and what does she have in common with Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, Rosemary Clooney, Karen Carpenter, and Renata Tabaldi?

All these popular women singers and/or composers have experienced major disabilities in their lives; disabilities which posed barriers to their art, often spurred or directed their musical careers–or even led to a premature death.

Pushing Limits, the creative voice of disability radio, again samples some of the musicians with disabilities who have contributed to our broad and varied cultural landscape.

Produced and Hosted by Eddie Ytuarte.

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