This week it’s exactly eighty years since my great-grandmother, Emilie Rau, was murdered in a gas chamber built into the cellar of an asylum in Hadamar, a small town close to Frankfurt. She was forty-nine and had four children, of which my grandmother was the eldest.

Stephen Hsu’s removal from the position of research VP at Michigan State University is not only a step forward in the context of Black Lives Matter. It can also be seen as a step toward a deeper understanding and valuing of people with Down syndrome and intellectual disability.

‘The worst thing about making a will’, my partner said to me, ‘is that you never get to find out if it worked out the way you wanted it to.’ And we laughed, genuinely laughed because – as disabled people – we both know that dying as a result of this pandemic would be the […]

This World Hearing Day, as well as thinking about the ten thousand people whose first language is Auslan, or the half a million people who will be buying hearing aids this year, I’ll also be thinking of those thousands of Australians around my age who are unable to afford to get help. The Hearing Awareness Week slogan in 2020 is ‘Don’t let hearing loss limit you’. I only wonder if the Government is listening at all.

I am writing to you because I know in my bones there will come a moment when I will feel vulnerable again. In that moment, I want someone to reassure me that we all forget useful things like phone chargers sometimes, and to tell me, only partly joking, that one hasn't truly been exploring till they've stood alone at night in an unfamiliar, deserted town path with no back-up plan.

Where self-care began as the radical notion of self-love, it has since been reappropriated to function as a marketing tool, advertising individualistic acts of respite from the pressures of late capitalism.

We must not fail to acknowledge how the demands of the neoliberal university fall disproportionately on disabled academics and students and how this perpetuates deep inequalities, of which ableism is just one expression.

I worry that Australian society is not ready or willing to look deep within itself and begin to reconcile why disabled bodies are locked away. Why, for so many, the torture, beatings and rape of disabled people are acceptable. How, beyond our own ideas of ‘fairness’ and ‘dignity,’ the humanity of so many disabled people in this country can still be denied.

When access to public transport is stymied, so too is access to public life. Something as basic as getting from one destination to another becomes unpredictable and stressful. Since isolation and depression already disproportionately affect disabled and chronically ill people, and one in ten suicides are linked to chronic illness, access issues need to stir up more than a passionless afterthought.

The internet was divided recently when a short audio clip repeating a two-syllable word caused an outpouring of confusion. ‘Do you hear Yanny or Laurel?’ everyone asked. Within hours it became team Yanny versus team Laurel, both groups lambasting one another over Twitter and Facebook. I hear Laurel. I am a thirty-year-old deaf woman.

The University of South Australia’s recently opened MOD. (Museum of Discovery) is self-described as ‘Australia's leading future-focused museum, provoking new ideas at the intersection of science, art and innovation.’ Yet this intersection gives little heed to disability. Science, art and innovation cannot replace accessibility and while visiting the gallery, a lack of warning to an exhibit’s content meant that a seizure was triggered.

Collaborations are difficult beasts to navigate at the best of times. When collaborators are coming from very different worlds, from very different ways of experiencing and understanding and making, the dynamic becomes all that more complicated, and all that more compelling.

I lost my voice in my mid-teens after a brainstem aneurysm. While my string of doctors were preoccupied with my damaged nerves and uncooperative limbs, I was worried about my paralysed vocal cord and rapidly atrophying tongue. I couldn’t hold any air in my lungs or make the right shapes with my mouth to form words. For months, the most I could manage was a faltering hiss as I re-learnt how to walk, eat, hold a pen.

Busyness has become a competition, a Victorian Cross or Legion of Merit for running ourselves into the ground. It speaks to our self-worth and dedication to our crafts. An overloaded lifestyle, rather than a quieter one, has become an aspirational status symbol. We venerate industry, even when it culminates in something lesser than the sum of its effort.