Mapping Access: Digital Humanities, Disability Justice, and Sociospatial Practice

New digital projects use geographic information systems (GIS) and crowdsourcing applications to gather data about the accessibility of public spaces for disabled people. While these projects offer useful tools, their approach to technology and disability is often depoliticized. Compliance-based maps take disability for granted as medical impairment and do not consider mapping as a humanistic and activist practice. This essay draws on digital humanities theories of "thick mapping" and critical disability theories of public citizenship to offer critical accessibility mapping as an alternative to compliance-focused mapping. Using Mapping Access as a case study, I frame digital mapping as a question-generating device, a site of narrative praxis, rather than mere data visualization. I argue that critical accessibility mapping offers a digital humanities-informed model of "sociospatial practice," with several distinct benefits: it recognizes marginalized experts; redefines the concepts of data, crowdsourcing, and public participation; offers new stories about disability and public belonging; and materializes the principles of disability justice, an early twentieth-century movement emphasizing intersectionality and collective access

Universal Design and the Problem of “Post-Disability” Ideology

Although Universal Design gains popularity as a common sense strategy for crafting built environments for all users, accessibility for disabled people remains a marginal area of inquiry within design practice and theory. This article argues that the tension between accessibility and Universal Design stems from inadequate critical and historical attention to the concept of disability as it relates to discourses of “good design.” This article draws upon critical disability theory to reveal the persistence of “post-disability” narratives and “ideologies of ability” from the eugenics era into the present theory and practice of Universal Design

Designing Collective Access: a feminist disability theory of Universal Design

Universal Design (UD) is a movement to produce built environments that are accessible to a broad range of human variation. Though UD is often taken for granted as synonymous with the best, most inclusive, forms of disability access, the values, methodologies, and epistemologies that underlie UD require closer scrutiny. This paper uses feminist and disability theories of architecture and geography in order to complicate the concepts of "universal" and "design" and to develop a feminist disability theory of UD wherein design is a material-discursive phenomenon that produces both physical environments and symbolic meaning. Furthermore, the paper examines ways in which to conceive UD as a project of collective access and social sustainability, rather than as a strategy targeted toward individual consumers and marketability. A conception of UD that is informed by a politics of interdependence and collective access would address the multiple intersectional forms of exclusion that inaccessible design produces

Beyond Accommodation: Disability, Feminist Philosophy, and the Design of Everyday Academic Life

Disability has become a hot topic for feminist philosophy in recent years. Special issues of Hypatia and Disability Studies Quarterly, multiple conference keynote addresses, and a growing cadre of scholars are exploring the intersections of feminist and critical disability thought. As a disabled feminist scholar, I perceive these trends as a signal that the field of feminist philosophy is taking up disability concepts and theories in valuable ways. There is certainly much that feminist philosophers can learn from disabled scholars and critical disability scholarship and activism. Unlike dominant medical models of disability, which treat disabled minds and bodies as objects of knowledge for science and biomedicine, critical disability theories foreground disabled peoples’ knowledge and lived experiences. Often in conversation with feminist theories, they define disability as a valuable form of human variation, cultural diversity, situated knowledge, and a basis for relational ethics that should be preserved, and even desired (Mitchell and Snyder 2006; Kafer 2013; Garland-Thomson 2011)

Inclusive Design: Cultivating Accountability Toward the Intersections of Race, Aging, and Disability

As a feminist disability studies scholar working on issues of accessi - ble and inclusive design, my participation in the Critical Health, Age, and Disability Collective (CHAD) in summer 2014 was my first introduction to the field of age studies. I was surprised to find how little my training had taught me about how to think critically about age and aging—that is, without treating age as an indelible biological category of deterioration or conflating aging with disability. ..

Cripping Feminist Technoscience

In feminist technoscience studies (FTS), the term technoscience conveys that scientific knowledge and technological worlds are active constructions of entangled material, social, and historical agents. Feminist analyses of assisted reproduction, environmental harm, digital media, and cyborg bodies constitute some of the work of FTS, a close sibling of the new materialisms and post-positivist feminist philosophies of science. Technoscience is also a familiar object of inquiry for scholars of critical disability studies (DS). DS’s historical, sociological, and philosophical engagements with medicine, the politics of design, selective reproduction, fictional cyborgs, and technology users make clear that DS and FTS scholars share at least some understandings of technoscience. However, while feminist disability studies has emerged as a field containing hybrid developments and reciprocal critical exchanges between feminist and disability theories of embodiment, knowledge, and ethics (Garland-Thomson 2011; Tremain 2013), a field of feminist disability technoscience studies is only on the cusp of emergence

Enlivened City: Inclusive Design, Biopolitics, and the Philosophy of Liveability

Shortly after the United States announced its withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, mayors of global cities committed to addressing climate change via urban-scale projects aimed at promoting liveable, sustainable, and healthy communities. While such projects are taken for granted as serving the common good, this paper addresses the ideological dimensions of planning liveable cities with health promotion in mind. Liveability, I argue, is a normative ideology wherein liveliness and activation perform aff ective roles, associating urban design methods with feel-good imagined futures while rendering built structures as polemics against disabled and racialized populations. Using Nashville, Tennessee, a mid-sized US city, as a case study, the paper parses the progressive vision of the liveable city from the ideologies, political economies, and development practices that simultaneously activate some lives while excluding others

Historical Epistemology as Disability Studies Methodology: From the Models Framework to Foucault’s Archaeology of Cure

In this paper, I argue for historical epistemology as a methodology for critical disability studies (DS) by looking to Foucault’s archaeology of cure in History of Madness. While the moral, medical, and social models of disability frame disability history as a progressive movement and replacement of moral and medical authority with sociopolitical knowledge, I argue that the overall framing of these models—the models framework—requires a more nuanced perspective from historical epistemology. In particular, it requires greater use of epistemology as an analytical tool for understanding the historical construction of disability. Turning to History of Madness, I excavate one particular archaeological strand in the text—the archaeology of cure—and demonstrate how this narrative disrupts some of the key assumptions of the models framework, challenging DS to consider the epistemological force of non-medical fields of knowledge for framing disability and procedures for its cure and elimination. I conclude by arguing that DS must pay attention not only to the social construction of scientific and biomedical knowledge, but also develop historical epistemological methodologies that are more sensitive to the complex overlays of moral, medical, and social knowledge

Universal Design Research as a New Materialist Practice

In Disability Studies, Universal Design (UD) is a concept that is often borrowed from an architectural or design context to mean an ideology of inclusion and flexibility with a range of applications in education, technology, and other milieus. This paper returns to UD as a design phenomenon, considering knowledge production practices as conditions of possibility for inclusive design. UD appropriates and redefines normalizing research methods, namely anthropometry, that were developed in the 19th century for uses that are contrary to disability rights and justice, such as eugenics, colonialism, and scientific racism. The paper argues that critical disability theory should understand work in UD research and design practice in order to formulate a nuanced, new materialist and historical disability epistemology, particularly in engagements with scientific knowledge

Inclusive Design

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