#5SmartReads - February 9, 2023

Qudsiya on the GDP, advances in disability rights, and accessible travel

February 09, 2023

Qudsiya is the creator and host of the podcast, Down to the Struts, which explores disability, design, and intersectionality. She’s excited to launch Season 6 of the show in February 2023. You can subscribe to Qudsiya’s newsletter, Getting Down to It, for updates. When she’s not podcasting, Qudsiya loves organizing adaptive sports adventures through the Metro Washington Association of Blind Athletes.

As a lawyer and policy wonk, I’m fascinated by the use of measurement to understand progress. That said, I’m not an economist.

This was a great long read on GDP—what it is, how it’s historically been measured, and how out of touch it is with what drive’s life outcomes for real people. I was also struck by how ruthlessly and exclusively it uses capitalism alone as the key metric for human progress, ignoring climate change, community care needs, and other key factors that drive social and economic success.

This is definitely worth your time if you want to understand a bit more about how the global economy actually works, and how governments assess it.

Disabled people are woefully under-represented in health sciences. This has major implications for the design of research studies, their findings, and the recommendations that flow from them. When the disability perspective is ignored, this can have deadly consequences for a huge segment of the population.

I’m so thrilled to see NIH’s commitment to disability inclusion, and I hope this translates to transformative change across the sector. If you want to learn more about the disparate treatment of disabled people in healthcare, check out my interview with Lisa Iezzoni, who is one of the scientists that has pushed NIH’s disability inclusion efforts.

One of my goals for 2023 is to more closely follow local news in my area and support local news outlets. DCist is a wonderful example of what is possible when we invest in high-quality local coverage as a tool for civic engagement.

This is a great piece about the implications of traffic fines, and the deep harm that results when governments deny access to critical resources like driver’s licenses for failure to pay them. For many, not being able to renew your license could result in job loss, housing and food instability, and many other negative consequences. And this isn’t just a local problem in DC—thousands of people around the country are unnecessarily hamstrung by draconian, and often unnecessary, fines and fees.

I am a very reluctant social media user, but as I have deepened my connection with the disability community, I’ve come to understand how valuable it is as a tool for organizing and advocacy. For many disabled people, mobility and communication barriers can often prevent us from connecting with one another.

Platforms like Twitter and Instagram transformed that paradigm by allowing disabled people around the world to communicate at a speed and breadth that had never been possible. That said, Twitter and Instagram are riddled with accessibility barriers, but they are still useable by so many people. Disability justice activist Vilissa Thompson eloquently explains Twitter’s significance in the disabled community.

This is just another example of the nuance that surrounds us when we look for it—there is the potential for good and ill in all things, and ultimately, it comes down to how we frame it in our individual and collective context.

Sheepishly sharing this podcast episode I produced last summer with Afar magazine. I share it because I want to share the wisdom of my guests, Bani Amor, Maayan Ziv, and Erika Rivers about why everyone should care about access and accessible travel.

Their interviews are chock-full of ideas about how, as travelers, we can work together to make the experience more inclusive for all.

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