Dr. Rebekah Taussig, author of this year’s Go Big Read book “Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body,” visited the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus for guided discussions about her story and experiences as a disabled person.
At the keynote speech Wednesday night, Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin said the book has been integrated into 40 courses, with 9,000 copies distributed across campus.
Taussig was emotional seeing the overfilled crowd, many of whom shared they had read her book.
“I’m having kind of a surreal moment,” she said. “I’m just pausing over this and seeing your faces, and just want to thank you. It feels really big to me.”
Taussig and Mnookin discussed the book and its larger connections to experiences surrounding disability.
As a child in rural Kansas, Taussig said her experience in a wheelchair left her feeling like a “class pet” rather than a person. She recounted arriving on the bus for disabled students in elementary school and having her first stark experience with feeling othered.
She talked about writing her book, specifically the uncomfortable chapters about her first time teaching about disability — an experience she recalled as like “jumping into an ice cold pool.” But these experiences of learning how to connect disability to others helped her frame how she wrote her book.
“So many people are connected to this conversation from so many directions and in a way that I can’t anticipate, but I know how to anticipate you will be connected in some way,” Taussig said.
Taussig will publish “We Are the Scrappy Ones” in April 2025, a children’s book celebrating children with disabilities.
Disabled community unites on campus
Disabled UW-Madison students, faculty and staff joined Taussig for a panel discussion on disability on campus Tuesday night.
Students shared issues with housing, receiving accommodations and social issues caused by disability, thanking Taussig for helping to normalize these issues.
One panelist, student Brelynn Bille, mentioned the book chapter about dating as a disabled person.
“It felt like I was the person that you wrote it for,” she said. “It’s exactly why we need more books on this and sharing that perspective because it helps to remove that otheringness.”
At Wednesday’s address, one audience member, a sophomore in high school who is disabled, thanked Taussig for sharing her “complications of kindness” and said it helped her understand her own self-advocacy.
Many times, Taussig echoed the importance of stories in understanding frameworks of oppression and change.
“I am rather biased, but I do believe that stories are the way to change people’s thinking the most deeply and directly, in the most lasting ways,” she said.
A ‘filtered’ experience
One audience member asked Taussig about her experience navigating UW-Madison’s campus in a wheelchair Wednesday night.
Taussig said her experience was “filtered,” with Go Big Read officials ensuring that all paths and elevators would be accessible.
At Tuesday’s panel, students shared this isn’t always the case. One student, Emmett Lockwood, said they had lived in a building on campus where the elevator company had been out of business for 30 years, causing a delay in repair parts.
Mnookin echoed this sentiment, noting that her husband works on the third floor of a building on campus without an elevator. She said that adding an elevator to this building would require a complete transformation, something the state Legislature and donors have not focused on.
Panelist Brelynn Bille said UW-Madison “seems content with merely meeting the bare minimum [accessibility] requirements,” in an Instagram post.
In the post, she shared that although Mnookin had previously told Bille that “she needs to hear these issues directly to advocate for them,” the chancellor was not present at the disabled students panel, which Bille called a “contradiction” and “disheartening.”
At both the keynote address and disability panel, Taussig emphasized that disability advocacy does not end when she leaves, and lasting, oftentimes slow, change is needed to make institutional changes.
“I get to come into these communities and these spaces where people have just read the book, and everybody's excited, and we're planning events around it, and then what happened?” Taussig said. “What do we do with the things that we learned?”
“So I think part of it is thinking about how we can carry the things that we practice now in the future,” she said. “I think it's learning to do more of that and not just do it this one time.”
A self-proclaimed lover of stories, Taussig asked the question: “what are the other books?”
Bryna Goeking is an arts editor for The Daily Cardinal. She also reports on campus news. Follow her on Twitter @BrynaGoeking.
