"That was when I realized that through dance I could communicate, and that saved my life."

One day, my mother took me to see Oakland Ballet’s “Nutcracker.” Being Deaf, when I would watch TV or go to the movies, I couldn’t connect with what I was seeing because it was not accessible for me — usually lacking captions or ASL interpreters. I would miss all the jokes. When I watched the Oakland Ballet, it was wonderful. No one was talking on stage; instead, everyone was dancing as a way to communicate. It showed me that I can use art and dance to communicate with the world.



That was the day I knew I wanted to be a ballet dancer. My mom couldn’t afford to take me to dance lessons, so I had to wait until high school to dance. It was a long wait. I was a person that no one understood; therefore, I became a person who felt I had no place in the world. It was a depressing feeling of being an outcast and left out of everything.

My high school dance teacher Dawn James taught modern and jazz, and she believes the spirit of dance lives in everyone … including me. Whenever she danced, it was powerful — a Black woman was giving me permission to find power in myself. She didn’t treat me differently, even though I was the only Deaf student in her class.

One day, she gave us a class assignment to collaborate in groups and come up with a dance performance to Whitney Houston’s song “I Will Always Love You.” Students were supposed to work together, but no one wanted to work with me. So, Ms. James told me to make up my own dance and perform a solo. I couldn’t really hear the words, but I read the lyrics on the back of cassette tape then clicked play and initially rocked side to side expressing the cold and loneliness I felt. During the powerful instrumental break, however, I was suddenly all over the room, my body channeled the lightning, fire, wind and ocean I sensed in the music. When the music ended, I faded off my dance. My classmates were blown away. They told me, “I really felt you were cold and alone.” That was when I realized that through dance I could communicate, and that saved my life.

I could remember that feeling I had when I watched the Oakland Ballet. Dance has the power to communicate, and I felt I could channel that power to communicate with others around me and they would understand me. I no longer wanted to die. (...)



As a dancer, people will say to me, “Oh, you can feel the vibration, that’s it, you’ll be fine.” No. If I jump, I can’t feel the vibration. If I’m running around really fast, I can’t feel the vibration. I have to slow down and stay in one place for a while to feel the vibration. So what does that mean? I’m listening. I’m using every intelligence of my being to do what I have to do to make it work.

For me, this often means creatively finding visual cues to stay on beat. So sometimes, I’d try to see what was happening with the light. Maybe the light would feel the vibration, and I could see what the rhythm is. Or I look at the musicians, and they’re bopping their heads or tapping their feet. I say, “Oh OK, that’s what the rhythm is.”

My body started to develop Deaf instincts, it’s like mother instinct or animal instinct — or like a Spiderman sense. Some people say, “How do you know when the music starts? Or the music changes?” Well, it’s my Spiderman sense. We love feeling the vibration. We don’t just like to feel loud shaky beats, but also clarity in the music through the vibrations. (...)

My work, deeply rooted in social change, will uplift marginalized communities, expose hidden truths through arts while breaking down barriers of judgments from those with white and/or hearing privileges. Marginalized Deaf communities include those who are Deaf youth, Black Deaf, POC Deaf, DeafBlind, DeafDisabled, LGBTQIA, and other intersecting identities.

Antoine Hunter

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photographs via and via

Body Care

"In Body care series, I pose as a modern man who presents a desperate desire to be forever young. Once I stumbled on a nose-slimming pin in the online shop. I remembered my childhood complexes and started to buy seemingly pointless treatments to stop aging and somehow improve my appearance. There is no evidence that a cream or a mask actually work. The irony is: we’d need a lifetime to find out which would make a difference."
Arseniy Neskhodimov



photographs via

Meeting Sofie

"How far should a pre-birth diagnosis go? From an ethical perspective, prenatal tests are quite controversial. Critics see them as a targeted search for sick children in their mothers’ wombs - for embryos with Down syndrome. They also question what this medical control means for people living with this condition - for their rights to assistance, participation and inclusion. Inclusion means giving people with handicaps a presence and visibility within society - and photography is one means of doing so.



I started taking pictures of Sofie young woman with Down syndrome back in 2017 when she was 18 years old. She just finished school and spent almost every day on the family estate in Eilenstedt (Germany). Sofie comes from a family of famous antique dealers and grew up in the magical atmosphere of this farm. Visiting Sofie and her family for over four years, I experienced their everyday lives and shared the highs and lows of her first steps into love. At that time Sofie was in that awkward yet beautiful and thrilling age of transition from a girl to a woman, when every feeling is extremely intense and love seems to be the main purpose of life. Sofie has a very strong bond with her mother Barbara. Barbara was 39 when Sofie was born, at home on Christmas night 25.12.1998. It was three weeks later during a routine doctor’s appointment when she found out Sofie had Down syndrome and should have required an operation on her heart.



With my series 'Meeting Sofie' I want to show the beauty of "being different" and thus to contribute to deeper acceptance, integration and love among us humans."
Snezhana Von Buedingen



photographs via

"In the end, it all comes down to what kind of world we want."

At times, some critics have said my comedy risks reinforcing old stereotypes. The truth is I've been passionate about challenging bigotry and intolerance throughout my life. As a comedian, I have tried to use my characters to get people to let down their guard and reveal what they actually believe, including their own prejudice. Borat did reveal people's indifference to antisemitism. When as Bruno, the gay fashion reporter from Austria, I started kissing a man in a cage fight in Arkansas nearly starting a riot, it showed the violent potential of homophobia. And when disguiised as a ultra woke developer I proposed building a mosque in one rural community prompting a resident to proudly admit "I am racist against Muslims", it showed the growing acceptance of islamophobia.



Today, around the world demagogues appeal to our worst instincts. Conspiracy theories once confined to the fringe are going mainstream. It's as if the age of reason, the era of evidential argument is ending and our knowledge is increasingly delegitimised and scientific consensus is dismissed. Democracy, which depends on shared truths is in retreat and autocracy, which depends on shared lies, is on the march. Hate crimes are surging as are murderous attacks on religious and ethnic minorities. Fake news outperforms real news because studies show that lies spread faster than truth. On the internet, everything can appear equally legitimate. The rantings of a lunatic seems as credible as the findings of a Nobel Prize winner. Voltaire was right when he said "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

In the end, it all comes down to what kind of world we want. If we prioritise truth over lies, tolerance over prejudice, empathy over indifference, and experts over ignoranuses, then maybe, just maybe, we can save democracy. We can still have a place for free speech and free expression, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Today these rights are threatened by hate, conspiracy and lies. So allow me to leave you with a suggestion for a different aim for society. The ultimate aim of society should be to make sure that people are not targeted, not harassed and not murdered because of who they are, where they come from, who they love or how they pray.
Sacha Baron Cohen 

::: Full speech: LISTEN/WATCH  

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".... you damned well better be a sex object"

"Prejudice against women is many, many times intensified against older women. You are viewed not as an intellect but as a body.... Astonishingly, even women's liberation has paid extraordinarily little attention to the older woman and to the fact that her job is limited because she is [older]. They say that women shouldn't be sex objects, but you damned well better be a sex object if you want to get ahead in television."
Elinor Guggenheimer



photograph (from left: Betty Friedan, Elinor Guggenheimer, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Gloria Steinem) via

Black Baby, White Baby & Survival Chances

According to a research paper published last year, in the U.S., "black babies are more than twice as likely to die before reaching their first birthday than white babies, regardless of the mother’s income or education level." A new study reviewing 1.8m hospital birth records in Florida (1992-2015) suggests that the doctor's ethnicity plays a major role since black newborns are three times more likely to die in the hospital than white babies if cared for by white doctors (for white babies the doctor's skin tone hardly has an impact on their chances of survival). The disparity halves when the doctor's skin tone is black ... but only 5% of doctors are black (via).



photograph (1970) via

World Polio Day

Worldwide, there is no correlation between a child's gender and immunisation, i.e., there is no gender difference. One important exception is India where females are associated with missed polio vaccination (via).



"(...) there are notable variations where immunization coverage is higher for girls in some countries and higher for boys in others. This is why the polio programme regularly collects sex-disaggregated data to enable it to track gender-related discrepancies and take swift corrective action. Overall it is important to note that data from the polio-endemic countries (Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan) in the past two years shows that girls and boys have been equally reached in house-to-house vaccination campaigns. For instance, in Afghanistan, out of all girls surveyed after vaccination campaigns in 2017, 92.6% were recorded as vaccinated, compared to 92.5% of boys. This high level of coverage is the tangible result of targeted and context-specific communications for awareness raising and behaviour change activities, combined with well-trained health workers recruited from local communities." Global Polio Eradication Initiative

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photograph via

... and the fear might evaporate.

“If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends on might evaporate.”
George Orwell, 1984



photograph by Vivian Maier via

Training Police for Intercultural Sensitivity. Two Approaches.

Intercultural training aims to train people to interact with people with different cultural backgrounds, to convey information about cultures and countries, to develop self-awarenss by examining one's own "cultural values, beliefs and assumptions". This approach emphasises different individuals coming together, cross-cultural understanding and self-awareness. Race (sic) relations training, on the other hand, focuses on raising awareness of one's own racism, understanding structural racism, combatting harassment based on skin tone, and seeks to change social institutions. This approach emphasises intergroup relations and behavioural outcomes.



In their meta-analysis of methods used to train the Canadian police for intercultural sensitivity, the authors come to the conclusion that programmes using the intercultural approach are significantly more effective than those using race (sic) relations training. Another significant finding is that programmes with ethnically heterogeneous participants are more successful than those with rather homogeneous groups (Ungerleider & McGregor, 2008).

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- Ungerleider, C. & McGregor, J. (2008). Training police for intercultural sensitivity: A critical review and discussion of the research. Canadian Public Administration 36(1), 77-89.
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World Osteoporosis Day

Since osteoporosis still has the image of being a so-called women's health issue, it is often overlooked in men and becomes an unrecognised and untreated condition leading to higher mortality and morbidity rates in men (Rao, Budhwar & Ashfaque, 2010).



- Rao, S. S., Budhwar, N. & Ashfaque, A. (2010). Osteoporosis in Men. American Family Physician, 82(5), 503-508.
- photograph by the amazing Vivian Maier via