Ethics of Kinship in the Archive w/Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz
Show notes
We are back for Season 3 and an exploration of interdisciplinarity with an interview with crip, mad, activist historian Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz. We talk about retraining ourselves to do anti-extractivist archival work and about how our disabled identities and kinships shape our scholarly work.
You can find out more about Hannah’s work on Twitter @hannahnthewolf and on their website: https://hannahandthewolf.wordpress.com/
Texts recommended in the episode (All links are affiliated to Bookshop.org UK and any purchases made through them will generate a small commission that helps to support the podcast):
Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education by Jay T. Dolmage
A Debt to the Dead? Ethics, Photography, History, and the Study of Freakery by Jane Nicholas (open access PDF)
Pollution is Colonialism by Max Liboiron
Texts mentioned in the episode:
“Tropics of Discourse” by Hayden White
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Read the full episode transcripts at www.elainagauthiermamaril.com
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Follow Élaina on Twitter @ElainaGMamaril
Transcript
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 0:15
Hello and welcome to the first episode of season 3 of Philosophy Casting Call, the podcast that features underrepresented philosophical talent! My name is Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril, your host and producer. This season is very special to me because I got to fulfil one of the founding goals of Philosophy Casting Call, which was to reach out to people who are not “officially” academic philosophers. As someone who is trained as a philosopher, who identifies as a philosopher, yet who doesn’t seem to watch a lot of people’s idea of a philosopher because of who I am or what my research practices are, I always wanted to amplify the practice of scholars who defy disciplinary boundaries and who end up doing philosophy without asking for permission. I am also salaried for now (yay!) and since the Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society pays me, I can afford to work on this podcast during normal business hours, which means I get to deliver it weekly to you, my lovely listeners. I also chose to make season 3 even more explicitly a snapshot of my actual research relations. In past seasons, I reached out to guests across the world and outside of my regular research bubbles and I am so happy I did. I learned so much from cold-DMing folks on Twitter and I met some incredible people. But I’m at a point in my career where I’m reflecting on my relational obligations as a researcher and I wanted to produce something that felt intimate and a reflection of my own practice of interdisciplinarity. This is why you’ll notice that many guests on season 3 are people I also consider friends, or they are my literal colleagues from the Centre and therefore people I interact with weekly, or they have written a book that really influenced my research. So this is by no means meant to be an exhaustive investigation of what “interdisciplinarity” means, but, rather, what it means to me at this point in time as I produce it within my web of relations. Of which you, dear listener, is also a part of. Ok, enough sap. No, wait, I won’t apologise for being emotional! This actually means a lot to me! A quick content warning, this episode contains non-explicit mentions of child trafficking, sexual assault, and suicidality. Now, without further ado, here is my conversation with my friend, the amazing crip, mad historian and disability activist, Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz.
Hi, Hannah, welcome! Thank you for being here.
Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz 4:30
I'm so excited to be here! Thank you for having me.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 4:33
I'm legitimately so excited because I feel like this is the culmination of like, two plus years of crip kinship via the interwebs.
Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz 4:44
Absolutely, you know, held together with your amazing knitting right.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 4:50
And I was able to like, create things and then send them knowing that they will be loved which is something that is very special like Think in the kind of maker community that's I love making for myself, but not everyone is net worth it. You're definitely knitworthy.
Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz 5:08
Oh, thank you. That is such a high compliment. I know exactly what you're talking about. You want it to be you want it to be loved. You know, I used to be a fibre artist myself and knowing that a little kid somewhere still loves on an armadillo I once made, it's just such a good feeling.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 5:24
That's so cute. But back to business. This is what happens when you have your friends on! Can you introduce yourself to the listeners?
Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz 5:34
Absolutely. I'm Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz, I use they/them pronouns, and I'm a recovering academic sort of, soon to be unaffiliated, and also a disability justice activist, I use that, tentatively because to me that ideas very aspirational and maybe a difficult thing to claim myself, and rather something that people have to decide other people like my kin, and my community have to decide I am. But largely that's sort of the sphere that I prefer to rotate in. So and most of my work so far has been about academic ableism. And then writing, and scholarship wise, I'm really focused on how settler colonialism and ableism interact and create one another and reinforce one another.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 6:29
So you are a historian, you're trained in the academic discipline of history, but you do a lot of interdisciplinary work and you present in lots of interdisciplinary spaces. So, to you what does it mean, to do interdisciplinary work?
Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz 6:47
For me, interdisciplinary work has always been really intuitive, it's actually like, makes far more sense to me than like disciplinary silos. The way that we often function, which I think a lot of people in recent years have felt, you know, there's a lot of talk about siloing, and people being too in their own sandbox and things like that. But I think that there's something inherently neurodivergent about interdisciplinary work neurodivergent, folks, especially folks, like me, I have ADHD and autism are very good at seeing lots of things all at once, and making observations that are sort of like this enormous constellation of things. But that relies for me, on kinship networks, and co-authorship, and collapse, like deep, deep collaboration on scholarship that there is no, you know, we have the traditional acknowledgments section and things like that. But I recently helped finish an essay where we wrote a collective biography of the three of us rather than three individual biography.
So, it's really about taking intersectional and interdisciplinary work really requires is something that cannot be done in isolation, one because of the training that we have, right, because we're trained in a disciplinary silo, that's the training we get, if we're lucky, we can do like a liberal arts, ma or something like that, or some, you know, some sort of master's degree that's a little broader, but we have to rely on one another who are in different silos, right, who have got those different trainings. And that, to me, is just the way that it has to be done. Otherwise, how interdisciplinary Can it really be? Yes, we're complex beings, and we embody lots of things. But it's the collaboration that is not just citation or acknowledgement. It's actual, deep, emotive and personal and community engagement with the work rather than just sort of I read this and thought about it really hard. And I'm gonna give it a place of pride in the in the essay or whatever I'm worth writing on. It's more. How do I relate to the human being themselves who wrote this and their community and what the work was politically for? Yeah,
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 9:24
I'm so glad to hear you say that because my most rewarding academic projects have been in collaboration, have been co-writing, discussing ideas together, building projects together, organising events where people could come together and really share not only their ideas, but their process and through that I can be so generative, and I believe and I think I'm justified in thinking that academia, especially in the humanities, Route, wards, single authorship and rewards this idea of like everyone should pump out a book whether or not you have an idea for a book or yeah, these kind of things. And even in the STEM fields, there is this competitiveness of are you first author? Or are you second author? And so the system is not designed to foster that. And yet, like the ways that I want to engage with it are collaborative. And can you speak more about what you mean when you say the emotive side because that is something that is either not usually recognised or downright derided. Sometimes when we approach scholarly work?
Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz 10:43
Oh, yeah, I for sure have gotten that! Well, I think I come at the emotive very much from black feminist politics, and also mad politics, the emotive is what goes most punished. And in some ways, that means that it's got to be really important. If you know, if it's so punished, it belongs, it needs to be there. But I also think of the emotive as about relationality. Because relationality without emotion is not relationality, there needs to be commitments to care, and gentleness and space making and you know, the beloved term access intimacy, there has to be a commitment to that even when we're reading people, we're just reading people or encountering people. For me, as a historian in the archives, there's, there's a level of, for example, while I was doing some archival work in North Vancouver, for my master's thesis I came across, I had to go through a lot of city records that were just totally irrelevant, because I was talking about urban planning, but urban planning of like only like two blocks of this of North Vancouver that the area that surrounded mission reserve number one on the North Shore, but it meant that I encountered lots of other documents that just sort of got thrown in there. And one of them was, what I've now come to understand after reading it several times was a trial record for a young girl who had been trafficked her race unnoted, but she had been moved from someone's house in Vancouver to someone in North Vancouver, and then was sexually assaulted. And her trial record was shoved in with a bunch of like, city block plans and blueprints, it was very strange. But to me, it was an encounter with the human that I wasn't able to have when I was looking at these, you know, giant blueprints of like, it was kind of cool to see people's handwriting on it and stuff. But like, there wasn't as much of an emotive connection. And I think, for me, it was like, "Oh, the emotive belongs here, because I need to pause and bear witness to the fact that this girl really did get lost in many ways, to many, many systems, both that were contemporary to her, and that came after her", and so that my scholarship is actually enhanced by the fact that I paused. And I found that, and it, she did end up mentioned in my thesis, where it's like, these are the encounters that you have. And these are the ways that my thesis sort of turned into a meditation on COVID, as most things written during COVID did but a sort of a conversation about how doing history work as an activist, can become extractive one history work can be extremely extractive a lot most of academia by default is an extractive industry, but especially activist work, because you can go in thinking like, "Okay, where are the lessons that I can use?", right, you know, "Where's the usable bits?", but her story isn't, there's not a lesson to it, like, there's no way to take this. I mean, I'm sure there are ways but with what I know about her, there's not a lot I can do with it aside, saying I encountered this vulnerability in a period of my own intense vulnerability to being disabled trying to survive the pandemic. And that connects me to her. And that's important as a historian, especially as an activist historian who does community history, the emotional is actually what allows us to look at people in the past, and thus people in our future, as related to us and not separate to us. And for me, it also really requires me to be much more intentional about what will what I say do once it exists in the world. And my responsibility to others comes from my emotive relational connection to them. So the more I expand that the better my scholarship gets, because I'm protecting the people with it that should be protected and not protecting the people who shouldn't be.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 15:08
And that's something that I've recently discovered. I mean, I've always had an emotive reactions to my philosophical work, because I never saw it as separate completely from what it is to live life and live my life. But to some degree reading Spinoza didn't affect me in the same way that reading accounts of disabled people do, or right now I'm researching eugenics in the UK. And there are certain things that I have to pause, as you say, and I have to take stock. And I spoke to my line manager who's a sociologist, and she was very receptive. And she comes at it from a perspective of a social scientist, like when you interview people, sometimes it gets very heavy. But what you just said, I think, is crucial to understand that even if you're dealing with documents, even if you're dealing with past things, even if these people are not in the room with you, there is still so much that a we need to deal with in our legitimate emotional response and be that that emotional response can be the catalyst to, as you say, be more mindful about why we're doing the work for whom are we doing the work? What are our responsibilities? So, just because you research history, it doesn't mean there are no responsibilities to people who live now and future people.
Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz 16:40
Yeah, there's actually a piece that I encourage everyone to read, but especially historians, or anyone who does historical work, which is most scholars, obviously, let's be honest. But it's by Jane Nicholas and it's called "A Debt to the Dead: Ethics, Photography, History and the Study of Freakery" and it was in "Histoire sociale" in 2014, but she writes about her experience in the archive at the World Circus Museum that's in Wisconsin, and that museum houses 1000s of photographs of, quote unquote, "freaks". The study of freakery is quite rich, it's a very like, but it's a very specific moment in disability history. And some people sort of take it and apply it more broadly than it ought to be. But in this, essentially, Jane Nicholas meditates on do I reproduce this photograph of two young boys with a incredibly painful skin condition that they were called Elephant boys and their children. They're, I mean, one is barely out of toddlerhood, right, and yet, this photo was taken of them in their underwear, and put, you know, on display, they themselves, their bodies were put on display. There's a whole history of child trafficking in the circus and, and of disabled children and things like that. But I always come back to this one quote, that all that I'll read from Jane Nicholas, which is: "Seeing is not believing, seeing must be a question of ethics and an acknowledgement of the politics of representation. That implicates the historian as witness to past vulnerabilities, intimately connected to the present."
And so reproducing that photo, not only, you know, depending on how and where it's reproduced, cannot only reproduce the violence against those children, but continue to justify violence against disabled children today and into the future. I read that in 2019, which was my first year of my MA. And that has stuck with me for a very long time of like, this is how you go into an archive. Also, I've had several indigenous peers and colleagues that also talk about ethics of kinship in the archive, which has been incredibly valuable. Because for them, indigenous folks in Canada, especially where I work encountered their kin, it literal kin in the archive, there, they are over documented over pathologized, etc. and disabled people, in some ways are the same, because our medical documents end up in archives, incredibly intimate details of our lives end up in archives. And so that sort of approach to everyone you encounter in the archive of understanding what vulnerability led them to be documented in a profoundly colonial capitalist institution. How do I honour the vulnerability that meant they were documented here and their agency within that? So yeah, and I think I think you can't do that without the emotive. You just kept it just like how do you you know, The emotive is political. And this is political to and you have to entangle the two or else you're not going to end up doing what you want to do, which is protecting your community and doing good work for them, right. So, yeah.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 20:15
I mean, maybe it's cynical of me, but I don't think every historian and every scholar goes into it thinking about wanting to protect their community. So do you have an origin story of how you came at it from that perspective? Or did you encounter someone who taught you that this is a way you could approach history? I guess, you just read an excerpt but like, my guess is that this is not the dominant culture within history departments?
Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz 20:47
No, not at all. I think it's Hayden White has this quote about like conquering or like, conquering the archive and like it like Hayden white and tropics of discourse, is very... Oh, plundering, the archive! That's what he says. He says, plundering the archive, and like, "plunder": My God is that a colonial and imperial term, capitalist... like, holy crap. Like, the predominant approach in history, there are a lot of people who are doing better now, I will say that, but the classical training that most of us get in history is about extractivism. It is about treating the archive, the way you treat the capitalists treat an oil well, it's about taking whatever you need from it. And I had that approach for a while. Because, you know, when I was an undergrad doing my undergraduate thesis, like, let's be honest, I was still somewhat of a child. You know, when you're 21, and 22, you're still a kid, like, your baby. But I very much had this like, oh, well, this is the story I want to tell. So every piece of evidence that helps me tell that story I'm going to use, right. And a lot of that, because I was a very junior researcher, and really learning how to research was I found a lot of sources by going into other people's primary sources, right. And so they were primary sources that had already been sort of discovered, which is another real problematic term in archives. But we're sort of already circulating in the scholarship on I was writing on World's Fairs and Indigenous performance there for my undergraduate thesis. But I started to as many disabled people do. Well, I didn't want to do disability studies or disability history, or I just wanted to be a historian who studied like circuses and World's Fairs and like, plotted along and, you know, that wasn't I was always an activist, right? But I didn't want to do disability in my scholarly life. Because I'm disabled, I have to be an activist in order to get access to anything. And I just kind of wanted a job that wasn't that, right? And that was the goal. But I came in and I had to do so much labour, just to get basic access, and to have a basic understanding of where I was coming from, to value the many things that I was bringing in that so much square one work because nobody, I think there's one person at my institution that does disability studies. And they're like in, I want to say they're in like the business school. And I'm like, there are lots of graduate students, but not there aren't supervisors. And so I ended up doing, doing a lot of that. And then the thing that I kept encountering in books that I was reading for, like my historiography class or my other, my other classes, was several books that used medical records. And a lot of I was the oldest member of my cohort, a lot of my cohort were early 20s. I was 28 when I began mine, so like, not like ancient, I hope not ancient. But I was I felt it, I definitely felt a bit of a gap there in life experience. Also, like I always feel a gap with non disabled people, because I spent most of my 20s almost dead. So like, it's just a very different experience. Right? Yeah. Like, and there's some things we can relate on. But also like, you know, the whole, like, lingering near death thing really changes.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 24:34
Yeah. On my last birthday, I was saying to everyone, "I'm 30 going on 77".
Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz 24:41
Yes, exactly, exactly. I'm like, That's me. I just don't I don't even know how to put an age on it anymore. You know, because it's just so different from how non disabled people move through their life. So I really felt that and I was saying things about like, is it ethical that they To use these medical records like, and for me, it was so profoundly terrifying. Because there are laws that say like medical records can't be on sealed until, like 70 years after the person's death. But I don't want any of my medical records unsealed ever. Like, I'm not an object of study. Yeah, right. And I'm a person living in a historical moment. And I know that historians do not treat people whose records are in the archive as people, they encounter the records as records and not as an impression of a life.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 25:44
In fact, I believe that is what we're encouraged to do. Because this is the objective. This is the scientific way to approach it. And I have a similar reaction to what you're saying, because I remember being a teenager and having doctors literally talk to each other while standing over me while I was lying on a gurney being like, we've never seen this before. Maybe we should take a scan, maybe we should send it to Vancouver. Like this is a special case. Sit down, stand up, no bad girl, no stand up. And it was like, being treated like an object shapes you for life.
Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz 26:22
Oh, absolutely.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 26:24
This idea that I was a case that I was an object to be dissected to be discussed with your colleagues...
Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz 26:32
A problem!
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 26:32
... is absolutely mortifying.
Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz 26:34
Yeah. Oh, and you become a thought experiment too! You know, like, your life becomes a thought experiment that people put in front of graduate seminars to discuss. And I'm just sitting here like, holy crap.You know, because, and it goes back to this young girl that I encountered in the archive of like, her most vulnerable moment, is preserved. 100 years after it happened, this was early 20th century documents. For me, someone with no relation, no context, no ability to place within any sort of like, framework of understanding for me to read about how she was sexually assaulted by who they thought was her uncle. And of course, they don't say it sexual assault. They They say she's a whore, right, you know, but she, I think she was 11 or 12. And it's like, yeah, sure. And II you encounter that. And some people see it as evidence, a primary source that you could scan and put before and undergraduate history class and say, write a primary source analysis of this, right? And it's like, one, I hope that we choose far more banal sources for those exercises. But not everyone does. And to be a problem in perpetuity, you know, a question to be solved, is just so violent. And, you know, because like, for me, like my medical records tell a pathologized history of me, but they are the most cogent records of my life that exist, I realised I was doing this, but I ever since I became very ill, I counter archive myself. So I actually, I have a bit of hoarding tendencies. But the things that I hoard are my journals, little bits of paper, and ephemera from my life that are like cards from friends that I got and tell stories of like the things that were not my blood work. And the second hand information, my doctors put in the notes, right, but the thing that most disabled people have as their most cogent footprint in a medical capitalist bureaucracy, are their medical records. And that ends up being the only way that our stories get told when disability is not solely a medical thing. And so that has those records have profoundly shaped how the medical humanities go about things. I've been shunted into being a medical humanities historian because I do disability work. And I'm like, disability is not inherently medical, you know, like, actually, my problem is that I'm so tired of being pathologized that every single component of my being has some sort of value attached to it with pathology that like no actually the counter storying that we have to do is that the pathology is secondary even tertiary to what it means to live a disabled life. The more important thing to know is actually how violent the encounters are with medicine. Right? Like, that's actually the thing that you should know. But none of that is recorded in my medical documents, right? If it does get recorded, it's going to be like hysteria. Right? And so I think that that has profoundly shaped how I go about doing history, even when it's not medical humanities stuff. It's like, no, like, a lot of people have had no say in how they end up in this archive. And I'm not going to take any more agency away from people and that has really curtailed the documents available to me, you know, operating on an ethic of consent is, can be very difficult when you're a historian because of how archives work. Thankfully, I have some I use the McKenna McBride commission that has really, really rich indigenous testimonies in it. And that is, like, very obviously conceptual in the sense of, you know, these are recorded statements of indigenous folks who came to speak to the commission and knew they were being recorded right for posterity, and even want it to be recorded. Because, you know, Canada does not do well by its indigenous people. But still history as a discipline, and the structure of the archive transgresses consent, so consistently, that I really think if we, if historians had to go through ethics reviews, we would fail all of them. Like, it's just not, it's not possible to because of how we have structured the discipline to do real, consensual ethical work, because of how people get recorded by dominant culture. And that doesn't mean we shouldn't touch those things and shouldn't do history. But we have to think a lot harder about it.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 31:42
But hopefully, what you're doing is testifying that it is possible to do it a different way. And when you say it's difficult, I think it's also important to maybe rethink why we do research and why we are scholars why it is a practice that we choose to engage in. And it is not always, at least it's not for me about being a breakthrough in my discipline, or coming up with the theory of everything, or having the blockbuster academic book, within my very small niche, you know, and I think once you free yourself from that pressure, the idea of like, Yes, I will do this work that has its limitations, but it is contributing to a larger project. It is in its own way saying it is possible to not reproduce unthinkingly structures of harm. So I mean, I'm very grateful for your work, and I encourage everyone else to look it up. But before we go, I did want you to say briefly, you mentioned that you work on academic ableism. And together with your colleague Danielle Lorenz, you coined the term academic crip. doula. And I would just like you to explain a bit what that is because I think that people who are familiar with the work of doulas probably have never thought about it in this way. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 33:16
And it actually really ties into how I do history work of like, it's about like generational change, but in the discipline, right. And so crypt doula is a term that Stacy Park Milburn coined our beloved ancestor who passed away from medical neglect during the pandemic coined to talk about how disabled people, help people be birthed into their new lives as disabled, because everybody will almost everyone becomes disabled. If you don't become disabled, it's likely because you died very, very, very quickly, very young, you know, you're going to experience disability in some capacity in your life. And for me, I really had that model by Heather McCain here and in Vancouver, who founded Creating Accessible neighbourhoods But Heather, the way they work has really been to they've lived here for a long time so they know which hospitals are better for what they know whether or not the access and assessment centre is safe for someone like me with CPTSD and ADHD or if I should go to someone else. They know the ways that paperwork works and the weird like, you know, the little trivia that you have to know of like no actually you do need to check that box even though you have no idea what that statement means or anything like that. Right? And it's even like less bureaucratic than that of like, modelling gentleness, modelling prioritising this self modelling a refusal of overwork and human value as productivity and so that's really Either way that Stacy Park Milburn described and then for me, Heather McCain modelled being a crip doula. And so with Danielle Lorenz, who I've written a few things with, we wanted to think about our work as graduate students how we both got forced into doing disability work Danielle works is working on their PhD at the University of Alberta and education and both of us have had to teach our departments how to do accessibility we've had to introduce the professor's we TA for to like the basic fundamental human rights of disabled students. Right. And most importantly, we have found ourselves mentoring other disabled students. But we also wanted to think about how do we refuse the traditional model of mentorship in academia, which is incredibly hierarchical, and makes mentoring is very, very vulnerable. Um, I've very much experienced that with certain mentors I've had and so the way we tried to think about academic crip doula is like, Yes, I'm someone who I get emails from disabled students of like, how do I ask my doctor to fill out these forms? And like, what do I need them to do, but also like trying to model in my scholarly public life, this ethic of it doesn't matter nothing is more important than your life than your well being then your ability to thrive and stay alive, right? There is no paper, no grade, no scholarship, no class, no degree worth your life. Because for disabled students, it is life or death. Like actually, for a lot of students um, Sarah Madoka Currie, who is very dear dear friend of mine is working on their dissertation about how like, even for non disabled students, the culture of suicidality in academia is incredibly dangerous, especially for international students and disabled students. And that there is actually a culture that encourages suicide in academia. And so, really being an academic crip doula is about trying to be a mitigating factor, trying to be someone who can come in with quiet and gentleness and care, and a certain amount of clarity, and a system that is designed to be as opaque as possible and to keep disabled people out. Jay Dolmage writes about this in "Academic Ableism", but it's very much about extracting knowledge from disabled body minds medicine, occupational therapy, social work, a lot of social sciences, history in the medical records, you know, extracting knowledge from our body minds, as well as other folks body minds. It's not just disabled people, but for academic ableism. That's real focused on disabled people and then denying disabled people, any space as people. In the Academy, we are only data not scholars, students, staff, whatever collaborators especially we are not collaborators in research about ourselves, the knowledge is taken from us and then computed elsewhere. And so being an academic crip doula is, was really my I can't survive the the sort of gauntlet of trying to get a job or even a PhD in academia. But I love teaching, I love students and I love disabled people. And so my work that I continue to do for free as an academic crip doula is really just about like, disabled people deserve to be there and to have the chance to experience what other folks do. Academia has tremendous potential to be transformative and wonderful and do incredible things in the world, but it needs disabled people and other folks, queer bipoc non North American or European right, folks in the academy to do these things. And my job even though I've I've failed to overcome these barriers, is to help others come up against those barriers a little better, I may still be standing at the bottom of that wall, and I may be stuck there, but hopefully someone can stand on my shoulders. Right. And that's really what I dream of my work being whether or not it's actually that is another question, but that's the that's the aspiration right. And a lot of Disability Justice work is about dreams and the future and aspiration of what a beautiful world we could create together in collaboration like that.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 39:47
I also believe that the goal is becoming.
Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz 39:51
Yes!
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 39:52
The aspiration is not something in the future, unconnected to us. We are making it happen. In perfectly nonlinear way, yes, but we are making it happen.
Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz 40:05
But yes, exactly. It's the now it's it's the journey, not the destination to be cliche, but that that is that is justice and liberation but Liberation and Justice are processes and not fixed points. You know, what is liberation today is not going to be how our descendants in 30 years describe liberation. And that's fantastic. Like that's a good thing that these things will change and grow and morph beyond us. And like, my goal as an activist historian, is to not be needed in 20 years you know, that's what I want to not be needed as an academic crip doula to just like, for it to not be needed in you know, whatever time to...
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 40:51
Also because we're tired!
Unknown Speaker 40:53
Yes! Oh, my God, I want a nap! I want to go to bed! Oh my god.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 40:58
Before you go to bed, what are you reading or watching or playing right now that is giving you joy.
Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz 41:05
I've been watching a lot of like, be well not even be great, but just like old blockbuster action movies that I missed in my teenage years. And like, early 20s, like I've been watching, I just started fast and the Fast and Furious.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 41:20
I knew you were going to say that, for some reason!
Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz 41:23
Yep. And then also, I watched John Wick the other night. So I've just sort of been like, letting myself watch these gratuitous over the top. You know, please don't take away my abolitionist membership card. Right. I don't actually believe in any of this like violence or, you know, over militarization, right, but there's just something so preposterous about it, that it and so unlike my life, you know, right. Because with disabled life, you see yourself reflected in a lot of media in very not good ways. And with with action movies are just so preposterous that I don't, I can turn that part of my brain off. So if you haven't ever watched John Wick trigger warning, that dog does die in the very beginning, and it's really upsetting, but it's just like, very over the top and probably the movie that is most efficient at making you hate the bad guys because they kill his dog, you know?
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 42:21
That's a cheap shot, but it works!
Unknown Speaker 42:22
Exactly. So and it's Keanu Reeves, you know, like one of the boys that we just, we just love because he's a big old cinnamon roll that plays these like, brutal...
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 42:30
He's the original pretty boy.
Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz 42:36
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. With one facial expression, but you know, yeah...
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 42:41
But he's there for all the Hollywood the hurt/comfort. They batter Keanu Reeves and then we get to like, hold him and be like, "it's okay!".
Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz 42:50
Exactly, exactly. We love him. So yeah, um, yeah, I've been trying to just do all of that. And yeah, survive the pandemic that's still ongoing. It's not over.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 43:02
I know, I've been having a flare up lately and I've sprung for the acorn TV membership. And I'm watching all of the garbage like, bakery murder-mystery, antique store owner murder-mystery, librarian murder-mystery...
Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz 43:21
Those are so good. Those are so good.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 43:23
I mean, also don't take away my abolitionist card, I don't support the police!
Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz 43:30
Exactly, exactly. I just need the great British baking show to come back. Right. Because like that is, I saw a tweet that said, I hope these four people are ready to carry my entire emotional well being for the fall from the Great British Bake Off.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 43:46
It started here but I haven't tuned in because I was burned a couple of years ago when they did a very racist, quote unquote, "Japanese week", and I was new to Twitter. And unfortunately, one of the tabloids here took my tweet. And like, I got lots of horribleness from random strangers telling me I didn't have the right to exist and to reproduce. Which ties back in to eugenics!
Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz 44:12
British tabloids sort of the worst, Jesus! Oh, yeah. But you know, again, disabled life, it's so hard to consume media without it being like, a thing you know, of not...
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 44:24
Even the most wholesome joy giving thing has been taken away from me.
Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz 44:29
Yeah, well, I watched the oh, I can't remember what it's called. But basically, there's another mutant TV show on Netflix. And it's like, explicitly about genetically modifying humans to get rid of all disease. And I'm like, That's eugenics. So, yeah...
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 44:52
I don't know if you watch Orphan Black?
Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz 44:55
Yes, I have. Yeah.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 44:55
Yes. Which, I do enjoy that show. But at some point, they're like, "We are eugenicists. Are you okay with that?" I'm like, "No! We are not!"
Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz 45:02
Yeah, well, and I think this, this new show on Netflix is proof of how, how much eugenics have become mainstream during during the pandemic.
Which makes my research super relevant. Which sucks.
I'm so sorry. I know.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 45:22
So is there anywhere on the internet that people could find you and or your work?
Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz 45:28
Yeah, probably the best place to find me is Twitter. I'm under Hannah N, instead of "and, Hannah N the Wolf, because I have lupus and lupus means wolf in Latin. And then you can also find me on Instagram, but I'm less, less sort of on there. And my website is also on my Twitter. So if you wanted to, like send me an email or something or get in touch, especially if there are students who listen to this, and they're like, "Oh, crap, I don't know how to do this thing". That's sort of what I do. And I sort of let people I let other people pay me to do that stuff, right? I take donations to do that stuff for free for students. So if there are students listening who need some help me and some advice need to, you know, have a professor they're struggling with or can't figure out some sort of bureaucratic nonsense, or, you know, just need someone to tell them that they belong and that they deserve to be there. I'm, you know, I'm around. So again, that's @HannahNtheWolf on Twitter, which is, I'm maybe a little too open on but, you know, that's what Twitter is.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 46:32
You're self documenting!
Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz 46:34
Exactly. It's my it's my archival tendencies, so.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 46:40
Okay. Well, thank you so much for coming on. This was wonderful. We could keep talking forever. But we both need a nap now. So...
Hannah Sullivan-Facknitz 46:50
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Yes. Thank you so much for having me. It's been so much fun!
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 47:06
Thank you so much Hannah for giving me your time and your wisdom. I feel so energised after this conversation and I hope you do too, dear listener. As usual, I will link Hannah’s socials and recommendations in the show notes, but if I can sneak in a cheeky rec of my own I want to tell everyone who is interested in anti-colonial and Indigenous research methodologies to read “Pollution is Colonialism” by Max Liboiron. That is all. So if you have any questions, you can email me at philosophy casting call pod@gmail.com and you can subscribe to philosophy casting call and leave me a five star review. If you can follow philosophy casting call on Twitter and Instagram at filo CC pod. That's P H I L O the letter C C P O D and you can find all episode transcripts on my website at www.elainagauthiermamaril.com and if you feel like supporting the podcast and become a monthly donor, I also have a Ko-Fi.com link in the show notes. Bye!
Transcribed by https://otter.ai