We Move Together

Product Information

We Move Together is a joyful new children’s book about disability community and culture. In conversation with one of the books’ co-authors, Kelly Fritsch, we discuss COVID-19, children’s literature, and disability justice in Canada. 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 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." Johal’s exploration of his characters’ hidden lives is what is most exciting. He rightly subverts cultural stereotypes and his audience gains a deeper understanding as a result. What dark secrets does the local Indian’s cook have, who you thought was the most straightforward man around? What about his famous chef daughter, or her newly religious sister?

A Broken Politics for a Disabled Worldis the working title of Fritsch’s current book project, also co-authored with McGuire. The book examines the failure ofinoperative social infrastructures through a disability lens. “In the book, we consider how crip knowledge practices of repair and maintenance can reconfigure our collective understanding of what broken means in the context of mutual aid and community care,” Fritsch explains. We Move Together is a love letter to the next generation of disabled kids, and a provocation for their nondisabled peers to rethink an ableist society's assumptions about how our bodies should move, what they should look like, and how our brains should work ... This gorgeously illustrated book offers a powerful message rooted in the Disability Justice movement—we care for and love each other, and we move together, with nobody left behind." We Move Together makes me want to move with joy! Finally there is a book I can share with my kiddo that expresses the joy of disability community; the playfulness of different ways of moving; and the fun of creating access—while also showing the challenges of ableism. This book can grow with my daughter as she goes from asking questions about the beautifully illustrated pictures and engaging words, to when she can grapple with the many key ideas of disability justice provided at the end of the book. A delightful and much needed celebration of disability community, and most importantly, as my daughter says, it's fun!" Fritsch and McGuire had an abstract sense of what the book might look like and invited Trejos to collaborate. Fritsch’s academic work is primarily situated in critical disability studies but also expansively draws on feminist science and technology studies, political economy, and critical criminology.From taking up the ways disabled people have designed their own accessibility tools, to the effects of neoliberalism on disability communities, to research looking at how disabled people are caught up in carceral systems of institutionalization and criminalization, an underpinning of all of Fritsch’s research is an ardent effort to advocate for different futures for disabled people.

With all these projects on the go, there are no immediate plans for a second children's book. “But” says Fritsch, “it’s something we’re considering.” We Move Together is full of practical magic. It’s grounded in a world children will recognize—full of ice cream, public transit, parks, and play—but it opens up possibilities of worlds and futures we dream of. It invites us to think and talk about disability and difference with love and respect. The best kind of book about changing the world, We Move Together doesn’t tell us how we should change things, it just reminds us that we can." The cover is warm and fiery and welcoming, with firm emphasis on feet and methods of movement (besides feet, there's a motorized wheelchair, a cane, and a service dog). But despite the clear underlying focus on disability justice, the entire book is a general call to community action. By moving together we make change, but there's no glossing over of difficulty here. Sometimes the change is fast, sometimes slow, sometimes we have to wait, but in the end we all wait together and work together. Disagreements and problems arise, but we deal with them. Sometimes we can't fight for justice today and we take a break, but there's always someone to continue. We Move is a series of interconnected short stories set in an area of West London, giving us glimpses into the close-knit British-Punjabi community. The stories feature recurring characters, either as the protagonist or appearing later as someone's relative or friend and changing our perspective on how we originally perceived them. We Move uses the characters and their stories to challenge cultural stereotypes ("You only had to wait so long when reading a western story about India to come across a mango, a railway or a spiritual awakening”).

We Move Together is a new picture book by a diverse team of authors 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." 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.One freshly published book is ‘ We Move Together’. It looks at the issue of disability from the point of view found in a quotation by Aurora Levins Morales and Patty Berne, which acts as a foreword: 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. We Move Together" shows how a community comes together to help each other have more enriched and accessible lives; they solve problems such as mobility ramps, crosswalks with audible alarms and tactile pavement (curbs with bumps on the ramp), even swings that accommodate wheelchairs on the playground. There is a multitude of representation throughout this children's picture book showing wheelchairs, walkers, crutches, ASL (American Sign Language) classes for the deaf, as well as long white canes for the blind, canes for the elderly, assistance animals, and persons with sensory issues.