Please join us for a lecture by Dr. Rebecca Monteleone (University of Toledo) Shifting Language, Shifting Power: Plain Language, Cognitive Accessibility, and Knowledge.

5pm Pacific time, only on Zoom. Register here to access the Zoom link. The lecture will be recorded and posted to the ICDS website. Zoom auto-captions and ASL interpretation from Bowtie Interpreting will be provided. Contact icds@wwu.edu for any access needs.

Formal Language: Disabled people, especially people with intellectual disabilities, have been categorically excluded from public discourse, even (and especially) as their rights and personhood are debated. This exclusion is often based on paternalistic arguments that people with intellectual disabilities cannot credibly contribute to these conversations. In this talk, I argue that by embracing cognitive accessibility through strategies such as plain language, we can reimagine what it means to produce, contribute, and share knowledge. By doing so, we resist nondisabled supremacy, and open up pathways for more just futures.

Plain Language:

• We argue about what rights people with intellectual disabilities (ID) have. People with ID do not usually get to say what they think.
• Some people say we don’t need to listen to people with ID. They say people with ID cannot understand.
• I think we need to change how we talk and write so more people can understand. This will change who gets to say what they think. It will change who we believe. I think it will make the future better to listen to more kinds of people.