Comment from the Field

Abstract

In this special guest lecture, held at Liverpool Hope University on 26 July 2016, Professor Petra Kuppers paid tribute to life and work of her friend and colleague Tobin Siebers.1 As David Bolt explained in his introduction to event, Professor Siebers served on board of JLCDS for over a decade. He was an active reviewer and edited a special issue of journal with Alice Hall shortly before he died in 2015. His work continues to make a leading contribution to field. Given her work and friendship with Tobin Siebers and her role as a disability culture activist and community performance artist, it was more than fitting for Petra Kuppers to give Tobin Siebers Disability Arts and Culture Lecture.The Centre for Culture and Disability Studies at Liverpool Hope University welcomed academics, independent researchers, artists and representatives from disability arts organisations across UK to this memorial lecture. Taking place only shortly after UK vote to leave European Union and horrific murder of 50 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Kuppers's talk addressed relevance of disability activism and disability arts to asylum and sanctuary. These themes have resonated equally through her distinctive pedagogy, research, and arts practice. Beginning with personal insights into foundations of disability studies community at University of Michigan, we were reminded of its emergence through activist rather than academic energies. A further account of playful nature of community arts activities at Michigan offered a moving description of early days of this important work, of which Siebers was a significant part.Kuppers's address centered on importance of and mutuality to arts practice through an exploration of her shared experiences of two site-specific pieces of work with her partner, somatic poet Stephanie Heit. Kuppers began by acknowledging influence of poet Audre Lorde on her exploration of collaborative arts practice, disability arts, and activism. The significance of interdependency between women is acknowledged by Lorde as the only way to freedom which allows I to be not in order to be used but in order to be creative (Lorde and Clarke 111). This sentiment is evident in Kuppers's emphasis on mutuality in her pedagogic approach as well as through her arts practice. She was keen to connect with her audience, prompting us to explore who was in room and who was not, a pedagogic approach explained in Disability Arts and Culture. She engaged us in a fluid, conversational sharing of experience through uses of participatory approaches, such as audience/group sourced visual descriptions and communal readings of text. These approaches enabled us to share potentially distant personal experiences making them live again in this new space. …