Crip Camp Themes

“Crip Camp” is a 2020 documentary directed by James Lebrecht and Nicole Newnham following the journeys of a group of disabled teenage campers at the summer camp, Camp Jened in the 1970s. The relevant themes it explores are disability rights, inclusion, and how context and environment impacts the areas of occupation, occupational risk, and social and mental well-being. The areas of occupation that are specifically highlighted are leisure and social participation. The main characters in the documentary are the campers at Camp Jened and who also went on to be disability rights activists. The audience meets the director and a main character of the film, Jimmy Lebrecht. As well as, infamous disability rights movement leaders Denise Sherer Jacobson

Context and environment greatly impact the campers’ occupations, occupational risk, and social and mental well-being. While the film is primarily set in the context and environment of summer camp, the viewer can deduce what life was like for the teenagers when they were at home for the school year based on their anecdotes, even though it is not shown. When the campers are at Camp Jened, they report on how much happier they are. Some said it was comparable to Woodstock and described it as a “utopia” where there was no outside world. The campers are interacting with other teenagers their age and with similar back stories, but in the end “teenagers could be teenagers”. The campers spoke about how they didn’t have to feel ashamed of their physical or mental disabilities, because everyone at Camp Jened had “something going on with their body. It just wasn’t a big deal”. These narratives told in the documentary are revealing of how much the campers’ social and mental well-being improves while they’re at camp. The setting they’re in provides them with social support that they clearly had not been receiving in their lives outside of camp, or else their experiences at camp wouldn’t have been so revolutionary and

But it also goes even further to depict how these same campers used their experiences at camp to inspire them to fight for their civil rights. Heumann said that everything they had learned at Camp Jened was just the same as the section 504 sit-ins they endured to achieve laws that protected their civil rights. During this time, activists like Heumann created centers for independent living (CIL) that people with disabilities could thrive in that didn’t limit their abilities and provided them with the appropriate accommodations. As discussed previously, many of the campers were barred from participating in typical occupations and had poor well-being outside of camp and having their summer experiences revealed to them that they could be living everyday more like this if they were just given the rights. Not only did these rights need to be written into legislation, they also needed to be fully enforced, which was an additional struggle once the legislation was signed. These acts of activism required a lot of sacrifice and physical detriment, which the documentary did not shy away from showing. People marched and protested for days, they went on hunger strikes, had no back up ventilators, had to sleep on the floor, among many other expenses. The effort put in by these activists goes to show the importance of occupational freedom