The Disabled Standard

In this week’s episode, Shruti and Harper discuss disability and relationships. They each share their experiences with platonic relationships, and the impact their disabilities have had on their friendships, communities, and social lives. Shruti also shares some of her dating experiences as a brown, disabled lesbian, and Harper discusses queerplatonic relationships as an aromantic asexual autistic person. With different types of disabilities, educational backgrounds, and other identities, Harper and Shruti compare and contrast the many ways disability can affect relationships.

You can follow The Disabled Standard on Instagram @disabledstandard and on Twitter @disabledspod. Thank you for listening and supporting!

On this week’s episode of The Disabled Standard, Harper and Shruti are joined by guest Kendall Wack to talk about the impact of the internet on disabled experiences. Kendall tells the story of how the internet led to their ADHD diagnosis, Shruti discusses her relationship with Twitter as a disabled journalist, and Harper shares her experience with disability in fandom. Together, they discuss the positive and negative aspects of the internet as a disability community and identity tool—including how this is often overlooked or devalued.

Kendall Wack is a queer, neurodivergent writer and editor based in Chicago, IL. They hold a double B.A. in English-Creative Writing and French Literature and Language from Loyola University-Chicago. She has found that the written word is one of the most powerful ways for like-minded people to connect, and she aspires to use her voice to break down taboos and the barriers they create. In addition to writing, they are also the co-host of the social justice-poetry fusion podcast, Poetically Speaking. You can find her on Instagram at @hopelesspoetesse and stay tuned for Poetically Speaking season two coming soon!

You can follow The Disabled Standard on Instagram @disabledstandard and on Twitter @disabledspod. Thank you for listening and supporting!

Happy Holidays from the Disabled Standard! And we mean all of them. This week, Harper and Shruti discuss the ways disability can intersect with holidays and celebrations. They talk about their experiences with everything from Christmas and Diwali to winter festivities and anniversaries. With holidays being a key aspect of culture, they discuss the difficulties of struggling to access holidays and traditions—but also the ways disability can make holidays even more special and the holidays a part of disability culture.

You can follow The Disabled Standard on Instagram @disabledstandard and on Twitter @disabledspod. Thank you for listening and supporting! Have a happy, safe, and justice-filled new year! 

This week, Harper and Shruti discuss lateral ableism—when a disabled person is ableist to another disabled person. They share their personal experiences facing lateral ableism, pop culture examples, how lateral ableism connects to intersectionality and internalized ableism, and some of the most common ways lateral ableism manifests. They also discuss the complex dialectic of acknowledging that lateral ableism can come from pain, inaccess, and self-preservation while also condemning the harm and working to towards collective liberation.

You can follow The Disabled Standard on Instagram @disabledstandard and on Twitter @disabledspod. Thank you for listening and supporting!

Have you ever wondered what traveling is like when you're disabled? How to fly on a plane as a wheelchair user? What it's like being an autistic teen on a choir tour? Why the same travel accommodations can create exclusion for one person and access for another? 

In this week's episode, Harper and Shruti talk all things traveling while disabled. From school trips to family vacations, on planes, trains, and busses, all the way across the world or just over state lines, they share their own experiences, how they were accommodated (or not), and what they've learned. Traveling while disabled—with growing support needs and new mobility aids—is an evolution that Harper and Shruti are both still trying to navigate with themselves and their loved ones. It can often create feelings of burden, isolation, and the inability to engage—but with disabled-informed support and lots of grace, sometimes travel can be positive not in spite of disability but because of it. 

You can follow The Disabled Standard on Instagram @disabledstandard and on Twitter @disabledspod. Thank you for listening and supporting!

In this week’s part two on the medicalization of disability, Harper and Shruti discuss diagnosis. They dive into the difficulties disabled people often have getting diagnoses, the problems with the gatekeeping and lack of intersectionality within diagnostic systems, and the negative impact it all has on real-life people—especially those who go through it in childhood.

Harper shares her four experiences of diagnosis—her elementary school dyslexia diagnosis, her ten-year journey towards a late autism diagnosis, her college arthritis diagnosis, and her current search for answers about her dysautonomia and chronic pain. Through these stories, Harper opens up about how growing up feeling like a mystery and not being believed has shaped her self-concept.

Listen wherever you find your podcasts and follow on social media to keep to update on all things Disabled Standard.

We will be going on a mid-season hiatus and new episodes will return Dec. 12.

Disability has a long, painful history of medicalization. In this two-parter, the Disabled Standard explores some of the ways medicalization affects the real life of disabled people in the modern day. In part one, Harper and Shruti discuss therapy, including the problems with the system, the importance of autonomy, and ways improvements can be made.

Shruti shares their experiences with physical therapy and medical intervention as a physically disabled person of color. She discusses the impact childhood physical therapy has on her development and her agency, as well as her decision to stop physical therapy and her outlook on future therapies. Harper also shares her experience with language therapy at her specialized learning disability school, and how this therapy was done in a better, more disability-centered way than most interventions.

Listen wherever you find your podcasts and stay tuned for part two: diagnosis.

You can follow The Disabled Standard on Instagram @disabledstandard and on Twitter @disabledspod. Thank you for listening and supporting!

The Disabled Standard is getting back to basics with Access Needs 101. In this week's episode, Harper and Shruti talk through the definition, theory, and framework of access needs. 

An access need is something a person needs in order to fully participate in an activity, group, or space. The term comes from disability justice and the field of disability studies, but everyone, disabled or not, has access needs. 

From giving examples of access needs and breaking down the ongoing collaborative process necessary for meeting everyone’s access needs, Shruti and Harper explore access intimacy in education, the workplace, and beyond. They also tackle the concept of conflicting access needs and share their thoughts on how to balance the diverse set of access needs for the collective benefit of everyone.

You can follow The Disabled Standard on Instagram @disabledstandard and on Twitter @disabledspod. Thank you for listening and supporting!

An episode about The Big Bang Theory?? Yup! In this Halloween special (that barely mentions Halloween) Shruti and Harper dive deep into an intersectional analysis of the notorious CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory.

Harper discusses the well-recognized Autistic coding of Sheldon Cooper, and his very much not recognized aromantic asexual coding. Sheldon Cooper is a queer, disabled man. Harper is here to explain why and why it matters.

Shruti examines the poor treatment Raj Koothrappali received as the show’s token character of color and its real-world impact. In discussing Raj’s role as the “unlucky in love hopeless romantic,” they discuss how Raj could have been—and maybe should have been—queer.

As two people with complicated, long-term, love-hate relationships with The Big Bang Theory and some of the very identities the show represents—for better or worse, canon or not—Shruti and Harper have a lot to say.

You can follow The Disabled Standard on Instagram @disabledstandard and on Twitter @disabledspod. Thank you for listening and supporting!

This week Harper and Shruti finally cover the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the beginning, the pandemic has disproportionately affected marginalized groups. While there was early hope in the disability community, that hope has been long gone since the push “back to normal,” which leaves behind not only access and accommodations for disabled people, but disabled lives themselves. Shruti and Harper discuss what it has been like to live through the pandemic and accompanying the wide spread eugenics rhetoric. Spoiler alert: it’s not pretty. But ignoring things that aren’t easy or pleasant is what got us here, still in this pandemic over two years and six million lives lost later. Confronting it and taking action to mount collectivist support is the only way we can even imagine moving on not to a new normal of death and eugenics, but of access and equity.

For more of Shruti and Harper talking about the pandemic, check out this instagram livestream from May 2, 2022: https://www.instagram.com/tv/CdEzgbxjHtR/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet

You can follow The Disabled Standard on Instagram @disabledstandard and on Twitter @disabledspod. Thank you for listening and supporting! (And don't forget to wear your mask and stay up to date on your covid vaccine!) 

July is Disability Pride Month, so to kick off the month, Harper and Shruti are diving into all things disability pride on this week's episode. They explain the concept—and how it's not as oxymoronic as some people might think—and the importance it holds not only in the disability community, but in the disability justice movement. They also discuss what disability pride personally means to each of them and how there is no wrong way to feel disability pride. 

Wishing everyone a happy Disability Pride Month full of joy, healing, and celebration of your disabled self! 

You can follow The Disabled Standard on Instagram @disabledstandard and on Twitter @disabledspod. Thank you for listening and supporting!

Everyone is always talking about self-care, but what about community care? In this week’s episode, Shruti and Harper explain the concept of community care and recontextualize self-care. They discuss the importance of being in community with those you share marginalized identities with, but also how impactful community care across lines of marginalization can be. Drawing on their own experiences, Shruti and Harper describe how putting in the work for your friends outside the bounds of amatonormativity and with equity in mind is the best way to take care of one another—something we need now more than ever in our individualistic society.

You can learn more about amatonormativity from Elizabeth Blake, the researcher who coined the term: https://elizabethbrake.com/amatonormativity/

The Disabled Standard will be going on a brief one-week hiatus—join us on 7/4 for a new episode to kick off Disability Pride Month!

You can follow The Disabled Standard on Instagram @disabledstandard and on Twitter @disabledspod. Thank you for listening and supporting!

Infantilization is a big word with a simple meaning and a wide-reaching negative impact on disabled people. To infantilize is to treat someone as a child or in a way that diminishes their maturity in age, experience, and/or development. Infantilization happens to a large variety of marginalized groups and is extremely prevalent in the disability community. In this week’s episode, Shruti and Harper discuss the harmful impacts of infantilization they’ve seen and experienced including the way it robs people of agency, can be used to force lateral ableism, and affects everything from the interests you let yourself have to your experience in the workforce. 

You can follow The Disabled Standard on Instagram @disabledstandard and on Twitter @disabledspod. Thank you for listening and supporting!

"Disability identity is a journey, not a destination." When ableist society treats disability like a bad thing you shouldn't associate yourself with, it can be difficult to cultivate a positive sense of self that includes disability. This week, Shruti and Harper talk about their journeys with disability identity, from childhood experiences to transformative college years to where they are today in the ever-evolving journey. They also discuss the impact of having a strong disability identity on one's self, the disability community, and the world. 

You can follow The Disabled Standard on Instagram @disabledstandard and on Twitter @disabledspod. Thank you for listening and supporting!

Have you ever wanted to start a disability student group? Ever wondered why they matter so much or why higher education is the next frontier of disability justice? In this week’s episode, Shruti and Harper discuss the story of Access: Student Disability Union, Emerson College’s first and only affiliated organization for disabled students, of which they are both inaugural members and former presidents of. They share how Access got its start, Covid’s impact on the org, an overview of Access’ advocacy and community building work, and most importantly, what Access means to them and why the organizations popping up across the country like it are so important.  

To find out more about Access and keep up with their work, go to https://accesssdu.wixsite.com/website or follow them on Instagram @access_sdu. 

You can follow The Disabled Standard on Instagram @disabledstandard and on Twitter @disabledspod. Thank you for listening and supporting! 

Welcome to the first episode of The Disabled Standard! In this introductory episode, disabled co-hosts Shruti and Harper share a little about themselves and their friendship, talk about what's to come on the podcast, and answer the all-important question— what does the disabled standard mean? Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode— exciting topics like community care, disability identity, and more are coming up!  

You can follow The Disabled Standard on Instagram @disabledstandard and on Twitter @disabledspod. Thank you for listening and supporting!