Ecocrip Sensibilities: Mending, Care, and Love Affairs, part of the (Dis)courses: Interdisciplinary Disability Dialogues Spring 2022 Series

Cultivating love affairs with ourselves, communities, and places means loving within states of stress. The disability community has unique knowledge in working towards accessibility and care in times of perpetual uncertainty. Join us as we discuss how to draw from our lineages, cultures, and ancestors to gently touch vulnerability and create our own definitions of sustainability.

Naomi Ortiz is a Poet, Writer, Facilitator, and Visual Artist whose intersectional work focuses on self-care for activists, disability justice, climate action, and relationship with place. Ortiz is the author of Sustaining Spirit: Self-Care for Social Justice (Reclamation Press), a non-fiction book for diverse communities on dealing with the risks of burnout. They are a 2021-2022 Border Narrative Grant Awardee for their multidisciplinary project, “Complicating Conversations.” Ortiz is a 2019 Zoeglossia Poetry Fellow whose poems have been nominated for Best of the Internet and listed on Entropy’s “Best of 2020-2021: Favorite Poems Published online.” They emphasize interdependence, inclusion, and spiritual growth in their poetry, writing, and artwork, which can be found in numerous print and on-line publications, anthologies, and art shows. Ortiz is a Disabled, Mestiza living in the Arizona U.S./Mexico borderlands.

Hosted by the Office of Interdisciplinary Programs and Outreach at the Burton Blatt Institute and Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature, the series “(Dis)courses: Interdisciplinary Disability Dialogues” returns this semester with four exciting conversations—with luminaries who are engaged variously with many forms of innovative and intersectional Disability cultural work.

Each of our four online events will include American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation, live captioning, image descriptions, and an opportunity for registered Zoom webinar participants to engage with the featured presenter and discussant. All four events will also be recorded and made publicly available, online. Post-production, each of the videos will include ASL interpretation and edited/polished captions, an accompanying transcript, and a summary of online resources of interest and relevance—all accessible, free, and open to the public.

The Spring 2022 (Dis)courses Series is sponsored by the Office of Interdisciplinary Programs and Outreach (OIPO) at the Burton Blatt Institute (BBI) at Syracuse University and Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature, with very special thanks to the Syracuse University Libraries, and with additional support from the Center on Disability and Inclusion, the Central New York Humanities Corridor Health Humanities Working Group (Medicine, Disease, Disability, and Culture), the Consortium for Culture and Medicine, Cultural Foundations of Education, Dept. of Biology, Dept. of English, Dept. of History, Dept. of Women’s and Gender Studies, the Disability Cultural Center, Disability Studies, The Graduate School, Hendricks Chapel, Information Technology Services, the Intergroup Dialogue Program, La Casita Cultural Center, the LGBTQ Resource Center, LGBTQ Studies, the Renée Crown University Honors Program, the School of Education, and the Syracuse University Humanities Center.

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