Activist Affordances
How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds
Arseli Dokumaci
- 333 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
Activist Affordances
How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds
Arseli Dokumaci
About This Book
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. In Activist Affordances, Arseli Dokumac? draws on ethnographic work with differently disabled people whose ingenuity, labor, and artfulness allow them to achieve these seemingly simple tasks. Dokumac? 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. Dokumac? shows how disabled people's activist affordances present the potential for a more liveable and accessible world for all of us.