Mike Kent

Disability and New Media

Disability and New Media examines how digital design is triggering disability when it could be a solution. Video and animation now play a prominent role in the World Wide Web and new types of protocols have been developed to accommodate this increasing complexity. However, as this has happened, the potential for individual users to control how the content is displayed has been diminished. Accessibility choices are often portrayed as merely technical decisions but they are highly political and betray a disturbing trend of ableist assumption that serve to exclude people with disability. It has been argued that the Internet will not be fully accessible until disability is considered a cultural identity in the same way that class, gender and sexuality are. Kent and Ellis build on this notion using more recent Web 2.0 phenomena, social networking sites, virtual worlds and file sharing. Many of the studies on disability and the web have focused on the early web, prior to the development of social networking applications such as Facebook, YouTube and Second Life. This book discusses an array of such applications that have grown within and alongside Web 2.0, and analyzes how they both prevent and embrace the inclusion of people with disability.

People with disability and new disaster communications: access and the social media mash-up

This article explores how a lack of access to increasingly complex and overlapping digital communications platforms in times of disaster for people with disabilities has the potential to make already life-threatening situations considerably more dangerous. As we are increasingly coming to rely on a social media mash-up of digital platforms to assist in communications during disaster situations, the issue of accessibility for people with disabilities is as dire as if it was high ground during a tsunami or transport during a typhoon. The contemporary social media environment is characterised by a complex and overlapping network of complementary platforms, populated by user-generated content, where people communicate and exchange ideas. In this environment, YouTube videos are posted to Facebook and embedded in blogs, and Twitter is used to link to these other sites and is itself embedded in other platforms. These networks are increasingly supplementing and supplanting more traditional communication platforms, such as the television and radio, particularly in times of disaster. The concern of this paper is that the elements from which this mash-up of communications channels is made are not always accessible to people with disabilities. This evolving network of social media-based communication exposes the limits of existing Internet-based universal design.

Hacking the City: disability and Access in Cities Made of Software

Citizens with impairments manage a disabling environment of barriers, borders, walls, steps and inconvenience. Yet there have been transformations of buildings, roads and signs after decades of activism. Cake and Kent investigate how this analogue history applies to digital environments. The imperative for universal design – being aware of the multiple uses and literacies that approach any product of environment – is crucial when enabling a digital city.

Reimagining Australia via disability and media: Representation, access and digital integration

It would appear that the effects of sustained overuse of the planet’s resources is straining the natural world to its limits. The consequences of staying on this path may be catastrophic for both planet and humankind. At this time, when the ecosphere which sustains us all is so fragile, it seems imperative that we address the nature of the fundamental relationship between humans and their environment. Hence, we should perhaps undertake to reimagine our relationship with nature, with place and with each other if we are to counteract such malign influences. This paper will argue that localised, direct democratic action offers us one way in which we may begin to redeem these relationships by providing an account of the way in which an assortment of subcultures in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales united to successfully oppose mining for coal seam gas. The Northern Rivers is renowned for its natural endowments and a community which boasts great diversity. A variety of motivations led to an array of groups exerting their collective power and unity at grassroots level to defeat the attempt to introduce unconventional methods of gas extraction. In this process, a sense of place emerged as an important factor for many of those resisting the mining. The movement as it unfolded ‘on the ground’ proposes an alternative way of being and belonging, developed through a different relationship to place, community and the ecosphere.More than 50 years after American feminist Susan Brownmiller (1976, p. 15, original italics) controversially claimed that rape is “nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear,” Australian girls and women continue to be raped, continue to suffer the consequences of rape in the aftermath, and continue to fear the possibility of being raped. In order to reimagine an Australia where the rape of women and children is socially and culturally unacceptable, we need to understand more fully the long-term and multiple impacts of violence of this nature. This paper reports on Australian research that uses innovative arts-based methodologies to shift the emphasis from the primacy of the psychological impact of childhood rape to the enduring, though less understood, multiple and embodied impact of childhood rape. The research holds important insights for women’s and children’s health professionals, for women who have experienced, and continue to experience the trauma of childhood rape, and for the discursive construction of a country where acts of sexual violence are unthinkable.The history of Perth, Western Australia, has been characterised by the incremental loss of its wetlands. While disputes about wetlands are often framed solely in terms of the environment, they are places of cultural significance too. The extensive wetlands of central Perth, food gathering and meeting places for Noongar people are now expunged from the landscape. Urban dwellers of Perth are largely unaware that the seasonal lakes and wetlands of the centre of the city were the larders, gardens, hideouts, dumps and playgrounds of previous generations; both Noongar and Settler. The loss of social memory of these lost cultural/natural places entails the framing of wetlands as aberrant and continues to influence Perth’s development and the sense of place of its inhabitants. Reimagining Perth’s Lost Wetlands was a project which attempted to reimagine the pre-colonial landscape using archival material. Reimagining the past allows connections to be made to the last remaining wetlands in the wider metropolitan area. The fight to save the Beeliar Wetlands in southern suburban Perth as a cultural/natural place illustrates the changing value of wetlands and the laying down of social memories of place.This paper takes as its starting point, the acknowledgement that the Indigenous nations of the continent of Australia have never ceded their sovereignty and as such the current nation-state of Australia constitutes a nation in occupation of other people’s lands. From a philosophical perspective, the Settler-citizens of the occupied territories of Australia therefore emerge into the world as occupier beings. As the inheritors of a still post-colonising nation, can contemporary Settler Australians find a way to live together ethically with the Indigenous population? This paper uses topologically based philosophical thinking of place in an effort to seek more expansive ways of thinking that might furnish us with productive questions about the meanings of place and identity in a settler-colonial context. I apply topological thinking to reveal the interrelated nature of Settler identity and the key constructs of settler-colonial Australia, the “possessive logics” of the political and legal systems that enact and maintain the occupation. The paper concludes with a call to thinking for place as a mode of acting in attentive awareness of the interests of a place as a whole, and in so doing realising an ethical relationship with both place and all the beings enfolded in it. Through recognising and relinquishing Occupier subjectivity, Settlers might begin to transform and decolonise themselves and engage in a process of becoming other than Occupier.This paper considers the aesthetic and material concepts of the threshold as they figure in contemporary Australian poetry, and examines how the threshold can be a productive and generative space in Australian poetics. The metaphor of the threshold as a point of entry or beginning, place of transition, place of exit, rite of passage, or liminal space, speaks to the writer’s imagination as a location of potent creative power. It is here, on the threshold, that a writer gestates ideas, follows the call of the initial creative impulse, and brings her words forth to be shaped. During this (w)rite of passage something new is made. For a writer, being on the threshold is at once a place where she can thresh out ideas (receptive), and the site of creative acts (generative). Yet the threshold is not only a metaphor for the creative process; it is a liminal space where certain kinds of knowledge can be sensed in passing. The word ‘liminal’ literally means “[to occupy] a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold” (OED). In an Australian postcolonial context, the threshold as a productive space in literature or art is particularly resonant because of the kinds of terrains that may be crossed and spoken across the threshold—the productive capacity of the middle ground. This paper will discuss the poems of Inside My Mother (2015) by Yankunytjatjara/Kokatha South Australian poet Ali Cobby Eckermann that inhabit the threshold as both an unsettled and productive space in contemporary Australian postcolonial poetics. Writing on the threshold, Cobby Eckermann is engaged in reimagining such poeticsLiving with difference is an unavoidable part of living in Australia. How we live with difference, therefore, impacts how people imagine and reimagine Australia. This paper considers the matter of reimagining Australia as a phenomenon that is located within the microecology of our everyday urban spaces. It is interested in knowing about these spaces and how they can contribute to the reimagining of Australia at the microlevel of society. It considers two examples of spaces that engage people in this task and advances the notion of the cosmopolitan intersection, framing reimagining within Anthony Kwame Appiah’s vision of cosmopolitanism and Jean-Luc Nancy’s vision of coexistence.This special double issue of Coolabah, numbers 24&25, was developed from selected presentations at Reimagining Australia: Encounter, Recognition, Responsibility , the International Australian Studies Association (InASA) Conference 2016, hosted by the Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University, and held in Fremantle, Western Australia, on 7-9 December. The double issue addresses the urgent need for Australia to be reimagined as inclusive, conscious of its landscape and contexts, locale, history, myths and memory, amnesia, politics, cultures and futures; reimagined via intense conversations and inter-epistemic dialogue; reimagined through different ways of knowing, belonging and doing. Key agendas, polemics and contestations at stake in this two-part publication project are raised in Tony Birch’s thought-provoking article that serves equally as an introductory essay.

Who is Working on It? Captioning Australian Catch up Television and Subscription Video on Demand.

Despite the rapid evolution in the way in which we watch television – through digitalisation and the introduction of video on demand (VOD) and catch-up services – the inaccessibility of television content remains an issue, specifically for people who are Deaf or hard of hearing. This article revisits the claim from 2014 that VOD providers were ‘working on’ providing closed captions. Building on Ellis’ 2014 research, the accessibility of television in Australia in 2016 is analysed using a cross study of current subscription VOD services and catch-up television providers. The research reveals that while some companies have accessibility policies and offer closed captioned content, there have been minimal changes in the provision of captioning, both within the industry and in legislation.

Access for everyone? Australia’s ‘streaming wars’ and consumers with disabilities

Abstract This article is concerned with the recent rise in popularity of video-on-demand services as a form of entertainment in Australia and its premise of offering freedom to watch whatever, whenever. The article investigates how the entry of video-on-demand services into the Australian television market has both enabled and disabled televisual content access, focusing on how people with disability access video-on-demand content and the hardware and software they use to do this. It discusses how a lack of accessibility features, reduced useability and cumulative barriers to accessibility has led to failure of these services to be inclusive of everyone.

Live music in a virtual world: Exuberant flourishing and disability at wheelies nightclub in second life

This chapter explores the virtual world Second Life and specifically one of its more famous nightclub venues. Wheelies opened in 2006 as a virtual nightclub that catered to both people with disabilities, and those who do not present as such. Its founder and proprietor, Simon Stevens, was the first person in Second Life to have his avatar appear in a wheelchair and helmet, reflecting Stevens’ analog identity. Wheelies is famous for its dance floor full of people’s avatars both in and out of wheelchairs, dancing and socializing. The club won the Catalyst Revolutionary Award in the United Kingdom in 2008. This chapter initially provides a brief background on the online virtual world Second Life and its history of virtual performance, dancing, and live music. The chapter then focuses, through Wheelies, on identity in this type of digital environment and how it interfaces with music, dance, and disability, and what happens in these spaces where an analog body is absent, but a digital body is a key part of a person’s interaction with others and the world.