Towards an assemblage approach to mobile disability politics

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses embodied geographies of power assisted devices (powered wheelchairs and motorised scooters) for disabled people in Australia to augment understandings of mobile disability politics. Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘lines’ is used to reimagine spatial thinking about mobile disability politics. Disability in this paper is understood as an emplaced, emergent, relational and embodied process that arises in the interaction between ideas, materials and bodies. A focus on the shifting affective capacities of everyday journeys can deepen an understanding of mobile disability politics through attention to sensations. To illustrate the notion of lines we draw on three ‘portraits’ from a qualitative project on power assisted devices in Ballina Shire, New South Wales, Australia. Each portrait provides an illustration of how mobility experiences of power assisted devices may reinforce and/or challenge normative ideologies and identities, alongside deepening understandings of how ideas and materials come together to produce enabling and/or exclusionary arrangements.

KEYWORDS:

• Molecular line
• molar line
• assemblage thinking
• participatory data analysis
• Australia

Introduction

This paper responds to a recent review of disability geographies that pointed to the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari on embodiment and affect as a way to offer a unique contribution to disability politics (Hall & Wilton, 2017). Such scholarship troubles recognised western dualisms that fix and constitute disability, including the biological/social divide, Cartesian notions of place as a fixed backdrop rather than dynamic, and predetermined abled/disabled identities. Our interest in Hall and Wilton’s (2017) focus on embodiment and affect was elevated by starting a project that investigated ways to better integrate power assisted devices into public space. The project is an ongoing collaboration between three faculty members of the University of X, an executive officer of Assistive Technology Suppliers Australia, and a research liaison with 20 co-researchers who use power assisted devices. Funded by the Australian Research Council, the primary project aim is to address in a practical, moral, and political sense, the right of people reliant upon a power assisted device to access public spaces. The project provides a platform where people can share personal insights into the mundane or emotive dimensions of everyday journeys.

Underpinning the emotional experiences of people moving by power assisted devices is how they may be stigmatised as ‘abnormal’ by a visual process of classification informed by western dualist thinking (Calder-Dawe et al., 2020; Garland-Thompson, 2009). Thus, day-to-day mobility becomes a part of both evoking, and managing emotions. Equally, the idealisation of independent mobility in neoliberal societies (Fritsch, 2013a) impacts how people aspire to, achieve, understand, and experience quality of life through mobility by power assisted devices. Yet, as noted by Bigonnesse et al. (2018) missing in the literature are the experiences that occur on-the-move, tethered to the sensations of quotidian power assisted mobilities. Such an omission minimises the importance of how everyday experience transforms not only mobility practices but understandings of self and the world around (Bissell, 2016). For example, Woods and Watson (2003) document how the advent of the power wheelchair in the 1970s gave rise to disability rights, by changing how a group of students, in Berkley, California, the Rolling Quads, understood themselves and their everyday interactions with places. Our aim in this paper is to illustrate how mobile disability politics is always embodied and structural, social and material, individual and collective, personal and social.

We argue that most published scholarship on social inclusion and power assisted mobility is premised on an ontology of connection within existing social networks (Meyer et al., 2002). Here, overcoming physical distance equates to social participation through measuring distance travelled or the number of destinations successfully reached in the management of day-to-day life. Attention turns to the characteristics of physical environments that work for, and against, social participation. Bigonnesse et al.’s (2018) systematic review of the power assisted device literature identifies three key physical environmental attributes: (1) neighbourhood features (perceived safety, physical proximity, street connectivity, open spaces, crowded areas), (2) mobility in transit (weather, sidewalk, street conditions, traffic congestion, parking, public transport system), alongside, (3) homes (front doors) and public buildings (stairs, doorsteps, heavy doors, ramps, narrow aisles, shelves, small elevators, inaccessible washrooms). While this conceptualisation of mobility is analytically helpful, we argue that it contributes to a static understanding of disability within the biological/social divide, alongside fixed ideas of disabled identity and space.

Our contribution in this paper proceeds by understanding the implications for accessibility through attention to the transient sensations that emerge during day-to-day routine journeys by drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) assemblage thinking. Through Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of lines we consider how socio-material interactions produce shifting enabling and/or exclusionary arrangements that enhance and/or diminish bodily capacities to act and sense. This approach embraces an ontology of exposure which is attuned to the affective intensities of unfolding social and material relations that comprise mobilities, self and place, and which allow thinking about a mobile disability politics. Here, different kinds of power assisted mobile bodies are affected by transient relations with ideas (including those about age, gender, disability, medical impairment, ethnicity, and class), other people (drivers, pedestrians), and things (roads, footpaths) to generate intricate webs of exclusion and disadvantage, that are not necessarily part of the journey ‘goal’.

Conducting this work raised personal sensitivities that are appropriate to acknowledge as non-disabled geographers researching for the first-time disability-related spaces and experiences. Reflecting upon our positionality this work has presented us with a new awareness of debates and challenges. As non-disabled geographers, we became aware of the mandates of the disability activists and rights movement of the 1990s to make space for the voices of disabled people. Our shared identity as non-disabled geographers positioned us within this debate as ‘parasites’ (Stone & Priestley, 1996). For one of us with familial experience of disability, the task was to generate a shared research space for developing trust and co-operation. At the same time, we became aware of critiques of positionality as a naïve and dangerous form of essentialism (Kobayashi, 1994). As discussed by Worth (2008), the rationale for us as non-disabled geographers conducting this work is our commitment to emancipatory projects and collaborative research design. Furthermore, the theoretical framework supports our political and ethical commitment to confront ableism alongside the inclusion of disabled people’s embodied knowledge and their voices in our research.

The four sections of this article advance mobile disability politics through an analysis of the experiences of power assisted devices on daily routes. The first section considers how our assemblage approach contributes to discussions of mobile disability politics by including nuances of the lived, felt, and spatial dimensions of mobility. Here, we offer a review of emergent disability geographies literature and introduce Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of lines. The second section outlines our collaborative research design. The main section draws upon three portraits to offer an understanding of mobile disability politics which foregrounds bodily capacities to act and sense. To conclude, we turn to policy implications arising from our assemblage approach to mobile disability politics.

Towards an assemblage approach to mobile disability politics as lived, felt and spatial

Within disability geographies we are concerned with the ongoing debates of ‘politics’ and ‘power’ in the continuing development of disability theory. By thinking with a social model of disability, one strand of disability geographies literature has demonstrated how ableism oppresses and excludes people from accessing public space (Gleeson, 1999; Hansen & Philo, 2007; Imrie, 2000; Kitchin, 1998). Ableism operates to marginalise and exclude those bodies from public space that do not conform to normative conceptions of health, mobility, independence, fitness, and youth. The social model offers important insights to mobility politics by how institutions perpetuate able-bodied interests through various building designs, planning and regulations (Imrie, 1996; Kitchin, 1998; Laws, 1994). Mobility politics in the social model of disability evaluates knowledge as power invested in institutions and seeks to identify and dismantle the hidden ableist norms in society that act, including changes in the provision of transport and infrastructure by governments.

We seek to build upon disability geographies that offer insights to the spatial politics of bodies, feeling, and relationality. This strand emerged from scholarly engagement with the concept of affect in disability geographies (Hall and Wilton 2017) and disabilities studies (Goodley et al., 2018). The turn to affect responds to earlier critiques of the social model of disability that attended to spatial exclusion through attention to the socio-economic and structural relations of a capitalist society, and tended to downplay ‘the body’ (Butler & Parr, 1999; Chouinard, 1997; Moss & Dyck, 2002), that excluded discussions of personal experiences of disability oppression (Hall, 2000; Hansen & Philo, 2007; Shakespeare & Watson, 2002; De Vet et al., 2012). As Shakespeare and Watson (2002, p. 15) argued, ‘People are disabled both by social barriers and by their bodies.’ On the one hand, the turn to affect reasserted the feminist maxim that ‘the personal is political’ (Thomas 2001)). Voice was given to the inter-connections between the political and personal, material and social worlds, by interpreting people’s everyday experiences, including those of disability and care (Morrison, 2022), (not)belonging (Morrison et al., 2020; Stephens et al., 2015), making art (Hall, 2013), engagement with art and environmental projects (Parr, 2006) and masculinity (Gahman, 2017; Wilton & Fudge Schormans, 2020). On the other hand, the turn to affect is associated with a desire to dismantle the medical/social binary model and ensure that the materialities of bodies are included in accounts of disability, illness, and impairment (Hall, 2000).

Here, building on the work of Merriman (2018) and Waitt et al. (2021), to help understand the mobile disability politics of power assisted journeys we draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concepts of lines: molar lines (ordering), molecular lines (crack lines), and rupture lines (lines of flight). Molar lines are conceived as affective forces that hold together working arrangements (assemblages) providing a semblance of stability. Molar forces represent being and consist of taken-for-granted norms that order and categorise public space and maintain socio-spatial hierarchies (Buchanan, 2020). Deleuze and Parnet (2007) further elaborated on how molar lines are conceived to operate as a device of power through organising public space as inclusive and/or exclusive arrangements. The politics of mobility can be accounted for by how molar lines operate as affective forces of control to determine which bodies are included or excluded in particular spaces – drivers on roads, power assisted devices on footpaths. As well, Fritsch (2013a) argues that disability is produced through how it is layered within the molar lines of neoliberalism, healthism, and able-bodiedness. In short, molar lines are embedded in the social and they exert an affective force that maintains working arrangements, and dichotomous social hierarchies.

Molecular lines are conceived as becomings embedded in the unfolding events of the everyday itself and are supple and flexible. Molecular lines capture the flux in a body’s power, understood here in terms of its changing capacities to do and to sense, in the unfolding of everyday experience: rising and falling through the tensions of different situations (Buchanan, 2020). Deleuze and Parnet (2007) argue that molecular lines often carry out the work of the molar. For example, molar lines of independence are reinforced by using a power assisted device. Yet, the molecular may operate beneath molar lines by generating ambiguities or contradictions which can create new potential through self-reflection. For example, for those reliant upon power assisted devices for mobility, self-reflection may result from the negative affects evoked by encounters with uneven surfaces, curbs, steps, broken lifts, pedestrian crossings, or the absence of secure parking. Following Deleuze and Guattari (1987) these affective moments may be conceived as generating a molecular line, evoking self-reflection about why and how journeys with power assisted devices did not flow. In turn, these affective moments may diminish the use of power assisted devices. Or the opposite: they may encourage support constituted by discourses of disability advocacy groups, thereby challenging ableist norms of transport infrastructure planning.

Rupture lines are breaks from the status quo of molarity. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) warn of the rewards and dangers associated with rupture lines. Rupture lines are conceived as associated with benefits of creativity and new beginnings but also the dangers of anxiety, despair, and death. For example, the molar lines of automobility that sustain notions of independence and freedom in neoliberal societies may be broken through a medical diagnosis. The clean break of the medical diagnosis from the past may generate either creativity that disrupts the molar order, or despair, from losing the existential means of freedom, security, comfort, and sense of self associated with automobility.

Methods for mobile disability politics

Informed by debates within disability research, the aim was to design a collaborative project that was participant driven (Barton, 2005; Parent, 2016). Three strategies were employed to prioritise disabled people’s expert knowledge – embodied and emotional – about their own lives. First, an individual who wheels a power assisted device was employed as a research liaison. They helped us to reflect throughout the project on our ontological and epistemological assumptions; to advise with recruitment and semi-structured interview scheduling and design; and, to adapt mobile methods for inclusivity, safety, and transparency. Second, disabled people who consented to participate were positioned as co-researchers rather than as research subjects (Kitchin, 2001). As co-researchers, they were actively involved in tailoring the mixed-qualitative method research design, co-trained in participatory sensory ethnography, engaged through conversation in participatory data analysis, the selection of experiences shared here, and facilitated the dissemination of insights into sensate journeys with power assisted devices through a community art exhibition. Finally, trust before, during and after the fieldwork with co-researchers was built and strengthened over time through the research liaison, sharing disabling experiences, informal meetings and regular check-ins by phone, text, and email.

In February 2021, fieldwork commenced in Ballina Shire, a coastal regional local authority of New South Wales, Australia, on the ancestral land of the Bundjalung people. The regional capital, Ballina, is some 600 km north of Sydney and 160 km south of Brisbane. Since the Disability Inclusion Act 2014 (NSW), Ballina Shire is imagined as ‘providing opportunities for all people, regardless of ability, to lead fulfilling lives’ (Ballina Shire Council, 2017). In the Ballina Shire Disability Inclusion Action Plan 2017–2021 the strategies for creating liveable communities are ambitious. The current able-bodied public space is to be reordered to provide access to power assisted devices following accessible design guidelines. We use Ballina Shire as a case study, to argue that mobile disability politics is not adequately accounted for by accessible urban design through the provision of ramps, paths, and washrooms.

By using the concept of lines as a methodological tool, our participatory analysis occurred in conversation with co-researchers to open a space for unpacking their everyday journey experiences. Interpretation is therefore no longer a discrete research stage that occurs when empirical data collection finishes, and the researcher assumes control over the research. To interpret the sensations of power assisted devices in everyday journeys our mobile participatory research design combined a life narrative approach alongside mobile methods with a follow-up conversation. The life narrative was built around 5 sections: ‘getting to know you’, ‘getting to know your mobility device’, ‘regular patterns of use’, ‘positive and negative moments’ and ‘the future’. This structure appreciated how our capacities to sense and perceive journeys are shaped by our previous experiences. Conversations lasted between 60–120 minutes, were audio recorded, and transcribed verbatim.

From the conversational style semi-structured interviews, taking our lead from discussions of mobile methods that are grounded in sensations (Harada & Waitt, 2013; Spinney, 2011), co-researchers were invited to photograph or video-record journeys through the region as the basis for a follow-up conversation. To uncover insights on how co-researchers’ bodies experienced ‘wheeling’ as intrinsically rewarding, or not, follow-up conversations focussed on photographs and video out-takes that left an impression where something gelled or was amiss. Watching the selected video outtakes with co-researchers (and proxies) the conversation was facilitated by sharing mobility experiences, engaging in critical-creative exchange, and a participatory process that positioned co-researchers as experts in their own lives. Participatory analysis yielded insights to the political grounded in sensations of everyday trips, that were not revealed through interviews alone (Spinney, 2011). As Harada and Waitt (2013) argue, video methods capture insights to how a body’s power, understood here as the affective intensities of encounters of familiar routine journeys, changes capacities to act and sense. Follow-up conversations lasted between 30–60 minutes, were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim.

Our purposeful recruitment strategy aimed to collect diverse experiences of power assisted devices. Recruitment occurred in February 2021 through word-of-mouth within networks known by our research partner, research liaison, care professionals and mobility equipment retailers. People who responded to our invitation were sent a co-researcher information sheet. In total, twenty disabled people and three carers consented to participate. Most shared European ancestry with only two co-researchers self-identifying as Indigenous Australians. Co-researchers varied by medical and migration histories, employment, relationship status, income, gender, sexuality, and age. Some were totally reliant upon medically customised power assisted devices, for instance, wheelchairs prescribed by an occupational therapist and funded by public health. Others’ status as pedestrians and drivers fluctuated but they found themselves becoming more reliant upon self-funded or gifted mobility scooters for everyday access to parks, shops, and services. Each was given the choice of selecting a pseudonym.

In what follows are three vignettes as examples to help understand mobile disability politics as explicitly embodied, emplaced, and spatial. The vignettes were selected because they illustrate the role of transient affective forces through the ongoing social and material relationships in which subjects and place are co-constituted on-the-move. Vignette moments from routine journeys by power assisted devices illustrate how disablement is a personal, relational, and embodied experience that changes over a life course. Each vignette provides deep insight into how the underlying affective mobility politics of ableism is differentiated by unfolding experiences (molecular lines) of different power mobility technologies, medical histories, and built environments. Furthermore, each vignette is embedded within the affective forces of wider relations of social norms (molar lines) that configure neoliberalism, nature, automobility, disability, age, gender, ancestry, and class. Tarni illustrates the affective value inherent in the mobility scooter through how it confirms the neoliberal molar lines of independence and freedom. In the context of an automobilised society, Tarni’s upsetting experiences of pedestrian crossings, pavements and parking illustrate the contradictions in the way in which power assisted devices constitute disability as an individual problem to be solved by a network of things. Max’s mobility scooter vignette illustrates the affective qualities of molar lines that constitute coastal environments and mobility scooters as positive, and that enhance his body’s capacity to act, engage and connect. Max illustrates how the accessible coastal path operates within molar lines of restorative nature, enabling inclusionary arrangements at certain times of day configured by white and middle-class privilege. Andy’s power wheelchair vignette reveals the affective dimensions of access, including ramps and accessible paths. Moments of encounter with curbs, steep ramps and narrow doorways illustrate how the affective intensities of molecular lines felt as anger or frustration, can decrease capacities. In turn, molecular lines are important for rethinking disability and reimagining public space in terms of universal design and collective access.

Interpretation: mobile disability politics

Tarni

Tarni, who is born in 1959, never married, and lives alone in a state housing commission apartment. She identified as a proud Bundjalung woman with disability. Pedalling a bike was her mode of transport during her career as a cultural heritage officer, until retiring on a disability pension and returning to Ballina, her homeland. At this time, Tarni learnt to wheel a second-hand mobility scooter; a gift received from a friend. Tarni offers an appreciation of the joyful molar affective forces circulated by the mobility scooter as a form of independence, freedom, accessibility, and inclusion. Yet, in the context of automobility, Tarni illustrates how mobility scooters become a problem when traversing pedestrian crossings, parking, and wheeling pavements.

Independence and freedom punctuate the conversations with Tarni. Thinking about mobile disability politics through the notion of lines, we conceive independence and freedom both as a social formation and as a sensibility that is circulated in, through, and between things and bodies that helps to sustain a sense of self, mobility, and space. Tarni illustrates how a specific molar identity of independence is entangled with molecular lines, and felt at the level of wheeling sensations from repetitive shopping trips.

A bit more independence? Absolutely. Being able to do shopping and putting the shopping in the back and that. And you know, I’ve even gotten soil and put it where my feet go. I’ve had to get people from the shop to put it there, but you can even put a bag of soil on that and get it home. God, I would hate to think that I’d have to rely on someone all the time to pick me up and take me places, you know? Just to be able to just be in the scooter and just go somewhere without ringing up someone and saying: “Look, I just really just want to get out because my head’s bouncing off the walls, you know?” … I don’t know, sometimes you just feel like you’re not asking too much, but you’re a bother to people. If I feel like I’m a bother to people, then it bothers me.

The affective intensities associated with wheeling reinforce molar lines of mobility that prescribe a way of investing in the neoliberal individual to ensure self-reliance and independence. Tarni expresses the molar identity of independence: riding a mobility scooter maintains the status quo that privileges the neoliberal subject. Tarni illustrates how through the imagined loss of the mobility scooter she becomes a ‘bother’, disrupting the affective pleasures that arise from independent mobility and increasing her capacity to wheel.

Tarni alerts us to three moment-to-moment shifts in affective intensity: the fear of crossing roads; the anxiety of absent parking facilities; and the pain of journeying along cracked footpaths. These moments illustrate how Tarni’s affective attachment to the mobility scooter that facilitates her independence, is at the same time an object that creates agony, what Berlant (2010, p. 1) calls cruel optimism: ‘A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing’.

For example, Tarni illustrates how pedestrian crossings are caught-up in the affective pleasures of the molar lines of automobility that privilege the movement of predominantly combustion engine vehicles. Showing up in her mobility scooter to cross the road is a moment of cruel optimism. Tarni draws attention to the risks of wheeling:

Some drivers they mark you. Not personally, but the screwed driver says: ‘If that person crosses the road, I’m going to speed up and get them.’ Even when you’re trying to get across sometimes on zebra crossings, drivers just don’t want to let you cross. Even just the other day, there’s these two men and they saw what happened, and you should have seen the looks on their faces when I’ve gone to cross the road. They said, “Oh my God, we thought you were going to get cleaned up.” I said, “Yeah, so did I.” I was on the crossing and the car still zoomed past me.

The molar line that organises the affective economy of roads as the domain of fast-moving automobiles is disrupted when Tarni attempts to cross. The driver’s resentment in potentially having to slow down seems to agitate them further. Tarni’s wheeling body is marked by those driving as disrupting the joyful affects of driving fast on roads. As Imrie (2012) argues, there are auto-disabilities by how roads become territorialised as the domain of fast and aggressive drivers. Slow moving bodies are constituted as trespassers, killjoys to be ejected through intimidating driving manoeuvres. At the same time, the volatility of this event creates new capacities for other people at the pedestrian crossing to sense her distress. The affective force of the molecular event enables solace between onlookers and Tarni. In the unfolding of the events at the pedestrian crossing, Tarni illustrates the profound difference between her sense of self as independent, and social expectations with respect to automobility. Crossing the road may be understood as a political act to fulfil her desire for independence and to address social injustice.

Likewise, Tarni’s experience of parking her mobility scooter during a shopping trip articulates a version of mobile disability politics that is embodied and emotive.

You go into Big W or even Kmart for that matter, I’m thinking, “Oh, geez, is someone going to steal this thing or what?” You’re always think that. You’re always thinking someone’s going to steal it because all they have to do is lift that lever and they can push it anywhere … At the moment, I’ve got it [parked] under the stairwell. It’s not supposed to be there. Housing commission have already sent me a notice saying it’s got to be moved, but I can’t bring it inside because it won’t fit through my doors. I can’t put it inside my, I’ve got like a little garden out in front because it won’t fit through the gate. And where my gate is, it’s got two steps. I can’t get it up the stairs and I can’t get it through the gate. It’s just under the stairwell.

Tarni draws attention to how a mobile disability politics operates in and through spaces, bodies, and things, in this case the lack of secure parking, ramps and wide doors. Socio-spatial relations with the absence of secure designated parking spaces at the shops, and her house, created exclusionary affects. For Tarni, negative affective senses (e.g. anxiety and fear) around parking illustrate the contradictions between the happiness a mobility scooter can deliver and at the same time, not being recognised as disabled enough to require designated parking. Tarni’s sense of irritation around parking is a moment of cruel optimism that gives rise to a sense of injustice. As discussed by Fritsch (2013b), the affective force of negative molecular lines may produce moments in which to challenge the status quo and become a powerful, politically active subject. Tarni opts to break the molar lines that configure Housing Commission as ableist space and parks under the stairwell.

Finally, invested in the molar lines of independent mobility, Tarni illustrates how the molecular lines generated by the painful physical sensation of uneven pavements gave rise to a sense of social injustice:

The footpaths, oh my god, sometimes they are so uneven. When you’ve got arthritis in the spine, even you’re sitting in the mobility scooter, when you hit the bump, it shoots right up your spine. And you’ve got to slow down. I know now where most of the bumps are … One day I was going down, I hit a bump and it nearly took the steering wheel out of my hands. And I stopped because it just dragged my hands into the point where it was just awful. It hurt. I sat there for a while before I kept on going.

Tarni conveys how something is amiss travelling along footpaths by mobility scooter. Her experience of footpaths does not align with anticipated corporeal comfort. Following Bissell (2008), we conceive of corporeal comfort as an affective sensibility, an outcome of the relations between bodies and proximate objects. Regardless of the physical accessibility that the engineered pavement affords, the affective intensities of cracks that jar her arthritic body feed into her growing sense of discomfort that may be conceived as a molecular line. Tarni feels the paradoxical qualities of becoming independent journeying by mobility scooter on uneven footpaths. Tarni went on to discuss how her desire to wheel with ease often translated into journeying on the road instead.

There’s a lot of times I will go on the road where there’s a lot of cracks on the footpath. It’s not good being on the road, I know what people are like in cars. Everyone seems to be in a hurry. The last thing you want to be doing is holding up traffic. I don’t want to be responsible for that; I do keep to the left.

This moment reveals the importance of the affective consequences of molecular lines (pain, suffering) to enlarge capacities for political acts. In this case, Tarni challenges social norms and traffic rules by journeying on roads with cars. Yet, as Tarni notes ‘it is not good being on the road’. Tarni illustrates Berlant’s (2010) relation of cruel optimism, in which her affective attachment to the mobility scooter that sustains her independence, is at the same time an object that puts her at risk of serious injury by travelling in the public space of roads.

Max

Max is a single divorced dad of British ancestry, born in 1953, whose status as a driver fluctuates. Following a mini stroke, his driving licence was temporarily suspended. He currently wheels a mobility scooter. He spent his limited savings on a second-hand mobility scooter from Facebook Market Place, which is parked in his garage. He retired following a cancer diagnosis. The disability pension has been his main source of income for the past eleven years. He moved to Ballina from Brisbane almost two decades ago to affirm the social norms of what constitutes the ‘good’ retiral life for many white Australians by living close to the ocean.

Max illustrates how when driving a vehicle is no longer medically possible the affective and emotional experience of ‘driving’ a mobility scooter goes-without-saying and is conveyed as love:

I’ve had four mini strokes. If they take my licence from me, which is very, very possible, then you don’t get it back once they take it off you for mini strokes. You’ve got to try and anticipate what’s going to happen, because look, I’m 68 now, something is going to happen. If I lose my licence, I need a way around. I’m very independent, I love to be able to get myself around. I still drive, but I don’t drive much. So, happy to do it with a scooter. I don’t care if it’s raining, I’ll go out in the scooter.

Like Tarni, for Max the mobility scooter becomes a part of the affective molar lines that reinforce the independence, and self-reliance of the mobile neoliberal individual. He becomes a political subject, ensuring his ongoing independence through market relations: the purchase of a mobility scooter becomes an investment strategy for ageing well. Even the molecular lines of wheeling in bad weather are overcome by the affective joys of independent mobility. As Max explained:

There’s a lot of people out there that need one [mobility scooter] for their independence and mobility. Particularly, people getting on from my age onwards probably. I run into a lot of people in their 70s around the place. The thing it [mobility] gives them is, and you’ve got to have it [mobility], otherwise you lose your sanity, you’ve got to have independence. Independence is a big thing. When you lose your independence, it’s when people want to die. I lived in a nursing home for nearly two years, I watched them. It’s God’s waiting room. They just want to die.

Max conveys how sensations of immobility from living in a nursing home did not make sense, conflicting with his desire for independence and life. How Max framed how immobility may be conceived as a rupture line; without mobility there was only the prospect of immanent death.

For Max, his daily routine involves journeys along the accessible coastal path (Figure 1). He conveys the impression that this routine is taken-for-granted, following the molar lines that constitute his experience of being in nature with the ocean as therapeutic alongside other leisure pursuits, including photography (Bell et al., 2019). Importantly, his affective and emotional resonance with the molar line that constitutes coastal nature offers a way to think about how the politics of mobility may function to police racialised and classed societal borders more broadly. Lobo (2014) reminds us that there is a whiteness to ocean-going practices in Australia that operates as a racialising force, debilitating Aboriginal bodies in proximity to coastal spaces.

Figure 1. Protective mobile territories and mobile subjectivities.

Furthermore, Max conveyed a sense that something was amiss in wheeling on specific coastal paths with pedestrians early in the morning. In his words:

After lunch, I’ll head out again. I’ll go, probably, right out to the end of the North Wall, which I don’t normally do of a morning, because it gets very congested, a lot of people out there walking. I don’t like mixing with them, in case somebody makes a wrong step, and I don’t want to bowl anyone over … I’ll go out in the afternoon when there’s less people out there. And I’ll just go right out the end of the North Wall and have a look around.

Max gestures towards the taken-for-granted arranging principle of the molar line shared and expressed by pedestrians in the morning. Lacking the necessary wheeling skills required to move with pedestrians, Max makes clear the affective intensity of being at odds with, or ‘out of place’ in proximity to, the molar pace and flow of pedestrians. The molar lines that arrange the socio-material-affective dynamic of the accessible path in the morning include walking bodies and walking shoes rather than mobility scooters. Interrupting the affective arrangement of the morning pedestrian economy, the mobility scooter becomes a problem rather than an opportunity for becoming well or independent. The molecular line of felt experience disrupts Max’s understanding of himself and place: he doesn’t want to be there. This moment illustrates the contradictions of the accessible path. While people with power assisted devices may have physical access to the path in the morning, our focus on molar and molecular lines encourages an interpretation that points to the importance of the shifting arrangements of bodies, things and ideas. The status quo is maintained through the molar lines of able-bodied pedestrian formations. Max schedules visits in the afternoon when there are fewer pedestrians.

Andy

Andy, aged in his forties, lived in a coastal town some 40 km north of Ballina, with his partner (who is his primary carer) and two teenage sons. The ocean is central to Andy’s identity as a surfer and marine biologist. He was diagnosed in his early thirties with primary progressive multiple sclerosis. Andy uses a range of power assisted devices, paid for by the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Andy outlines how the contemporary production of disability is layered within the contradictory affective forces of mobility aids and the neoliberal imperative of self-reliance:

I used to be really, staunchly, like everybody with a disability; I think the desire for independence is the most important thing they’ve got … I’ve gone from resisting a crutch to resisting a walker, to resisting a manual wheelchair, to resisting a power chair. Everything was about resisting. I start to find I’m losing the strength to do stuff with my arms, and it was a hard decision to accept. But okay, I’ll take on a chair … And then it became, where I wanted to go was difficult to push, and so that’s when they transitioned to, “Okay, we’ll need a motorised wheelchair.”

For Andy, mobility aids originally induced anxiety and evoked a capacity to resist how disability is produced through pity and tragedy (Kolarova, 2012). The molar line of corporeal standards links mobility aids with ‘a diminished state of being human’ (Campbell, 2009, 5) evoking in Andy an affective politics of resistance. Invested in the molar lines of independence as a social good, the affective politics of mobility aids are embedded in his narratives of overcoming disability:

I’ve got a lot of wisdom on basically every stage of the decline that I’ve gone through. I do spend my time in public telling people, even ageing people who are going through knee operations, these kind of things, use the equipment. It’s there to help you.

As such, Andy illustrates how the affective molar lines of mobility aids to overcome disability are tied up with what Fritsch (2013a, 144) termed the ‘abelist turn towards healthism and the imperative for everyone to have intensively enhanced bodies’. As such, the affects of mobility aids circulated by way of hope follow the molar lines of neoliberal governance.

Power assisted device journeys to the ocean were particularly important to Andy in generating positive affects. Drawing on the notion of lines, his happiness is by how power mobility devices produce accessible coastal geographies that allow his disability to momentary disappear. For example, Andy conveyed the sensations generated through the socio-material working arrangements of beach-going by a four-wheel drive power wheelchair as ‘fun’ (Figure 1) in terms of becoming a family man. For Andy, the socio-material arrangement that comprises the beach is a place of happiness, organised by the affective molar lines of whiteness, gender and technology assisted able-bodiedness (Waitt, 2008). Likewise, Andy narrated the affective intensities from the socio-material arrangements of ocean-going power assisted wheeling practices along the accessible North Brunswick Heads break-wall path that enables his academic identity to fluoresce as ‘love’ and ‘joy’.

For me just getting out and about is just great. I love the bush and nature is paramount. You have to accept that it’s not the same experience of nature, but it is at least an approximation. To go out in nature, be surrounded by ocean, and they’re [sealed break-wall paths] fantastic. Just to be surrounded by ocean on both sides. That’s an enormous difference. Psychologically it’s huge. The joy is just palpable. Just to be in a different environment.

Andy illustrates how the ‘nature’ and ‘bush’ he encounters is already invested with positive affective value. Molar lines that organise encounters with nature as therapeutic orientate Andy’s body towards certain plants, animals, and the ocean. On this accessible path white, educated, middle-class bodies with prescribed power wheelchairs become part of the affective molar lines. In his words:

A lot of people like to talk to me, and even strangers, when whale season’s on, I’ll sit down and I’ll give lectures as to what’s going on, on the break wall. That gives me great reward, and … Yeah, to be of use, or to be … I don’t know, to be a counsel to others. And I can come back from a day out that has been facilitated by my chair. I can come back with a sore jaw, so you could say it’s a negative, but genuinely I’ll have ranted nonstop for four or five hours.

In the context of socio-material relations that comprise journeying on the accessible North Brunswick Heads break-wall path, affects circulate through how the power wheelchair momentarily overcomes disability. Andy narrates how the presence of his white, educated, power wheelchair body is not felt as a problem by strangers on this accessible path. Thinking with the notions of molar and molecular lines, the sensations generated by encounters with strangers, enhances the ease at which positive affects circulate in-between bodies, things, and ideas. Andy’s capacity to linger and talk with strangers is enhanced through a deepened sense of self as an educator, alongside constituting North Brunswick Heads as a satisfying place and natural environment.

Thinking through assemblage, wheeling bodies are orientated towards an array of objects which create liveable arrangements including ramps, elevators, and wider doors. Yet, as Dolmage (2017) argues, disability accommodated by the addition of ramps, as a retrofit, does not necessarily produce accessible geographies. For example, Andy’s felt experience of wheeling up a ramp deepens our understanding of how bodies, things, and ideas combine in various ways to generate an exclusionary arrangement. Reviewing a video-outtake of negotiating a ramp he explained that:

Unfortunately, our built environment is at odds with all the mobility equipment that I’ve gone through … I know if I’m going to go to the coffee shop, I’ve got to get up that ramp, that means I’ve got to tilt down to get up the pram ramp because it’s angle’s not quite 1:14, that particular one is bad. When you see those obstacles at shops and you go, “It’s someone’s thoughtlessness that’s done that.” You go, “Well … ” That does create a bit of ire. I know my particular territory. It’s very important. You become more disempowered when you’re in a new territory.

In the scene of negotiating the ramp to a coffee shop, it is the affective molar line of able-bodied privilege that is expressed in the territorial order of the retrofitted built environment. Andy illustrates Dolmage’s (2017) argument of how disability is felt and produced through the retrofitted ramp designed for access. Andy experiences anger at being overlooked and disempowered, his capacity diminished from the acute angling of the ramp. The molecular line of encountering the ramp reveals the cruel optimism (Berlant, 2010) of Andy’s attachment to the power wheelchair. On the one hand, the power wheelchair sustains his sense of pride, investment in narratives of overcoming and the allure of technology. On the other hand, the power wheelchair threatens his self-reliance and capacity to act. In his words ‘you become more disempowered’.

Andy went on to discuss fleeting encounters with other material objects in Ballina – heavy doors, uneven surfaces, curbs, and steps. In this context, molecular lines represent moments of affective and emotional intensity that offer clues to how he must constantly negotiate molar classifications of ableism in the built environment. In Ballina, to wheel is felt as judgment of disabled people as ‘second class citizens’ where he becomes ‘just another wheelie’. Andy describes how he responded to the felt injustice through his political advocacy for change to accommodate the widest range of human functions and forms in the built environment.

But I’m finding actually that when my voice is heard it’s really empowering and makes me thirst for having more input. I got invited onto another committee yesterday, which is the [local area’s] access committee.

Andy illustrates the significance of the concept of the molecular line in becoming a disability advocate. The shift in his capacity involved the negative affective force of coming up against deep-seated molar lines that territorialise, stratify, and divide public space along able-bodied lines.

Discussion and conclusions: embodied mobility, accessibility, and inclusion

In response to Hall and Wilton’s (2017) call, our aim has been to address the relative absence of embodied geographies to spatial understandings of disability. There has been limited attention in geography to the co-constitution of subjectivities and places through the sensations of power assisted devices. We draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concepts to conceive mobility as an ongoing process of negotiating the affective intensities produced by the coming together of ideas, bodies, and things into socio-material arrangements. The relational focus of Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking offers a provocation to think about mobile disability politics as always contingent upon sensations that enhance or diminish the capacity to act and sense, through the coming together of socio-material relations in working arrangements that comprise journeys. Specifically, Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notions of molar and molecular lines offer new insights into mobile disability politics as embodied, felt, and spatially situated.

In this article we deployed vignettes to discuss the experiences of three disabled people. Each vignette enhances our understanding what it means to be included and/or excluded from journeying by power assisted device through places at specific times. The prescription/purchase of a power assisted device does not guarantee inclusion but is dependent on how affective capacities to act and sense are increased or diminished. On the one hand, our co-researchers, differentiated by their embodied histories, illustrated moments when molar lines may serve molecular lines that enhanced their capacity to ride. For example, our co-researchers highlighted the way in which bodies journeying with a power assisted device combine with the affective logic of molar lines (including able-bodiedness, the neoliberal subject, natural environments, automobility, whiteness and gender) to create moments of enabling potential and opportunities to reaffirm a sense of self and ‘good’ routes. In these moments disability is no longer a problem. On the other hand, our co-researchers illustrated moments of felt disability where molecular lines intersect with affective molar lines that sustain auto-mobilised, gendered, and racialised ableist working arrangements and social hierarchies. These moments included the affective force of uneven surfaces, curbs, and absent parking facilities as well as those where disability is seemingly taken care of by building ramps, pedestrian crossings, and accessible paths. In these moments disability becomes felt as a problem. As a problem, our co-researchers illustrate how the upset may generate possibilities to open conversations for rethinking the production of disability and accessibility, and mobilising political advocacy. It is the transformative potential of affective intensities which enhance the capacity to sense and act that offers promise for rethinking disability policy.

Policy makers would do well to better understand the affective logic of wheeling practices that has the potential to improve accessibility to public space. The notion of lines calls for a shift in policy that moves away from thinking about disability as someone who needs special access. No longer can public space be categorised a priori as accessible or not. Our research illustrates how exclusion from public space does not depend solely on physical accessibility, but points to the importance of recognising kinaesthetic sensations. When attention turns to kinaesthetic sensations, embodied capacities to wheel, and mobile subjective becomings of everyday journeys, policy makers must be alive to bodily and technological differences and respond to the experiences and navigation tactics of different power assisted device users. To work towards more inclusive public spaces, future research must start by collaborating with disabled people to draw on their embodied experiences of mobility to augment understanding of their capacities to act, become and belong. At the same time, the concept of lines reminds us of the policy challenges of embracing embodied geographies. Current policy thinking is dominated by molar lines that produce disability and accessibility that is known, and solved, by the provision of things like ramps, lifts, and wide doors. In the disability policy context, embodied geographies may generate discomfort for some by how it calls for an understanding of disability as provisional rather than a fixed identity, and questions a predetermined list of disability objects as a solution to accessibility.

Acknowledgments

The research received ethical approval from the Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC no. 2019/502, University of Wollongong. We thank our research partner Assistive Technology Suppliers Australia for their ongoing support. Thanks to our research liaison, care professionals and mobility equipment retailers who helped with recruitment. And to all our co-researchers who shared their powered assisted device experiences living in Ballina Shire, New South Wales, Australia. We convey our sincere appreciation to four anonymous referees for their constructive feedback on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council LInkage Project entitled Integrated Futures for the use of Motorised Mobility Devices, Grant number: LP180100913.