Reviewed by Serafina Paladino
Content Warnings: Ableism, pandemic trauma.
As a fledgling student of disability studies, I was admittedly drawn to Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s name on this edited collection since she was one of the first scholars I read who introduced me to the field, and most importantly, to the fact that I have the agency to shape literature, language, and culture through a neurodiverse lens. That said, The Art of Flourishing is not a monograph penned solely by Garland-Thomson; rather, the material in this collection originally came from a webinar series hosted by The Hastings Center for Bioethics beginning in 2019 and ending in 2022.
In order to bring this webinar to a larger audience, Garland-Thomson is joined by her fellow series organizers Liz Bowen, Joel Michael Reynolds, and Erik Parens on the editorial team to assemble a dynamic transcript of the AoF’s panel discussions that brought together disabled scholars, activists, and creatives to share their lived experiences during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic. The editors explain in the introduction that while this series had been initially focused on discussing the complicated relationship disabled people have with technology in an ableist society, the panelists at the original conference made it known that what was on their minds was how to make sense of their nebulous positions in the chaotic intersection between the medical and social models of disability.
And so to ensure that each panelist was given the chance to express their joys and hardships, the conference’s mantra became “people can flourish in all sorts of bodyminds” with the emphasis placed on “flourishing” to convey disability studies’ push to disrupt the construct of normalcy in all ways of life (1). To begin, the format of this collection is nonstandard when compared to most scholarly publications because the transcribed dialogue reads conversationally, as if the reader is in the audience when the conference was first held, an approach that lends itself well to the welcoming environment of these panels that the editors have reformatted into six separate chapters.
As panelist Yomi Sachiko Young notes in the second chapter on technology, what is innovative about the AoF is that it has opened channels of communication between “people of color, queer people, folks who are neurodiverse” that are rarely represented as “the standard bearers of the disability rights movement” despite their invaluable contributions to this intersectional activism (66). Readers can rest assured that the conversations recorded by the editorial team reject white homogeneity in disability studies. Panelists were invited from across the spectrum of gender, sexuality, and race so they could further celebrate their differences in the discussion section of the chapter and the subsequent pages dedicated to answering audience questions.
Due to the accessibility of the collection’s format and theme, as a reader, I felt encouraged to learn from the panelists regarding how the disability community can aim to acknowledge different bodies and minds that fall outside of ableism’s normalizing agenda so that we can flourish together in harmony. One of these learning experiences came in the third chapter, where panelist D.J. Savarese introduces himself “as an alternatively communicating” autistic person, which is a neurodivergent identity I was unfamiliar with, despite also being on the spectrum (80). I take solace in the fact that intersectional identities are vast, and thus my work as a disabled researcher will never be done when there is always more insight to be gained from my peers in community spaces like the AoF.
On that note, I was drawn to the fifth chapter’s discussion on designing art museums to be more accessible for disabled patrons, with Georgina Kleege who, like Garland-Thomson, has been a formative scholar in my introduction to disability studies. Kleege explains that most museum exhibits are unequipped to accommodate blind patrons like her because they are built to prioritize a sighted person’s engagement with art over the innumerable perspectives that offer an alternative to this exclusionary model. She demonstrates one of these “alternative methods of navigation” through the practice of “shorelining” which a blind person typically employs to ensure their safe passage through diverse terrains (150, 155). Kleege elaborates that when shorelining is permitted in a museum setting, it allows blind patrons to experience visual art on their own terms, an orientation and approach that goes unnoticed in an ableist frame of mind that wrongfully assumes sight is the dominant sense for appreciating artistic expression.
Finally, I would like to highlight Jina Kim, Jess Waggoner, and Sami Schalk’s discussion on “queercrip doulaing” in the final chapter of the collection because it allowed me to reflect on what I had learned from the previous chapters and how I could apply this knowledge to my own queercrip friend group. For Waggoner, these queercrip connections can also be made online, where people with intersectional identities can form a sense of belonging with one another, removed from societal stigma, to openly converse about a range of subjects, from their simple joys, to more pressing concerns in life, like gender expression. (181) These moments of acceptance deeply resonated with me because I have experienced something similar, but I did not have the words to describe these experiences and how much they mean to my friends and me until now. A queercrip found family flourishes alongside an accepting community that stands to counter neuronormative and heteronormative standards of communication, when most of my relationships come from these unconventional channels. Schalk concludes that an intersectional identity does not forever exile one to a place of “isolation, shame, stigma, or fear” when we can bypass these prejudiced systems that keep queercrip families apart (183).
Overall, The Art of Flourishing offers a solid foundation for students who are new to disability studies and are interested in broadening their intersectional frameworks to include aspects of human diversity that coincide with disabled identities. For readers with a background in the field, the collection’s six interdisciplinary chapters will affirm their current projects and suggest possibilities for future research. The conversation on flourishing within the disability community is ongoing and will only continue to evolve in tandem with developments in disability activism and scholarship.
Title: The Art of Flourishing: Conversations on Disability
Editors: Liz Bowen, Joel Michael Reynolds, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and Erik Parens
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2025
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About the Reviewer
Serafina Paladino (she/they) is a first-year PhD student at the University of California, Riverside in the Department of English. As an autistic academic, their research emphasizes the importance of defining one’s autistic identity to challenge neuronormative expectations. They are currently developing a critical framework to examine their special interests from playing video games to reading great works of literature like Moby-Dick, autistically and queerly.