Chapter
Section Information
- Articulate how genre conventions shape and are shaped by readers’ and writers’ practices and purposes.
- Match the capacities of different environments (e.g., print, electronic) to varying rhetorical situations.
“Stories are the closest we can come to shared experience.”
The Disability Visibility Project
Alice Wong (b. 1974) is an activist, writer, and media creator from San Francisco, California. After graduating from Indiana University in 1997 with majors in English and sociology, Wong went on to earn a master’s degree in sociology from the University of California, San Francisco, where she later worked. Wong has been widely published, including feature pieces appearing in publications ranging from the New York Times to Teen Vogue, and her activism work has been featured in CNN’s series United Shades of America. In addition to writing, Wong regularly creates multimedia content, including podcasts. From 2013 to 2015, she was a member of the National Council on Disability, appointed by then president Barack Obama.
Wong is also the host and a coproducer of the Disability Visibility Project podcast, launched in 2017. She uses the podcast to give a voice and platform to issues concerning politics and culture as they relate to disability rights and social justice. Through conversations with diverse guests, Wong amplifies disability media and culture on topics ranging from health care to climate change to the arts and everything in between.
Wong has also partnered with #CripTheVote, a nonpartisan campaign to bring awareness of disability issues into the public and political arenas, and Access Is Love, an initiative to build accessibility into everyday life. She is the editor of Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, an anthology of personal stories from members of the disability community. The book contains curated text such as blog posts, manifestos, eulogies, and testimonies to Congress in order to bring to light the diverse experiences of people in this community. The aim of the anthology is intersectional, meaning it emphasizes the crossroads of living with disabilities and other issues, including race, class, gender, culture, and religion.
Discussion Questions
1. Why might Alice Wong look to speech and other media to communicate activist ideas surrounding the disability community?
2. How is the impact of writing for speech different from writing for print? What comes across when an activist speaks rather than represents their ideas in print?
3. How does social media both enhance and limit accessibility within the disabled community? How is this true for other cultural communities?
4. Wong says that storytelling can be more than written words. How can other forms of media—she lists emojis, memes, selfies, and tweets—communicate rhetorical ideas as effectively as, or more effectively than, traditional written storytelling?
LICENSE AND ATTRIBUTION
Adapted from “Podcast Trailblazer: Alice Wong” of Writing Guide with Handbook, 2023, used according to CC BY 4.0.