Getting Down to the Liminal Space
Reflecting on the past year of Down to the Struts
Hello dear DTTS community,
A warm welcome to our newest subscribers and followers—thank you for choosing to be here! And a huge thank you to everyone who has listened to Season 9—it’s such a privilege to bring you compelling stories about disability, design, and intersectionality every season. Together, we are creating a more just, inclusive, and accessible world.
If you haven’t yet, please remember to subscribe to the podcast and share it in your communities. The team and I are planning some exciting things to celebrate our 10th season in 2025, so stay tuned!
The year in review
It's been humbling to see the DTTS family grow over the past year. Down to the Struts reaches more than 400 Spotify subscribers, and the show has been streamed in 17 countries this year. Most of our listeners are tuning in on Apple podcasts—so if that’s you, please remember to leave a rating and review to help us grow.
Getting Down to It has a small but dedicated community of nearly 100 subscribers—can you help us reach this milestone by sharing the newsletter? We’re counting on you all to help us spread the word even more widely in 2025 (which is also the podcast’s fifth anniversary)!
My word of 2024 was curiosity. Curiosity certainly guided me as my partner and I navigated the first year of marriage, as we barreled through the 2024 election cycle in the US, with all its ups and downs, and as conflicts erupted and escalated around the world.
Of course, I held many other emotions as these events unfolded, but curiosity grounded me to seek new perspectives and to understand the “why” of it all, even when the answers seemed elusive. Curiosity helped me to listen more, and judge less. I will admit, though, as much as I’ve tried to keep hold of my curiosity, this end of year season is a strange one.
The word liminal—a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold—certainly describes how I’ve felt these past few weeks. We wait, in a sort of interregnum, not knowing what the new year will hold. Personally, I am at the crossroads of multiple life transitions, unsure of the path that will emerge for me to take. It is truly a liminal space.
These moments of transition often call me back to my experience of vision loss, which I continue to navigate. Perhaps the greatest gift my disability has given me is the ability to lean in to the liminal space—to succumb to change, no matter its messiness. Vision loss has forced me to let go of what is and prepare myself for what will be. And because of it, I also know that I am not alone—I have many others to guide me as I traverse new ground.
Whatever it is you are navigating in 2025, I wish you all peace and a sense of curiosity as you enter the liminal spaces in your lives. Change is not always easy, but we are better off if we lean on each other to bear it together.
Community shout-outs
We’ll wrap up 2024 with a few shout-outs to celebrate past DTTS guests and friends of the podcast:
Cheryl Green and Thomas Reid of Pod Access released the trailer for their forthcoming podcast series, where they will dive deep into what it takes to launch a podcast. The information and resources that Cheryl and Thomas will share are geared toward disabled podcasters and those in the disability community who are thinking about launching a podcast. Subscribe to their newsletter to get the latest updates about this amazing project!
Peter Torres Fremlin was honored among the top 100 most influential disabled people in the United Kingdom by the Disability Power 100. Peter curates the Disability Debrief, a collection of disability news from around the world. His incisive and wide-ranging global disability news analysis, and his commitment to uplifting the voices of disabled people from the global south (and around the world, really) have become a key resource for me and countless others. Check out Peter’s thoughtful reflections on the past year.
Mustafa Rfat’s article, Refugees and asylees with disabilities: A call for economic integration, has been published in The Lancet, one of the highest-ranking journals in the world! This work highlights the intersection of disability and immigration, focusing on the unique challenges faced by refugees and asylum seekers with disabilities. The article underscores the urgent need to ensure their economic integration through equitable access to employment programs, workplace accommodations, and educational opportunities.
Thanks for reading our newsletter all year. See you in 2025!
In solidarity,
Qudsiya