Magic corners

Dear Debriefers,

Happy new year and welcome back. I hope 2025 is starting well for you.

I came back to my desk last week planning to charge straight into disability news. But I quickly saw that previous Peter had postponed quite a few tasks for current Peter to catch up on.

So while I get Debrief ducks in a row, I want to share other creators you can follow.

Many thanks to such generous response to my fundraising appeal for 2025. Thanks for new contributions from Amelie, Amy, Andrew, Anna, Charlotte, Diana, Eleisha, Emilia, Francesca, Julia, Jutta, Karen, Khanam, Kishore, Latifa, Laurel, Lina, Loreta, Lori, Marie, Matthew, Michael and Meg, Murteza, Ruth, Sander, Sarah, Shrivaths, Silvia, Steven, Tessa, and Yazmine.

Magic corners on the internet

As it happens the creators I'm suggesting are all from India. Here are two newsletters that are always important references for me:

• Sanity by Tanmoy Goswami. Mental health storytelling, at turns incisive reporting and visceral lived experience. Tanmoy is a role model for me in how to write authentically and how to bring people together online.
• Reframing Disability by Priti Salian. Guidance on inclusive storytelling and profiles of folk changing the narrative from around the world. Priti shares essential tips and her reporting throws a spotlight on important initiatives.

Debriefers will already be familiar with Sonaksha's beautiful illustrations (for example of a wheelchair on a flying carpet). For those of you who want to follow or support their work more:

• Sonaksha's new Patreon. A “magic corner” of art and feelings. This is subscription based, in addition to what they already share on Instagram.

I hope you will join me in reading, and sharing these creators' work. And they are all fundraising to continue what they do in 2025, so if you can please do consider supporting them financially also.

What makes the magic

Our media horizons are filled with ruins of traditional media and the unchecked chaos of social media. Individual creators like Priti, Tanmoy and Sonaksha are making something beautiful and new.

Doing this work isn't easy anywhere, but it's even harder to do it from the Global South. It's not just that there's less disposable income, but as Tanmoy has shared, the Western infrastructure of the creator economy can at any time suddenly exclude them.

I've been aware for a while that Disability Debrief is in an incredibly privileged position of being resourced to pay for my time and that of other contributors. It's important to pay that forward to help the wider media ecosystem thrive.

As such, I've contributed £500 each to Reframing Disability and Sanity, and subscribed to Sonaksha's Patreon. It's thanks to generous reader support that this is possible.

I particularly hope that organisations working on disability rights will follow my small example and make their own investments in digital media. Online creators are disseminating knowledge, changing attitudes, and building our movements. These efforts are, compared to their impact, catastrophically under-resourced.

2025 is sure to throw a lot of challenges at us. We won't be able to do this alone. I'm glad to be in such fine company.

Cheers,

Peter

Outro

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Áine Kelly-Costello for feedback on this piece. And, as ever, to the individuals and organisations whose support makes the Debrief possible.