Aimi Hamraie, “Critical Access Studies”

Thirty years after the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act, much of the built environment remains inaccessible to disabled people. Accordingly, the vast majority of research and writing on accessibility seeks to convince the unconvinced of the value of inclusion. This field, which I term “Access Studies,” would benefit from greater engagement with the concepts, practices, and political commitments of critical disability studies. In this talk, I will discuss the emerging field of “Critical Access Studies,” which engages with the methodologies, epistemologies, and political commitments of accessibility from the perspectives of Disability Justice and disability culture. Using historical and contemporary examples, I will illustrate the difference that critical perspectives on disability—including intersectional perspectives—can make for architects seeking to understand design with, by, and for disabled people.

Aimi Hamraie is Associate Professor of Medicine, Health, & Society and American Studies at Vanderbilt University, where they direct the Critical Design Lab. Hamraie is author of Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) and host of the Contra* podcast on disability, design justice, and the lifeworld. Their interdisciplinary research spans critical disability studies, science and technology studies, critical design and urbanism, critical race theory, and the environmental humanities.