Matthew Edwards
In Accessible America: History of Disability and Design (2019), Bess Williamson situates the origins of contemporary notions of accessibility in national eugenic projects of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. The often intentional invisibility of disabled peoples continues, Williamson explains, until the 1980s and 1990s when human rights activism on a broad scale motivated the disabled community to rethink accessibility altogether and in such a way that prioritizes disabled experiences. As a disabled person, I see the historical trajectory Williamson introduces within my own lived experiences. There is a clear moment in my own memory when I recognize, as a young person, that I cannot see like others, followed by quite a long period of shame, silence and insistence in proving myself “able-bodied”. Today, I feel much more comfortable claiming my disabled experiences.
Williamson explains that whereas Accessible Design may focus on the construction of ramps, the installation of automatic doors and “beeping” streetlights in order to bring disabled folks into the public domain, she describes more radical initiatives that focus on the use of already existing spaces and, in particular, on the knowledge developed by disabled peoples as we “make accessible” the places and things we need, when we need them. In previous editions of AccessRoo, we have read about how our colleagues have worked to make their classrooms “accessible” by using tools and resources differently in order to bridge the gap between individual needs and institutional-university support.
I am drawn to this idea today as I think beyond my own disability, beyond disability as a physical and, or mental condition. I am interested a more radical application of disability that would help us to understand access as a social, or better yet, societal product. As a blind researcher who works on the production and circulation of marginalized peoples, ideas and artefacts that originate within Latin America, I have long been preoccupied with how to engage with objects of study that are already strategically hidden from sight, difficult to get to and hard to define. As a blind researcher, finding objects, people and places that systematically “fall off the grid” is an interesting process that more often than not finds me lost, confused, and unproductive. And when productivity is a measure of our success as professors and scholars, and a defining term of our promotion and evaluation mechanisms, finding objects to study—seeing them, bringing them into “plain” sight—highlights the importance of accessibility altogether.
Beyond my research and my individual disability, the ongoing COVID pandemic has forced many to rethink how we navigate domestic and public spheres, and how we access materials, relationships and thought processes. Travel restrictions along with health guidelines prohibiting close contact have forced us to think about how sickness—and disability--like wellness—and able-bodiness--give form to our daily practices and to our life styles, thought broadly. Importantly, COVID has motivated a critique of normalized research methods and a wide-spread recognition that these shape how we do our jobs, how we think, analyze, and argue, and, similarly, limit how these tasks are performed.
Today, as we become more and more comfortable with the uncomfortable nature of our new normal, I would like to suggest that the accommodations we have made and that have helped us to live alongside COVID-19, and its increasing number of variants, be considered examples of living with disability, of an epistemology that puts at the fore the lived experiences of physical and mental disability. Bess Williamson, among others, have termed this focus on the knowledge produced by disability, by disabled folk, “Crip Design”. The term reappropriates the derogatory “crip”, once used to marginalize our community, to define a radical (political) posture. Much in the same way, the sicknesses associated with COVID-19 has produced changes that today give form—new form—to the tasks we do and to the knowledge we gather and share, Crip Design centers on revolutionary potential of disabled experiences.
Although we may be accommodating disability, or sickness, through the specific structures, tools and support systems in its wake, we are also, and more importantly, I would argue, are using disability to create, innovate, and change. And while the ongoing value of the “right to be in the world” continues to motivate accessibility initiatives and is a constant reminder of the importance we place on mobility, autonomy and economic participation (185), disability “crips” our comfort zone and produces alternatives to the “normal” that guide us, daily.