Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds

by Arseli Dokumaci

Overview

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 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478019244
Publisher:	Duke University Press Books
Publication date:	03/03/2023
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	765,630
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Arseli Dokumacı is Canada Research Chair in Critical Disability Studies and Media Technologies and Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  1
Part I. Shrinkage
1. Affordance Encounters Disability  31
2. Chronic Pain, Chronic Disease  55
3. The Habitus of Ableism  71
4. Planetary Shrinkage  87
Part II. Performance
5. A Theory of Activist Affordances  99
6. An Archive of Activist Affordances  119
7. Always in-the-Making 191
8. People as Affordances  205
9. Disability Repertoires  227
10. Speculations for a Shrinking Planet  237
Notes  253
Bibliography  293
Index  311

What People are Saying About This

Feminist, Queer, Crip - Alison Kafer

“Arseli Dokumaci reveals how people living with illnesses and disabilities navigate an inaccessible and ableist world by identifying the creativity, innovation, and resilience that goes into such navigation. Refusing the still-too-common notion that knowledge about disability is the province of medical experts rather than disabled people themselves, she brilliantly theorizes the accumulation of skills, negotiations, and hacks that disabled people discover to make their way in this world. And in this way, Dokumaci persuasively argues, they help concretize more accessible and just worlds.”

Faye Ginsburg

“In this exciting work Arseli Dokumaci 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 Affordances is critical disability studies at its intersectional best.”

Editorial Reviews

Arseli Dokumacı reveals how people living with illnesses and disabilities navigate an inaccessible and ableist world by identifying the creativity, innovation, and resilience that goes into such navigation. Refusing the still-too-common notion that knowledge about disability is the province of medical experts rather than disabled people themselves, she brilliantly theorizes the accumulation of skills, negotiations, and hacks that disabled people discover to make their way in this world. And in this way, Dokumacı persuasively argues, they help concretize more accessible and just worlds.

Feminist, Queer, Crip - Alison Kafer

"Activist Affordances attunes readers to individual, everyday acts that could teach us how to create more habitable futures. Such a perspective opens new spaces for scholarly and political debates on activism, disability, and the preservation of the planet."

LSE Review of Books - Kostadin Karavasilev

In this exciting work Arseli Dokumacı 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 Affordances is critical disability studies at its intersectional best.

Faye Ginsburg

"This book strikes a balance between academic rigor (i.e., theory) and practical relevance (i.e., practice). Readers will appreciate that many of the hacks discussed also come with pictures to help readers visualize the affordances. The book draws on a range of disciplines, including disability studies, anthropology, and design, to provide a comprehensive understanding of the complexities of disability activism. Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals."
 

Choice - G. Colosi

[A] generative, thought provoking text … it will be exciting to follow how readers ‘make up, make real, and make do with’ this book’s innovative contributions.”

Christine Sargentn Ethnologist