Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds [Hardcover]

For people who are living with disability, including various forms of chronic diseases and chronic pain, daily tasks like lifting a glass of water or taking off clothes can be difficult if not impossible. InActivist Affordances, Arseli Dokumacı draws on ethnographic work with differently disabled people whose ingenuity, labor, and artfulness allow them to achieve these seemingly simple tasks. Dokumacı shows how they use improvisation to imagine and bring into being more habitable worlds through the smallest of actions and the most fleeting of movements---what she calls “activist affordances.” Even as an environment shrinks to a set of constraints rather than opportunities, the improvisatory space of performance opens up to allow disabled people to imagine that same environment otherwise. Dokumacı shows how disabled people’s activist affordances present the potential for a more liveable and accessible world for all of us.USArseli Dokumacı draws on ethnographic work with differently disabled people whose ingenuity, labor, and artfulness allows them to achieve seemingly daily tasks like lifting a glass of water or taking clothes off.Arseli Dokumacı is Canada Research Chair in Critical Disability Studies and Media Technologies and Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University.“In this exciting work Arseli Dokumac1 offers compelling ethnographic interviews, journal entries, and her own experiences of difficulties with rheumatoid arthritis. Her accounts of the lives of her interlocutors are rich and evocative and form the basis for her idea of activist affordances: the everyday hacks that allow disabled people to manage the simplest of daily activities as they face a diminishing world of possible action and imaginaries. Addressing what it means to live with bodily challenges,Activist Affordancesis critical disability studies at its intersectional best.”Faye Ginsburg, David B. KlsA