Take Frances Berko, for example. A pioneer in the disability rights movement, she earned a Fordham Law degree in 1944. By 1949, Berko, who had ataxic cerebral palsy, helped start United Cerebral Palsy. She later served as New York state’s advocate for the disabled.

“I’ve had much success,” she told a panel of legislators in 1981. “But the one achievement which I held most precious—for which I’ve most constantly striven—I’ve never been able to attain completely: that is, the full rights of a citizen of this country and this state.”

That achievement came in 1990 with the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act. In 1994, two years before Berko died, Fordham awarded her an honorary doctorate, and Janet Reno, then U.S. attorney general, called her “a symbol to me of what you can do and how you can do it magnificently.”

Today at Fordham, Berko’s spirit is evident in the work of senior Abigail Dziura, who has focused her research on improving the New York City subway system, where only 27% of all stations are considered fully accessible to people with disabilities.

In April, she earned a prestigious Harry S. Truman Scholarship, which recognizes college students dedicated to public service. “One of the hardest parts of advocacy work is knowing that you don’t always get to see the end result,” she told Fordham News. “Sometimes you’re setting things up for future generations because something can’t be completed for another 20 years. … But someday, I’d love to see a fully accessible New York subway system.”

The ever-striving, regenerative spirit that links Berko to Dziura and beyond is just one example of Fordham people working to build stronger communities. You’ll find more in our latest “20 in Their 20s” series.

That was the message of the “Disabled Freedom Portals,” Fordham’s 2022-2023 Distinguished Lecture on Disability delivered online last month by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, a disability and transformative justice movement worker and author.

“As a disabled person, you are needed. If you’re not disabled, you are also needed to learn from, support, and lift up disabled leadership and organizing in these times. Imagining disabled futures that are free is always an act of resistance,” she said, noting that in the minds of some, “we are not even supposed to survive to a future. We are not supposed to be free, and we are not supposed to have a right to decide what that freedom consists of.”

She acknowledged the activism she has seen from many in the community.

“I’m here to tell you that I know so many of you are already fighting like hell and we have to keep fighting like hell. Everything’s possible to win.”

For the April 12 talk,  Piepzna-Samarasinha defined disability as “encompassing anyone who is disabled, chronically ill, neurodivergent, mad, deaf, or more than one. And that’s been 33% of the United States for a while,” she said, noting that some experts say disabled people are now close to being a majority of the population, given how many people now exhibit symptoms of long COVID and PTSD brought on by the pandemic.

She talked about the many ways disabled people have been discriminated against and outright attacked in modern history, from the Nazis demanding that parents surrender their disabled children to be killed, to violence against the trans community, to CDC director Rochelle Walensky calling it “encouraging news” in 2022 that most COVID deaths were attributed to people with co-occurring conditions, to New York City Mayor Eric Adams planning to institutionalize severely mentally ill people against their will.

“It’s so important for us to remember that none of these attacks are separate,” she said. “The connections between fascism, ableism, trans hatred, racism, and all forms of oppression are crystal clear.”

Piepzna-Samarasinha also shared how she came to be involved in disability justice.

“I’ve been autistic since I was born, even though I only figured it out when I was 41,” she said. “I got chronically ill and disabled when I was 21. And as a young neurodivergent survivor of violence, I was so lucky that I found communities of other young disabled survivors who are involved in punk, anti-Giuliani, queer, and anti-police brutality organizing in New York, and later in the psychiatric survivor movement in Toronto.

“None of us were experts, but we all know that we are experts on each other, our own lives, and we have so much to learn from each other.”

The annual Fordham Distinguished Lecture on Disability is organized by the Disability Studies Program and the Research Consortium on Disability. It is sponsored by the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer and co-sponsored by the Center for Community Engaged Learning, English Department, Graduate School of Religion and Religion Studies, Office of Multicultural Affairs, Office of Disability Services, Peace and Justice Studies, the Graduate School of Social Service, and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Watch the entire lecture below:

An American studies major and a member of the Rose Hill Honors Program, Dziura aims to raise awareness about the experiences of underrepresented and marginalized peoples, particularly those with disabilities. 

Dziura, a native of suburban Connecticut who needed a car to travel to most places, said her first time riding the New York City subway was incredible. The problem is that not everyone can use it. 

“Only 27% of all subway stations are accessible, meaning ADA compliant, which doesn’t literally always mean accessible. That means that all elevators and escalators are working, that the station is open and has service,” said Dziura, but that often isn’t the case. 

Dealing with Her Own Disability

The oldest of four sisters, Dziura learned from an early age how to care for others. As a teenager, she volunteered in local youth programs, where she helped children with dyslexia learn how to read. She also worked as a summer camp counselor with children, some of whom had autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It was there that she realized something she had suspected for a long time—that she was neurodivergent herself. 

“I felt an intrinsic connection to many of those kids. I saw myself in them,” said Dziura, who was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder last year. “But OCD doesn’t make me any less capable of doing anything that I want to do.” 

Finding Disability Studies at Fordham

She arrived at Fordham in 2020 and later decided to major in American Studies, a field that blended her interests in English, history, social sciences, and political science. Her academic concentration, Diversity and Difference, also allowed her to take courses related to her interests, including disability law policy and advocacy. 

Outside of class, she joined extracurriculars focused on building community. She volunteered at the Bronx Community Foundation, where she worked with community organizers and learned how to run a nonprofit. She helped to plan events with the LGBTQ+ History Month Committee in the Office of Multicultural Affairs, including the upcoming Lavender graduation ceremony for LGBTQ seniors. Most recently, she has been interning at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, where she helped to facilitate free events for people with disabilities and their families and developed strategies to make events more accessible to the public. 

A New Policy Proposal on Subway Inaccessibility 

Dziura said she discovered disability studies through her honors course Justice I: The American Experience. As part of the course, she developed a semester-long research project on improving accessibility in the NYC subway system.

She wanted to learn more about the system by experiencing it herself. Last year, Dziura and two friends spent seven hours traveling across the subway system in a single day. Although all three are able-bodied, they decided to only visit stations where they could access an elevator or escalator. In total, they were able to visit 12 stations, she said. 

“It’s almost impossible to navigate the city if you need accessible stations. All of the buses are now wheelchair accessible, and there is something called Access-A-Ride, a paratransit service, but it is infamously bad,” Dziura said. 

In her policy proposal for her Truman Scholarship application, Dziura focused on another aspect of inaccessibility: the importance of installing tactile strips on platform edges and designing stations with high-contrast colors, which can help guide people with visual impairments. 

“As of 2019, there are about 120 stations with platform edges painted yellow but no tactile guide strips because per the ADA, they’re only required for stations of significance like Times Square,” Dziura said. “The MTA has been installing them, but there was a case of a visually impaired man who fell on Brooklyn subway tracks that had yellow paint, but no tactile guide strips.” 

Most people are able-bodied, but at any moment, we are two steps away from being disabled, said Dziura. 

“Disability also includes temporary disability. If you broke your leg tomorrow, your commute would change. It’s also hard for parents with strollers to navigate the subway,” she said, citing the 2019 case of a mother who died while trying to take her 1-year-old daughter down the stairs in a stroller. “And once you reach a certain age, you will have certain disabilities. Poor sight, poor hearing—or both.” 

Dziura now lives on Bathgate Avenue with her Fordham friends. There is a man who often sits on the corner of Bathgate and 189th Street with a blue walker and smiles and waves at her, she said. When she takes out the trash, she also enjoys chatting with her next-door neighbors—longtime residents who have lived in the Bronx for decades. 

“One of the coolest parts of living in the Bronx is seeing how people interact with each other. There’s nothing wrong with Manhattan, but when you travel all the way downtown, there’s this air of detachment,” she said. “The Bronx is, and always will be, a community that looks out for each other. I’m grateful to be a part of it.” 

Creating A New World for the Next Generation

Last month, Dziura found out she was named a finalist for the highly competitive Truman Scholarship, a national program that recognizes college students dedicated to public service. 

Each year, about 800 students across the country are nominated for the scholarship. A quarter of those students are selected as finalists, and an even smaller number—between 55 and 65—are chosen as winners. Since the scholarship was established in 1975, Fordham has produced nearly a dozen winners. (Fordham’s president, Tania Tetlow, is also a 1991 Truman Scholar herself.) Dziura will find out in April if she is chosen as a winner.

Marisa Iglesias, Ph.D., assistant director of the Office of Prestigious Fellowships and Dziura’s advisor, said she expects big things from the student advocate.

“After speaking with her, you’ll probably see the New York transit system differently,” said Iglesias, who helped Dziura apply for the Truman Fellowship. “I can envision the type of change that Abby will make in 10 years, and it’s going to be a pleasure to watch her not just be a part of the city, but a real, tangible part of it.”

Dziura’s long-term career goal is to lead the NYC Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities, acting as a liaison between the disability community and the city. 

“One of the hardest parts of advocacy work is knowing that you don’t always get to see the end result. Sometimes you’re setting things up for future generations because something can’t be completed for another 20 years. It can be difficult when it feels like you’re working toward an intangible goal,” Dziura said. “But someday, I’d love to see a fully accessible New York subway system.”

“It still gives me chills to think about what a moment that was. It was … taking ownership of this term, rather than it being used to demean or marginalize her, that gave people a framework to understand her. And so she shifted from being somebody that was enigmatic or strange to somebody who was a person with autism who wasn’t ashamed of having autism,” he said on April 4 in an online lecture.

Grinker, an award-winning professor of anthropology and international affairs at George Washington University and an expert on autism and mental illness, was the main speaker at the 2021/2022 Fordham Distinguished Lecture on Disability. His book Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism (Basic Books, 2008), inspired by Isabel, won the 2008 National Alliance on Mental Illness KEN award. 

In his speech, he shared the most critical findings from his newest book, Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness (W.W. Norton, 2021). He argues that the main cause of stigmatization against those with mental illnesses and disabilities is something that we don’t often consider—the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which we live. 

‘The Ideal Person’: How American Society Became Divided

Over the past two decades, disabilities have been increasingly embraced as part of being human, rather than something shameful and frightening, said Grinker. He said he witnessed this transformation in Isabel, who is now 30, as well as his students. On the first day of class in front of nearly 300 peers, a student announced that he had Tourette syndrome, Grinker recalled, because he wanted his peers to understand the reason behind his unusual behavior. 

Grinker said that society is becoming less judgmental. Increasing education and public awareness have contributed to this, he said, but what primarily shapes our stigmas against those who are “different” are the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which we live.

Capitalism, for example, created conditions that led to stigmatization. The ideal American possessed two traits that were central to capitalism: independence and autonomy. Those who lacked those traits—or were unable to possess them—were viewed as “abnormal,” he said.  

“Our judgments about mental illnesses come from our definitions of what, at different times and places, people consider the ideal society—the ideal person,” Grinker said, adding that we are now moving away from the definition of an ideal person as defined by capitalism. 

He also drew attention to a phenomenon that helped to destigmatize mental illness and disabilities: war.

During World War II, an unprecedented number of people suffered from mental illness. In response, U.S. President Harry Truman established the National Institute of Mental Health and ordered the military to create a manual used for the diagnosis of mental disorders.

To Be Normal Is To Be ‘Boring’ 

Many people aspire to be “normal,” but this mindset is actually a damaging illusion, said Grinker. He recalled a 1951 research study conducted by his father and grandfather, who were both psychiatrists. They studied a group of men who they divided into two groups: those who screened positive for mental illness and those who were “normal.” They found that the latter lacked ambition and creativity. As Grinker put it, they were “boring.”

“What my grandfather and my father were suggesting was that normality was crippling—that some degree of mental illness, some degree of mental difference might be necessary for humanity to remain vibrant, creative, and diverse,” Grinker said. 

Humanity’s stigmas can never be completely eradicated—but that doesn’t mean we can’t resist them, he said. 

“We only need to look at the kinds of examples that I gave you earlier, whether it’s my daughter, Isabel, or my students, to give us hope,” Grinker said. 

The sixth Fordham Distinguished Lecture on Disability was co-organized by the Disability Studies Program and the Research Consortium on Disability and co-sponsored by the Conference of Arts & Science Deans and the Office of Research. The Q&A following the lecture was co-moderated by Sarah Macy, FCLC ’22, a psychology major and disability studies minor who identifies as an autistic woman, and Micki McGee, Ph.D., associate professor of sociology at Fordham and the parent of a neurologically divergent young adult.

Watch a full recording of the lecture below: 

“We wanted to get into quality education, the ability to move around the city in our communities, the ability to get jobs, get paid, live in the community, get married, have children. And I think … we realized we could make a difference if we did it ourselves.”

These words come from Judith “Judy” Heumann, a 72-year-old pioneer of the disability rights movement recently featured in TIME’s list of the most influential women of the past century. Heumann reflected on her life of activism at Fordham’s fifth annual Distinguished Lecture on Disability, “The Disability Rights Movement: Where We’ve Been, Where We Are, and Where We Need to Go,” in a Zoom webinar on Oct. 14. 

A Five-Year-Old ‘Fire Hazard’ Girl

Heumann became New York City public schools’ first teacher in a wheelchair after winning a landmark court case. She helped spearhead the passage and implementation of federal civil rights legislation for disabled people, including the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504, a federal law that prevents discrimination against individuals with disabilities. She also served in various leadership roles, including the World Bank’s first adviser on disability and development and the first special adviser for international disability rights under the Obama administration. In recent years, she has been working to change the portrayals of disabled people in the media as a senior fellow for the Ford Foundation. 

At the beginning of the webinar, she recalled that when she was a five-year-old girl with polio, the principal of a local school told her she couldn’t attend classes because she was a “fire hazard.”

“As I was getting older and meeting other disabled people, in my special ed classes and then at camp, it was becoming very apparent that we were facing discrimination without any real group of people speaking up against discrimination,” said Heumann, who had joined students earlier that day for a Q&A about the recent film Crip Camp, which featured the stories of disabled teens—including Heumann—at camp in the 1970s and their role in igniting the disabilities civil rights movement.

In that same period, she said, she also saw scores of people on TV standing up for civil and women’s rights across the country. They inspired her to lead demonstrations, start new organizations, and use legislation to fight discrimination directed toward the disability community, all while working closely with the community, religious leaders, and labor unions.

“All [these]types of activities were what enabled congressional representatives and U.S. senators to understand that the discrimination that disabled people were facing was not something that happened once in a while,” Heumann said. “It happened in every community, in every state—and it happened regularly.” 

Ongoing Obstacles for the Disability Community

In the wake of much progress, the disability community continues to struggle, said Heumann. Many Americans don’t realize they have a disability protected by law; others face stigmas and repercussions related to their disability, she said. There is a disproportionate number of disabled individuals in juvenile and adult facilities—people who may not have ended up in prison if they’d received “appropriate services along the way.” There isn’t enough money being dedicated to education for both nondisabled children and disabled children on local, state, and countrywide levels, she said, and many teachers-in-training at colleges and universities are not taught how to teach students in inclusive settings. 

Toward the end of the evening, the moderator of the event, Navena Chaitoo, FCRH ’13, a research manager at New York City mayor’s office of criminal justice, asked Heumann how people could take specific steps to help the disability community. 

“We’re talking about stronger parent training programs. We’re talking about better programs in universities for teachers, principals, and superintendents,” Heumann said. “We’re talking about our local school boards. Who are the people that you’re electing? … Are they fighting for you and your kids with disabilities?” 

“It all gets, to me, back to voting and knowing the people who are running for office and being more demanding and working collaboratively together.”

‘We Need to Normalize This’

In a Q&A, an audience member asked Heumann how society could lower stigmas around “invisible disabilities” like mental illness. 

“You look at Covid right now, and we’re talking about people having increased anxiety, increased depression, other mental health disabilities, and our inability to speak about this is both harmful to the individual person, to the family, and to the community at large. And so I think like with each category of disabled people, we need to normalize this,” Heumann said. She added that that specific movement needs to be led by people who have psychosocial disabilities themselves, like Andrew Imparato, executive director at Disability Rights California, who has openly spoken about his experience with bipolar disorder. She emphasized that we need to listen to people’s experiences and try our best to understand them. Lastly, she noted the importance of advocacy across generations and for youths, including students, to stand up for themselves. 

“Most importantly is allowing people the space and giving people the protections that they need,” Heumann said. “We have 61 million disabled people in the United States. If 5 million of us on a regular basis were speaking up and speaking out, it would have an amazing impact.” 

The live Zoom lecture, which featured two American Sign Language interpreters and live captioning, comes under two key initiatives on disability at Fordham: the disability studies minor and the research consortium on disability. The event was organized by the Faculty Working Group on Disability and co-sponsored by the offices of the provost and chief diversity officer, the Graduate School of Education, the School of Law, the Gabelli School of Business, the Graduate School of Social Service, and the departments of economics and English. 

Watch the full webinar in the video below: 

“Disabilities are often perceived as a small minority issue—something that affects a mere 1%. That’s not the case,” said Sophie Mitra, Ph.D., co-director of the minor program, founding director of the Research Consortium on Disability, and professor of economics.”

Around one billion people worldwide live with a disability, according to the United Nations, including one in four adults in the U.S. alone, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Since the minor started in January 2019, students in the program have learned how disability and normality are understood and represented in different contexts, from literature to architecture to fashion. The curriculum also helps bring awareness to issues of access on Fordham’s campus and beyond.

“Our minor program gets students to think about what it means to have a disability and what the consequences of having a disability might be in society,” Mitra said. “It’s an essential part of thinking about inclusion and what it means to be an inclusive society—and yet, it’s a dimension of inclusion that we sometimes forget about.” 

The program is designed to show undergraduates how to create more accessible physical and social environments and help them pursue careers in a range of fields, including human rights, medicine and allied health, psychology, public policy, education, social work, and law. 

Among these students is Sophia Pirozzi, an English major and disability studies minor at Fordham College at Rose Hill. 

“The biggest thing that I’ve taken away is that when minority rights are compromised, so are the majority … And I think when we elevate that voice and that experience, we come a little bit closer to taking into consideration that the only way to help ourselves is to help other people,” said Pirozzi, who has supervised teenagers with intellectual and physical disabilities as head counselor at a summer camp in Rockville, Maryland. After she graduates from Fordham in 2021, she said she wants to become a writer who helps build access for the disability community.

Now, in addition to the minor program, Fordham has a Research Consortium on Disability, a growing team of faculty and graduate students across six schools—the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Graduate School of Education, the Graduate School of Social Service, the Gabelli School of Business, the Law School, and the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education—who conduct and coordinate disability-related research at at the University.  

Since this past October, the consortium has created new opportunities to connect faculty and graduate students working on disability-related research across the University and in the broader New York City area, including lunch meetings and new research studies. This month, it launched its new website. The consortium is planning its first symposium on social policy this November and another symposium on disability and spirituality in April 2021. 

The consortium is a “central portal” for interdisciplinary research that can help scholars beyond Fordham, said Falguni Sen, Ph.D., professor and area chair in strategy and statistics, who co-directs the consortium with Rebecca Sanchez, Ph.D., an associate professor in English. That includes research on how accessible New York City hospitals are for people with disabilities, particularly in the COVID-19 pandemic.  

“What has come to light very acutely is the whole notion of how vulnerable populations have been differentially affected in this COVID-19 [pandemic],” Sen said. “The emergency responses to that population have not necessarily been as sensitive or as broad in terms of access as we would like it to be … And we were already thinking about issues of crisis because of what happened in 9/11.” 

The minor and the Research Consortium on Disability build upon the work of the Faculty Working Group on Disability: a university-wide interdisciplinary faculty group that has organized activities and initiatives around disability on campus over the past five years. The group has hosted the annual Fordham Distinguished Lecture on Disability and several events, including a 2017 talk by the commissioner for the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities.

“Fordham is known for community-engaged learning and how its work, both the research that we do and others, have relevance directly in people’s lives,” said Sen. “And that’s what we are trying to do.”

“We are delighted to be afforded this opportunity to serve as stewards of the endowment and to promote the work of America’s most distinguished Catholic writer,” said Alaimo O’Donnell, “and to help shape the future of Catholic literary studies.”

The Curran Center’s application was one of several submitted when the trust conducted a search for a university or center for Catholic studies to house the endowment. The application was accepted last December, and a formal agreement was signed on May 15.

The nearly $450,000 in funds—$50,000 a year for nine years—will allow the Curran Center to sponsor conferences, symposia, and other events that promote scholarship devoted to O’Connor and to Catholic writers who have left a mark on the American canon. A portion of the money will be used for programming while the remaining funds will continue to build the endowment.

Alaimo O’Donnell said trustees of the estate were impressed with the Curran Center’s work promoting Catholic writers, particularly last year’s conference, “The Future of the Catholic Literary Imagination,” which featured 60 Catholic writers and attracted 400 attendees, and the 2012 symposium, “Still Alive at 60: Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood.”

For her part, Alaimo O’Donnell, has delved deep into the Catholic legacy of O’Connor in her book, Flannery O’Connor: Fiction Fired by Faith (Liturgical Press, 2015). She said that O’Connor has served as a gateway to literature for many Catholics who might not otherwise have found their way to the rich body of work written by Catholics. She described O’Connor as a Southern and Catholic writer, though not particularly influenced by her Irish heritage. The author’s work and life are also of great interest in the field of disabilities studies, Alaimo O’Donnell said, since she was diagnosed with lupus at the age of 26. She would die of the disease 13 years later.

“She lived with the daily reality of death; she lived the cross,” said Alaimo O’Donnell. “She wrote like her life depended on it, because it did. Writing kept her alive.”

The disease forced O’Connor to abandon the social aspects of her fledgling career, which included a post-graduate fellowship at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a residency at Yaddo, the famed artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York.

In the course of her career she would complete two novels and 31 short stories, most famously “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” She also wrote hundreds of letters, several to well-known literary figures, including her friend Robert Lowell and poet Elizabeth Bishop, and many to people who were not so well known, like Elizabeth Hester, a file clerk who admired O’Connor’s work. The letters were compiled after her death in a book titled The Habit of Being.

“She knew she was good,” said Alaimo O’Donnell. “Some writers stumble around trying to find their subject and their voice, but not O’Connor. Even in her letters she knew she was writing for posterity.”

Robert McRuer, PhD, professor of English at George Washington University and author of Crip Theory, (NYU Press, 2006), said the term “crip” derives from the word cripple. Embracing the negative term allows those with disabilities to take ownership of a word that is used to disparage them, he said in an April 13 lecture.

McRuer said he merged disability studies with queer theory in his book, using “crip” in the same manner that “queer” is used in queer theory.

“‘Crip’ has become a more radical term for artists and activists,” said McRuer. “It forges a coalition of ‘left-behinds’ who may or may not identify as disabled, but who can be … connected somehow through a crip analytic [that is]committed to theorizing vulnerability, precarity, and resistance expansively.”

Both crip theory and queer theory, he said, are concerned with how bodies, pleasures, and identities are represented as normal or as abject. Thus, the two fields can and do inform each other.

McRuer said his upcoming book, Crip Times: Disability, Globalization and Resistance, examines neoliberalist policies in the United Kingdom through a crip lens. He defined neoliberalism as being characterized through austerity measures that lower government expenditures, increase hours for workers, cut social services, and “impose a fetishistic view of capitalist growth.”

He said that he chose to focus on the United Kingdom because it’s “ground zero for austerity politics at the moment” in Europe, policies that have been in place since David Cameron became prime minister in 2010.

One way to access the vantage of persons with disabilities is through art, said McRuer. As the queer art scene has burgeoned, the crip art scene is also growing.

He focused on the work of artist-activist Liz Crow. Crow, who uses a wheelchair, began a performance piece last year titled “Figures” in which she created 650 sculptures out of mud from the River Avon. In order to work, she had to be lifted onto a site on the banks of a river because there was no ramp access.

The sculptures are expressionless, humanlike rounded forms, and “each figure represents a [real]person living on the sharpened end of austerity,” said McRuer. The 650 figures also coincide with the 650 constituencies in the House of Commons, which cut welfare benefits to these persons.

An online component of the piece shares their stories.

Many of the 650 represented by the figures had died appealing their claims for benefits that they lost, said McRuer. Some died due to addiction, some were terminally ill patients, and all fall within the scope of being someone whose life was harshly impacted by austerity.

McRuer said that while the issues were locally based, the artist Crow was trying to bring attention to what is now a global phenomenon. He said that tourists from Spain, a country also undergoing strict austerity measures, immediately related to the project.

“There are disabilities everywhere if you know where to look for them,” said McRuer. “And, in truth, everybody will be disabled if they live long enough.”

Once completed the sculptures were loaded into a truck that toured the country, including a pop-up exhibit at London’s Trafalgar Square. Eventually, the sculptures made their way across the country to the ocean, where they were burned as Crow read the stories of those affected by the austerity. The ashes were cast into the water.

The final act was designed to urge action against “now-global austerity politics,” he said.

“Basically these artists and activists are saying that the austerity measures are killing us,” said McRuer.