However, quite a few stories were hard to read and felt without a purpose in between the more moving stories. At times I had to put the book down as I wasn’t following or understanding the purpose of those few stories. For me, they felt a bit out of place in this book.

We all move through the world in different ways, and it’s so important to provide young readers with visible examples of the many assistive devices people with disabilities use on a daily basis. Normalizing characters with disabilities in children’s literature is such a great way to accomplish this goal, and We Move Together does it flawlessly.

Flowers for the rebels who failed: Rebellion in Patagonia by Osvaldo Bayer [Book Review]

A month ago Dr. Suess Enterprises took the decision to stop publishing six books. These include a number you may not be familiar with such as “If I Ran the Zoo” and “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street”. The reason for the decision was that these contain racist and insensitive imagery. These efforts should be encouraged. Likewise newly written and published works by others that try to raise awareness of important social issues among a young readership. Frictions engages ethnographic, narrative, and artistic research-creation practices to recast the standard practices and foundational principles of solid organ transplant,” Fritsch explains. “The project uses creative methods to probe the ways medical utility and technoscientific possibility can be at odds with the lived experiences of heart, liver, and kidney transplant recipients.” I’m interested in how disability culture and politics shape our shared social world, how disabled people’s ways of resisting ableism or fighting for accessibility can transform social relations,” says Fritsch. “I’m also interested in what can be gained from failure, like when our struggles don’t succeed, or when our communities don’t agree, or when there are not obvious ways to resolve problems.”

We Move Together is a book I wish I had read as a kid. It covers themes of disability justice, care, community, and friendship. It’s a beautiful book that explains, through simple words and pictures, that no one is disposable and that everyone has value. If you plan to teach your children about disability and access, start with this book.” Through their four-year creative process, Fritsch, McGuire, and Trejos consulted with several groups and individuals, including academics, international disability communities, parents of disabled kids, and of course, children themselves. At the time, most books we encountered did not include diverse disabled characters or engage with disability as a social justice issue. The books we found were more about how sad or tragic disability is, depicting disability solely as a medical issue, or as a problem experienced by one individual,” says Fritsch. “Our frustration fueled our desire to create something better.” With their help, the project developed into a story that reflects the power of moving together – sometimes slow, sometimes fast, sometimes in conflict, and sometimes in celebration. Dr. Fritsch I’m a disabled person and disability studies professor and I use a wide variety of mobility devices in my daily life including an electric wheelchair, scooter, walker, and cane, and I’m also in community with folks who are diversely disabled. My kids have had A LOT of questions about all of this, as have their friends, or people we meet at the park, or at their school. Anne is also a disability studies professor and parent and we’ve collaborated on many disability-related different projects. We started talking about what we were yearning to find in children’s literature and then thought, why not try to create a book ourselves? We approached Eduardo who is a graphic designer and started drafting up text and images.

Themes

We Move Togetheris a new picture book by a diverse team of authors (Kelly Fritsch, Anne McGuire, and Eduardo Trejos) who have come together to write a love letter to the disability community. It is, in a word, fantastic. It is empowering, it is interesting, it is understandable, it is relevant—I could go on all day about how much I love this book. Unfortunately, as I discovered to my dismay, it is entirely possible that the kids in your life will not love it as much as you do. Anne McGuire, Eduardo Trejos, and I began writing this book in 2017 after failing to find picture books that engage with disability culture and disability justice that we could read with our kids. So many books for kids that feature disabled characters are either about individually overcoming adversity or how despite having some kind of disability we’re all supposedly the same because of our shared humanity. These kinds of stories leave out the ways that ableism impacts disabled peoples’ lives and how experiences of ableism can definitely make us not all the same. They also frequently leave out the many joys of disability culture and community, how disability is more than just medical treatments or scientific understandings about our bodies. Many of these books had inaccurate depictions of what assistive devices or disabled people look like. And more often than not, the books that we found represent disability as anomalous or undesirable and these were not the kind of stories we wanted to read with our kids.

This stunning picture book highlights the way that people of all abilities can move together with a little ingenuity, a lot of community and a focus toward disability justice. Presented with a focus on diversity the book is written simply and powerfully in a way that even the youngest children will find relevant."Winner of the International Latino Book Awards' Best Educational Children's Picture Book in English. Lydia X.Z. Brown, disability justice advocate and founder/director of Fund for Community Reparations for Autistic People of Color’s Interdependence, Survival, & Empowerment This is a glorious storybook full of images that make the reader far more aware of things they may take for granted in an able-bodied environment that is slow to transition to accommodate every type of person in this world. In this session, the creators of We Move Together will do a reading from their picture book that includes an audio description of the illustrations and introduce participants to a couple of accessible art making sample activities found in the book’s accompanying learning guide. The creators will support a discussion about art, accessibility, and disability justice, and engage in a

Gorgeously illustrated and simply put this is a book that should be shared even with all readers. This book can be shared with all readers from newborn all the way up to adults. The lovely simple story embedded with information about working together. There are wonderful moments like how the authors point out that there are times when we have to wait and waiting can be pretty boring. They turn that boring feeling around and share how waiting can be exciting too. The authors share with readers how in a community we all work together to solve problems and help each other out. We can learn from each other too. In this session, the creators behind We Move Together will talk about the experiences that led them to write this book and discuss how the key principles of disability justice can shape and guide our learning in and out of the classroom. The creators will then do a reading from their picture book that includes an audio description of the illustrations and introduce participants to We didn’t want a book that told the reader what to think or that didactically presented a lexicon. We wanted to create a book thatprovokedthe reader to look at the world differently and that would generate conversation and questions,” Fritsch says. One stand-out story is "Chatpata: Kaam", with middle-aged Jagmeet remembering the forbidden love he had for his friend Hiten. Decades later, Jagmeet continues to struggle with his sexuality.I also want to thank AK Press for publishing such a wonderfully inclusive book, and sending a copy my way. Across 13 chapters, this book examines howableismand disability oppressionis embedded in Canadian criminological institutions, policies, and practices, showing how incarceration and institutionalization is dangerous and deadly for disabled people,” Fritsch explains. “It linkseugenics and white supremacy to the ways the criminal justice system pathologizes disabled people as deviants, and how processes of criminalization depend upon discriminatory approaches to physical and mental health. The book highlights the significance of disability justice for fostering different futures for disabled people andcontributes to contemporary abolitionist movements that seek to abolish not just criminal justice systems but also other forms of disabled incarceration like congregate care.”