Thread by @daniellelorenz

Danielle Lorenz, PhD candidate at @UAlbertaEd. I will be outlining how I, as an Associate Editor of @TheCJDS (an #OpenAccess critical disability studies journal) used a single bracket elimination tournament to casually educate folks on bad disability representation. #MWSOTL 1/11

As @HGulka et al. wrote in their recently published article (cjds.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cjds…), if disabled ppl are included in film/tv, they’re “portrayed in negative, stereotypical, and unauthentic ways,” usually by non-disabled actors (see also Barnes, 1992). 2/11 #MWSOTL

Knowing this, I created The Worst Representations of Disability Tournament (“The Worsties”; #TourneyCJDS) as a form of crip narrative resistance to normative, problematic disability tropes in literature, film, and TV. 3/11 #MWSOTL

The tournament was designed using concepts you would find in a #HigherEd English classroom: two literary devices (irony & black/dark humour), and post-colonial theory (writing back). 4/11 #MWSOTL

Verbal irony is when someone says something that does not match their intent. Awarding a character for being the worst is a form of verbal irony if we consider Twitter to be an alternative means of communicating over speech (often used in disability communities). 5/11 #MWSOTL

Black/dark humour in literature occurs when someone makes light of a dire or morbid situation. Disabled folks making light of misrepresentations of disability in popular culture is a form of black/dark humour. (We often call it crip humour in our circles). 6/11 #MWSOTL

Writing back, originating from Ashcroft et al., 1989, is where BIPOC folks from the periphery write against the centre (i.e., whiteness) and normative (white; problematic) understandings of the periphery (1/2). 7/11 #MWSOTL

Writing back in the tourney, used as an analogy, points to the historic and ongoing tendency of non-disabled creators representing disability in problematic ways and the lack of BIPOC disability representation in popular culture in general (2/2). 8/11 #MWSOTL

After getting suggestions from our social media accounts, I ended up with 28 characters in film & TV and 20 in literature & comic books/graphic novels (N = 48). The “winner” was Will Traynor from Me Before You (boo hiss). 9/11 #MWSOTL

Tho there were issues (mine) w/ execution, the tourney served its purpose: it engaged @TheCJDS’s audience & functioned as an informal educational tool. The same premise could be adopted into other #HigherEd classrooms to teach other literary devices and/or theories. 10/11 #MWSOTL

Would I do it for @TheCJDS again? Yep! (I’m already planning for next year). Would I use the same premise in my own classroom? Absolutely. 11/11 #MWSOTL

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