NZPI Conference Keynote Speaker
Rebekah Taussig is a Kansas City writer, educator, and parent.
Bolstered by academic knowledge and personal experience, she strives to tell stories that enhance and complicate the way we think about disability. You can find more of her work in TIME, on her Instagram, @sitting_pretty, in her memoir in essays, Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body, or you can follow her work and sign up for her newsletter at www.rebekahtaussig.com.
Presenting:
Accessibility is so often framed as a side conversation that exclusively benefits disabled folks, but Rebekah Taussig sees access as a fundamental part of any plans that intend to serve those of us who live in a body – which is to say, all of us. Through her storytelling, academic study, and lifetime of navigating an inaccessible world, Taussig aims to offer a perspective that looks to disability, not as an afterthought amendment or set of fringe needs we're obligated to work around, but as a host of clues that can help us in our quest to build sturdier, kinder, more sustainable communities. Even as she brings folks deeply into her personal story moving through the world in a wheelchair, she emphasizes the universal reasons we should all prioritize accessibility and inclusion, reframing the conversation from “special needs” to “human needs.” She aims to motivate all of us—disabled and non-disabled—to rethink what we want to build, how we want to build, and who we are building for.
