People tend to want to fix, to solve, to make better. This is a human aspect, but one that requires people first to identify a problem, or find a flaw. This has led to great accomplishments, innovations, and advances in technology. Wonder after wonder at the hands of people.
At the hands of people…
But not all people have hands.
Not all people can see, or hear, or walk, or talk, or…
People have fantastic and amazing abilities. They though, are not their abilities.
Yet people are defined by their abilities, and by the accomplishments their abilities bring forth.
People obsess over this idea of productivity and fixate on achievement.
It’s a race that must be won.
A race where to not be first means to be forgotten. Where if you don’t win you’re a loser, an outcast, a reject. Defective. A less-than. A glitch.
And people have become so very good at seeing differences as wrong or bad. As abnormal.
Different is frightening and anything different is a threat.
And so people work to solve the problem. To fix the glitches. People want to make the problem go away. Make it inconsequential. Invisible. So they don’t have to be scared.
But what happens when people identify a person as the problem?
What happens when we identify someone as the problem?
Well, we shift uncomfortably and then identify lack of access as what needs fixed.
And the solution is technology. And, we get to feel better. We high-five and clap each other on the back. We praise the technology that has opened doors and broken barriers. And technology has done that.
But it isn’t enough.
It doesn’t address what we choose to ignore. That lack of access is not the underlying problem.
We ignore that the person who has the concern or problem isn’t leading the conversation. That we need to be invited into the conversation by them. That we need to listen to their experience.
Instead we close the gate and deny access, perpetuating the underlying problem.
There are three basic patterns or approaches for person-to-person interaction.
- Doing to
- Doing for
- Doing with
Focusing on lack of access as the problem in regard to disability results in doing to and doing for, with technology as the tool. From a psychological stand, doing to and doing for both send a message that the person is less than, incapable, or incompetent.
Focusing on lack of access as the problem regarding disability sends the message that the person is incapable and technology is the savior.
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Doing to and doing for continue the kind of thinking that leads to oppression and suppression. It leads to ablebodied privilege and associated rhetoric. Bonnie Tucker talked about reading into phrases like giving a voice to the voiceless and giving hope to the hopeless. These phrases ring of good intention and sound sweet, but the core of the phrases are bitter. They label the object of the sentence as voiceless and hopeless.
It may be better to say…return the voice to those who have had it stolen. But this still seems to have a privilege angle.
If I have the power to return your voice then I have the power to take it again. It still places me in power over you. It implies that I own your voice. I still am doing something to you or for you. I maintain my privilege.
It also alleviates me of taking responsibility of stealing it in the first place. I don’t have to look at the way I have stripped another person of their autonomy, their freedom, their choices. It means I get to retain my position. I get to maintain my sense of superiority.
And we do this. Regardless of our status or our position. Regardless of how “woke” we proclaim to be. We identify those who we can deem less-than and prop up our position in relation to them.
We give lip service to tolerance but we continue to do to others. We talk about acceptance but we continue to do for others.
But we can change this. Elise Roy in her Ted Talk discussed moving from a frame of increasing tolerance to a frame of becoming an alchemist or magician focused on the real problem. I felt this was similar to Justin Hodgson’s idea of being a tinkerer and engaging a willingness to play. Both talk about the willingness to fail and fail often. To essentially fail forward.
Roy’s idea of design thinking has five steps.
- identify the problem
- observe the problem
- brainstorm possible solutions
- experiment with prototypes
- implement a sustainable solution
Roy goes on to highlight design as an interdisciplinary and multiperspective experience.
Roy hints the best approach is what I understood to be a “beginners mind” common in dialogues on mindfulness and meditation. Practices that can help us to loosen our egos and what Roy calls premade solutions.
These premade solutions are the ones Tucker discusses as part of the technocapital disability rhetoric, which mistakes fixing access with addressing the civil rights and social justice issues present in society.
Roy and Hodgson’s ideas of becoming alchemists and tinkerers are much better positioned to foster a doing with approach that can begin to address those issues Tucker identified.
And I think another entity needs to be included into the dynamic. Technology itself can be part of the process rather than seen merely as a tool or as a means to an end.
Hodgson proposed the interaction between humans and technology is collaborative. Each is affected and changed by the interaction. Adopting a design thinking approach including technology as a partner, could have an impressive result. One allowing us to “look sideways,” as Warren Berger might say, at the social problems we continue to face despite all our success in improving access.
Creating Dissonance 
Great post, Brian.
I’m glad you enhanced our conversation by including the concepts of doing to/with/and for. In particular, I valued what you had to say about power: “If I have the power to return your voice then I have the power to take it again. It still places me in power over you.” A phrase like this really captures why the Disability Rights Movement should hold more weight in our consideration of social rights movements. I also appreciate your addition to our conversation because it provides us with a view towards the intention people often have and the differences between intentions and actions and how intentions don’t always come across clearly. If you didn’t have a chance to see Garland-Thompson’s piece, she discusses this quite well. I feel that her comments on the visual rhetoric of disability touch on this in a slightly different way. The person to person interaction you describe is quite important, even so in a digital environment. GT spoke about the visual narratives we perceive, but you discussed ways in which those visual narratives contribute to our physical encounters.
I love the concept of doing with. Who wouldn’t?! It implies a communal, collaborative experience. But it also forces us to recognize abilities– to take inventory. Perhaps our definitions for how we perceive ability need a revision. Seeing ability on a scale of strong/weak or able/inable restricts us to a system of power. I like Roy’s recommendation to observe in relation to this system of power because it deconstructs those binaries and repurposes them. With adequate observation we can witness the proper action and implement the right design, which is a process that can include varieties of “strengths” or abilities for all sorts of contributors. In Roy’s case, she views people with disabilities as having an acute eye for universal design. She deconstructs the physical in this case and emphasizes creative abilities.
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Hello Brian-
I enjoyed how you emphasized points throughout your response with visual rhetoric. Your synthesis of ideas across the texts is also well done. Reading your commentary regarding person-to-person interactions and Tyler’s response allowed me to reflect upon the tension that exists within Doing For. Working with a variety of teenagers, I think constantly about the push and pull of Doing For/Doing With and what best facilitates self-determination. Sometimes my acts of Doing For may not seem altruistic to students as they may be ways that I am attempting to encourage independence and voice, or they may even be something students never even realize that I do to prepare for the abilities of a diverse group with whom I work. Of course, I can think of a variety of mistakes I have made over the years, but they are typically reflective of my blind spots (terministic screens…yay Burke), which is why this week’s focus provided a good reminder to check these blind spots.
I am so glad that you also emphasized the idea that technology does not fix the “problem” of disability. Your final paragraph allowed me to think about the dynamics of person-to-technology interactions and how they function within the Doing To/For/With.
Thanks again for your post! MI
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Thank you for your comment.
Please look down at my reply to Tyler. I attempted to expand on the doing for concept.
I think teenagers and children can be difficult to figure out if we are doing for or doing with. Somewhat it is trying to figure out where the point of struggle becomes to great and we need to step in and provide some extra skill training. And that is different for each person and can be different for the person on any given day. Our frustration tolerance ebbs and flows. My goal with children and adolescents was to try never to do for them what they could do for themselves. It meant asking more questions, trying to figure out their confidence, asking about how I could recognize if they were getting overwhelmed, and how they would like me to assist if I saw those signs. I always added the caveat of safety, and that I would step in if something was unsafe, but that overall I would let them try a lot of different ways to figure something out. Setting things up like that seemed to work well, and even if I asked if they needed some help later because I saw other signs of them getting overwhelmed it seemed to go over better (I usually started by saying what I noticed and how either I do that thing when getting overwhelmed or have seen that with some other person so I was just curious.)
Thanks again for your comment.
~Brian
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I appreciated your highlighting the three basic person-to-person interactions. The ability to distinguish between them, and to understand the psychological and emotional effects of each, is something that there is a disheartening dearth of, due in large part to hugely influential narratives pushed by masculine Hollywood, technocapitalism, and wealth worship in general.
There’s an important distinction to be made regarding Doing For, however. It’s a distinction that often gets lost in conversations like these, where pride, shame, guilt, love, a yearning for justice, and frustration with it all can concatenate and gyre, and may in fact lead to a place of greater harm than the Doing did in the first place.
The distinction, that I ardently believe exists and deserves to be recognized, is in Doing For.
I ask that we entertain the possibility that Doing For isn’t always evil. Doing For doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, where the helped is entirely disenfranchised and the helper is granted omnipotence. Let’s also suspend, at least momentarily, that Doing For isn’t a sort of Pyrrhic contest, where the less able are disempowered and the more able have their souls sucked out through their noses.
A friend I grew up with, a brother, even, was born with a body that doesn’t cooperate. His hands are stubborn; he could hook things, sort of, or pinch a paintbrush (which he does better than any “able” artist I know). His knees and ankles don’t bend. He needs at least a little help every day, with the basics. Though he has a fiery side that flares up and rages at the world, he is also possessed of a patience with his well-intentioned but bumbling friends, as well as a generosity of spirit, that I’ve not met elsewhere.
This generosity of spirit makes room for Doing For. It embraces it, because helping one of the pack is an urge as old as urges are. Altruism is a defining characteristic of our species; per Darwin and his laws, it has literally been concentrated and distilled into our genetic coding.
My friend Does For his people by letting them Do For him. All thrive in the process. All are enabled and enfranchised. It’s called love. Generosity and love and altruism aren’t traditionally academic things, and in an academic environment, things that aren’t academic are sometimes invalidated or overpowered. I don’t argue with the message or merit of the DRM, but I do say that it can at times ring as a bit cocksure and reductive.
Doing For doesn’t always have love at its core. But it often does. Ergo, I motion for an addendum to your list of the three basic person-to-person interactions.
Thanks for the read, Brian. I enjoy your style and your passion.
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Thank you for your comment.
I agree with you that doing for doesn’t have to be zero sum or evil. I contend though we can start from some place of doing for with the consent or at the request of the person and even in a spirit of helpfulness, and then fall into a pattern where we do for without that same consideration.
The consideration I think is key, but also reveals what might be seen as doing for as actually being a doing with situation. What you described I would define as doing with, which is where acts of altruism and actions that benefit the “herd” come into play.
For me it comes down to the intent of the action (always a tricky area to navigate), and even more how it is received by the person being done for. I might be jaded a bit from my counseling experiences because I often heard or saw the negative side of doing for, with people coming to resent the doer rather than seeing them as helpful. The person was getting the message that the doer found them incapable, or less competent (wasn’t always what the doer was trying to communicate…sometimes their intent was to be helpful), and led the person to have doubts about their self-worth. Doing with on the other hand communicated the message of support and belief in the person and could help the person to recognize their value and worth.
Another way to look at it is doing for is related to sympathy, and doing with is related to empathy. Sympathy in the simplest idea is feeling bad for the person, but maintain separation from the person and their experience. Empathy in the simplest idea is the sharing of feeling and experience in relation with the person.
Hope that clarifies a bit where I’m coming from with the doing to-for-with idea.
Thank you again for your comment.
~Brian
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