Research Focus Group Talk: 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 Professor Aimi Hamraie terms “Access Studies,” would benefit from greater engagement with the concepts, practices, and political commitments of critical disability studies. In this talk, Hamraie 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, they will show how critical and intersectional perspectives on disability can enable a deeper engagement with the politics of knowing, making, and belonging in the twentieth-century United States.

Aimi Hamraie (they/them) is Associate Professor of Medicine, Health, & Society and American Studies at Vanderbilt University and Director of 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. They identify as disabled, SWANA, and diasporic Iranian. Their interdisciplinary research spans critical disability studies, science and technology studies, critical design and urbanism, critical race theory, and the environmental humanities. They were just appointed to the US Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board.

Register for the Zoom attendance link here.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Disability Studies Initiative Research Focus Group, Department of History of Art and Architecture, The History of Science Colloquium, The Comparative Literature Program, The Graduate Center for Literary Research

Image description: An olive-skinned Iranian person with short, dark curly hair and rectangular glasses smiles at the camera. They wear a blue shirt and blue/green checkered blazer. Behind them is a blurred green background.