Unknown: My name is Kevin Godkin. I am a white, scruffy
person. I'm sitting in my home office, there's white walls.
There's a brick wall and a few things hanging on the walls; one
says, "create more anti ableist spaces." One says, "reinventing
my strangeness as an art form that only I am the perfect
practitioner of," and I am wearing a pale yellow shirt for
a store called Spa Warehouse, and some gold jewelry. So how do
I understand my place as a juror for the CripTech Incubator and
in the larger ecology of disability justice, art, and
technology? So I am honored to have served as a juror like this
for several different kinds of projects. But as a reviewer for
the granting of funds for disability artistry. And I, I'm
often asked I think because I am an activist, I co-founded an
organization called Disability/Arts/NYC. And we have
done community organizing in New York City to elevate disability
artistry and provide a broad platform for it. So I'm really
glad to serve as an activist on these on these committees,
because because it kind of forms a feedback loop, right, where
people who are on the ground doing organizing know the most
about the kinds of needs that, that we need to address. And
then being on these committees and serving as a juror allows me
to, to study the field. And then from there, share that
information out and offer some of my analysis about trends I
notice. And that helps me develop new initiatives, builds
community better, and you know, develop expertise that we need
to to keep going. So that kind of momentum has historically not
been been there with funders for disability justice, often
because I think disability justice initiatives are rather
illegible to funders who are looking for particular kinds of
outcomes and particular kinds of analytics that don't align with
the reality of what disability justice is. Sometimes disability
justice is, is taking care of somebody. And that doesn't seem
like fundable activism. But we're at a moment now, where
lots of different institutions are doing the funding. And we
have an opportunity to build forms of accountability and
governance into these processes and to really draw on the
expertise of the folks who are most affected and who are on the
ground doing this work. So I take this job very, very
seriously. I learn an enormous amount and then I try to use
that process to generate momentum in the activist work
that I do.