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Working as I do, in a disability studies framework informed by posthumanism, I think a lot about relationality. My view of disability is informed by my belief that Western Enlightenment valorizations of individualism, agency, rationalism, intentionality, and independence are limited, reductive, and ultimately ableist theorizations of the world and the various disabled and non-disabled humans and non-humans that inhabit it. My beliefs on relationality are also entangled with a part of my identity. As a brown /immigrant and an uninvited guest on Indigenous lands, my cultural heritage has introduced me to the idea of Vasudhaivam Kutumbakam, a Sanskrit phrase found in the Upanishads that loosely translates to “the world is my family”. Our day-long conference takes place on traditional lands of the Huron-Wendat, the Senecas and the Mississaugas of the Credit River. The language of the Mississaugas, Anishinaabemowin, offers us - without expectation of any return - a phrase known as Indinawemaaganidog. This translates to "I am all my relatives, and all my relatives are me" (Vukelich, 2023, p.31). The noun form of ‘relatives’ is ‘relations.’ And, I cannot help but be struck by the relationality of this phrase to Vasudhaivam Kutumbakam.

But what do these ideas have to do with our conference? 

It is the evening of the conference. Rod Michalko, disability scholar, retired professor, and Gentle Teacher, is delivering the keynote. Rod speaks of the many stumblings with which we become entangled with disability. He takes us into Nietzsche’s theorizings on how the world remains senseless until we bind perception to existence. At that moment, with the setting sun streaming into the room and listening to him, I experience Indinawemaaganidog. I, too, am binding my perception of relationality to my existence. As he speaks, I watch myself embedded in an expansive network of relationships – historical, present, and future. Vasudhaivam Kutumbakam. I, an uninvited I/immigrant on these lands, was an invitee to the conference. I listened to speakers I had heard before and speakers from England whom I heard for the first time. I watched a D/deaf participant nod and smile as she engaged in a relational act of understanding with the ASL interpreters. I cried uncontrollably as a speaker shared the story of Tracey Latimer. Tracy Latimer was my disabled, autistic seven-year-old son, Vikram, and my seven-year-old son was Tracy Latimer. As Tanya Titchkosky, disability scholar and Gentle Teacher, opened the conference, talking of the infinity sign, I travelled back and forth from past to present to hear her voice speaking during Critical Disability Studies courses during my MA in 2021. 

Via these moments, I see myself embedded in an expansive network of relationships within the room – bound by deep love and affection to many in the room, bound by caring and respect to others, bound by dependence to a tech team I do not know but whose kindness and expertise support much of the day, bound by experiencing, reading, writing and talking disability. Relationships not just with the people in the room but with their scholarship, health, love, care, beliefs, and with time itself. 

As the sky outside moves into dusk, I experience an embedding so dense that I cannot even discern the texture of its weave or discern one dimension of existence from another. I am a philosophical existence within Nietzsche-Rod’s words, I am an imaginary existence as in the case of Tracey-Vikram, and I also exist as a tangible body-mind in a collection of body-minds grouped in the Nexus Room in OISE on occupied land. All these existences, real or imaginary, present, past or future, are valid…and interdependent. Posthumanist thought talks of ‘becoming-with.’ I experience that moment of becoming-with disability in these relational existences. The world is my family. Vasudhaivam Kutumbakam. 

Why do I think this relational experience is vital for my thinking on disability studies?

Because the embedding that I speak of troubles the notion that separation is a necessary part of teasing out theoretical truths from disability experiences. That we need this distance to arrive at pure epistemological insights. Closeness hinders, says this WEIRD-centric worldview. We need to step back to see and discern normalized structures – to distil the potency of a lived experience of a disability. But what if we embrace closeness and a relationality that refuses to separate? Does that mean we loosen our grip on reality? Maybe not. Maybe what we loosen our grip on is not reality, but intentionality, surrendering instead to shared lived experiences of disability that are so integral to our own self that we become-with them. We stumble in and out of different contexts - mine, yours, ours, real, imaginary. We are affected ontologically, if you will, in a hundred, thousand, infinite ways. I am them; they are me. Indinawemaaganidog.

References

Kaagegaabaw, J. V. (2023). The seven generations and the seven grandfather teachings (M. Fairbanks, Ed.). James Vukelich.