I studied the Youtube video “Christine Sun Kim: Friends and Strangers” Dowling and Sollins (2021). The video explores Sun Kim as an artist who was born profoundly deaf, her career trajectory and the impact her experiences as a deaf person, an artist, a parent and an American living in Berlin has had upon her creative output. Sun Kim was born in California and moved to New York.
Initially I misunderstood the blog task as an attempt to find the individual’s positionality and wrote “I am hesitant that the need to find someone’s positionality can actually lead to assumptions about a person and their situation. I question whether this idea of positionality is actually of use or whether it becomes more detrimental, labelling and boxing off people into neat little compartments where assumptions about their needs are made.”
After the blog tutorial I reframed the analysis of Christine Sun Kim. The difficulty I had with this was that little is directly stated regarding Sun Kim’s identities, and I gained little from my further research which led me to make assumptions about her class, gender, etc.
Christine Sun Kim Shit Hearing People Say To Me 2019
Sun Kim discusses her intersectionality as an artist and deaf person and how this has excluded her from partaking in art classes during her high school and university education. When growing up she had an interest in art but didn’t take classes as there were no interpreters available. During both high school and university she was ‘told no’ when requesting to attend a sculpture class and evening class. There was no reason given in the video as to why they would prohibit her from attending the classes, the implication being that she is deaf and they refused to find a way to cater to her hearing differences.
Another aspect of Christine Sun Kim’s experience as an artist which was impacted by her deafness is her creative output. “A perk of being a member of the deaf community is that you have this shared culture, this shared language, and so people like to stay here stuck in that echo but then I became an artist and had to go into the hearing world” (Dowling and Sollins (2021) 7:42). Sun Kim expresses jealousy of “artists who have the privilege to be misunderstood” and that her creative process and output reflects her constant need to be understood and explain, due to her deafness. Sun Kim doesn’t so much reject ambiguity in her art but clings to the need to be heard and seen, captioning buildings in Manchester, creating pie charts , drawing signs which create poetry and repetition which reflect her experience as a deaf person and the ‘echoing’ of her thoughts through an interpreter.
(BuildHollywood, 2021)
In the context of teaching garment construction, we are not made aware of disabilities until the student raises their needs due to GDPR/lack of communication from management. Due to this I generally try to cater as much as possible to a range of needs by providing verbal, written and visual communication techniques and videos which include captions. In terms of captions, I need to look at how these are used and whether they have a bias towards the hearing community, for example “when inserting the bobbin into the machine, you should hear a click”. In terms of accessibility to studio space for wheelchair users, I have big concerns over how this could be catered to due to the lack of space and cramped set up of the studios.
I participated in a knowledge exchange with a colleague over the summer. My colleague has limb differences and was learning to sew again. I researched adaptable sewing techniques online and reached out to an acquaintance who has limb differences about their advice, as they advocate for differently abled people to learn to sew and take up space within the industry. I found that using the knee pedal to lift the machine foot is more practical as it means your hand is available to guide fabric. I lowered the sewing speed, used a magnetic seam guide for the fabric to butt against so that it could easily be guided with one hand. We used pattern weights rather than pins to help place pattern pieces and cut fabric with a rotary blade rather than scissors. I also found scissors with a pinching action which were easier to use than traditional scissors, which were quite strenuous.
Through listening to my colleague and their needs, careful planning and research, I was able to successfully teach my colleague how to sew a pair of shorts through adaptable sewing techniques. This was a really positive experience for myself and my colleague and I learnt to consider further how I can adapt my practice to meet differently abled students’ needs.
References
BuildHollywood (2021). [Photograph] Available at: https://www.buildhollywood.co.uk/work/mif-captioning-the-city/ [Accessed 27 Apr. 2025].
Dowling, S. and Sollins, S. (2021). Christine Sun Kim in ‘Friends & Strangers’ – Season 11 | Art21. [online] www.youtube.com. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NpRaEDlLsI [Accessed 20 Apr. 2025].
Friedman, A. (2021). The Gentlewoman – Christine Sun Kim. [online] thegentlewoman.co.uk. Available at: https://thegentlewoman.co.uk/library/christine-sun-kim [Accessed 21 Apr. 2025].
Sun Kim, C. (2019). Shit Hearing People Say To Me. Available at: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/426300?sov_referrer=art_term&art_term_slug=charcoal [Accessed 27 Apr. 2025].
Wikipedia. (2020). Christine Sun Kim. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Sun_Kim [Accessed 21 Apr. 2025].
Thank you Charlie, I very much enjoyed reading your open and inciteful blog post.
I welcome your openness in sharing how you initially misunderstood the blog task as an exercise to find the individual’s positionality. I can 100% relate to this as I too had a similar experience.
I also focussed primarily on Christine Sun Kim. I am primarily a visual learner and by way of familiarizing myself with the theory of intersectionality I produced a drawn diagram of my own intersectionality – and also one of CSK.
I read widely around CSK but on reflection, I realised on drawing the diagram, I was intuitively making several unintentional assumptions.
As a result, I chose not to include this second diagram in my blog, and I see this a positive example of how undertaking the PgCert is challenging us in the way we think. I believe this is a positive lesson learnt which has deepened my understanding of disability and intersectionality.
I enjoyed reading the descriptions of your pro-active range of methods for catering for a wide range of needs within your teaching practice. I note how it must be a real challenge to cater for all needs given the complex and often physical nature of garment construction processes and methods.
The description of how you researched adaptable sewing techniques and applied them in practical terms while working with your colleague is inspirational – what a wonderful positive experience.
Might you integrate and use this approach (or similar) as the basis for your intervention perhaps? I’m very much looking forward to exploring, sharing and discussing possible ideas for this next stage of the PgCert, and how we can embed it into our teaching practice.
Thank you Kelly. I appreciated your analysis and relation to Sun Kim’s work and am glad to hear someone else had the same experience with intersectionality. Thank you for the suggestion of basing my intervention around this. I did in fact refer to this in my intervention. Thanks Kelly!
Your analysis of Christine Sun Kim’s video clearly explained her perspective and highlighted important points from her experiences, which I may have missed.
I strongly agree with your point about academic staff not being informed of students with needs until later in the term. While I understand this relates to privacy policies, it’s frustrating when we’re asked to address awarding gaps and improve outcomes without access to some level of information from the start. Even small adjustments like modifying content delivery or space wheelchair access (as you mentioned) could potentially be made if we were notified earlier, which would directly benefit the student experience.
I think relying on students to self-declare their needs isn’t always effective. Some may see disclosure as a negative label, (especially in cultural contexts, like in my traditional Chinese background, where issues like mental health are often dismissed as laziness) rather than as a opportunity to access valuable support.
I appreciated your section on knowledge exchange with the details about adapting your sewing technique for your colleague. (It reminded me of related content in my Games Design course, such as using assistive technology like the Xbox Adaptive Controller.) Your example demonstrates how knowing a participant’s needs can drive immediate, meaningful adjustments is exactly why teaching staff should have access to relevant information to better support all students.
Yes I agree in terms of being able to plan ahead, as the last minute scramble to assist students needs can be embarrassing for both the student and staff, and can amplify their feelings of not belonging as a disabled person.
It is interesting to hear your insight around students not disclosing needs due to cultural stigma, something I hadn’t considered previously. Thank you for sharing this perspective.
I would love to hear/learn more about assistive technology as this could have some crossover/considerations for my practice.
The last two paragraphs are really good and they show how you are able to reflect and change your methods to support the needs of others. I think in terms of supporting a diverse group of students you just need to be open to changing at all times so I hope you can build confidence in seeing how much agency you had to support your friend in the exchange.
I would avoid writing a summary of a whole film as we all should have seen the examples so you can be more specific on how the film made you reflect as a person over retelling whole sections of the film.
Great job!
Fred
Thank you for your feed back Fred. I am taking these experiences into my intervention and looking at how I can incorporate them into my day to day teaching. Noted about summarising the film within the blogpost!