Paulina Seyfried and Paloma Nana, Temporary Gallery, July 2023

For our work within the project Islands of Kinship we noticed that we need to educate ourselves to bring everyone on one level in terms of awareness and anti-ableism especially focusing on our privileges as mostly non-disabled and white academics as well as our language, which is not easy to deal with for everyone. On a basic level, we want to improve our understanding and practice of care.

To do so, we are planning three workshops in 2023: 1) Awareness workshop by Blu Doppe, focusing on our entanglements, 2) Critical Whiteness workshop by Rafia Shahnaz Harzer and 3) Disability and Ableism workshop by Gina Jeske and Agnieszka Habraschka. Within this workshop series, we will learn why access is a matter of mindset in the first place and how we can improve our awareness. We will uncover ableist norms, expectations and stereotypes, the differences between integration and inclusion. And we will discuss how we can improve our work and communication to be accessible for a more diverse group of people, for example by thinking about the way we structure the amount of work and what skills are actually needed for what kind of task.