Go Big Read Display
UW-Madison’s Go Big Read selection for 2024 is Rebekah Taussig’s memoir Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body. Taussig will speak at a keynote event at Union South on Wednesday, October 16, 2024, from 7 to 8:30pm.
To celebrate and build on the book and event, College Library’s 2nd Floor display centers books containing stories of disability culture to highlight and celebrate Taussig’s calls to action:
To everyone with a body that has been sent to the margins. Our stories matter…. Because this right here, you and me, looking at these stories together? This is one of the most beautiful parts of being a human – the drive to connect and understand, heal and blossom…. I didn’t even realize how starved I was until I sat at the feet and listened to the stories of other disabled folks, collecting words I’d never heard, words I didn’t know I could have. Their accounts deepened my understanding of my own history and gave me new pictures to reimagine what it can mean to be a disabled woman…. Here’s to building new narrative pathways through our brains, our spaces, our stories. Here’s to dismantling ableism, building a bonfire from its pieces, and toasting marshmallows over the flames.”
— Rebekah Taussig, Sitting Pretty
Books featured include Care Work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha; Black Disability Politics by UW-Madison’s Dr. Sami Schalk; Against Technoableism by Ashley Shew; Sipping Dom Pérignon Through a Straw: Reimagining Success as a Disabled Achiever by Eddie Ndopu; Crip Temporalities by Ellen Samuels; Deaf Utopia: A Memoir– and a Love Letter to a Way of Life by Nyle DiMarco; and Odd Girl Out: My Extraordinary Autistic Life by Laura E. James.
UW-Madison Disability Cultural Center Program Coordinator Helen Rottier notes, “Narratives from disabled voices are essential because so many disabled people are isolated – physically, emotionally, or away from disability community. It is easy to think you are the only one until you hear that others have similar experiences. Joining my disabled life to the vast community of disabled people has given me purpose.”
Rottier has written about disability culture as “disabled people creating, being, doing from a place of disability” and calls it “essential, because it expands our understanding of disability from something sad, bad, and tragic that we should avoid into understanding disability as part of life. Disability is an array of experiences – some frustrating, some joyful, all that shape who we are.”
Rounding out the display are titles that focus on some of the issues Taussig addresses in her memoir, such as works on accessibility, universal design, healthcare reform, media representation, and body image. College Library will continue to feature and rotate books containing these stories and this array of experiences throughout the fall semester.