Museum Education for Disability Justice and Liberatory Access

ABSTRACT

This article engages crip theory and concepts from Critical Disability Studies to frame museum education through critical access and disability justice to center disabled, Mad, and neurodiverse audiences in public practice. The authors introduce and define key concepts and ask questions to cultivate liberatory access for museum education. Theoretical concepts include (1) critical access and “leadership of those most impacted,” (2) crip time and flexibility, and (3) curatorial care and collective responsibility. By engaging the work of crip knower-makers, we elucidate the ways in which these three areas can inform a politics of relation and pedagogical practices. In essence, we propose liberatory access and a pedagogy in solidarity with the disability justice movement, as a reorientation through which disabled people are not invited to participate in an able-bodied, inaccessible space, but where we all venture toward a world of solidarity to inhabit alongside one another.

KEYWORDS:

• Disability justice
• crip time
• liberatory pedagogy
• critical disability studies
• critical access studies
• museum education
• art education

Introducing the question of accessibility

We, the authors of this article, are current university professors and former art and museum educators, and we wish to begin this article by asking you to engage in a short exercise. Take a moment to think about your typical museum visitor—the person who, when you plan your interpretive or engagement work, you expect to see in the galleries, classrooms, public spaces, or on the other side of a screen. We expect that there will be a range of responses in terms of age, race, gender, familial relationships, socioeconomic status, and learning styles. But what about disabled, d/Deaf, neurodiverse, and Mad¹ visitors? While it is beyond the scope of this paper to document the myriad, complex experiences of all learners in museum contexts, we do wish to suggest disabled people are largely underrepresented, underserved, and neglected in most art museum practices, from access to participation to planning to exhibition curation and programming.²

We explore the implications of this exercise by considering how museum access for disabled visitors is often conceptualized as making accommodations for their visits—checking ramps, using amplified sound systems, or offering closed captioning on a film. While these are important practices, they focus on what educators and museum staff can do for disabled visitors, rather than with them. We suggest that museum staff engage in the practice of asking questions with those visitors whom we assume will benefit from accessibility as a way of unlearning deeply entrenched, ableist notions of accessibility. Concepts from critical disability studies undergird a process of seeking justice and liberatory access for those who desire experiences in museums—including critical access, crip time and flexibility, and (curatorial) care and collective access. We conclude with a set of specific thoughts and questions for museum workers to consider as they work at individual and institutional levels toward the formation of museum spaces, practices, and pedagogies centered in critical access and disability justice.

Many discussions around disabilities in public and cultural institutions begin with the questions Is this accessible? and How do we make this accessible? The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 is essential civil rights legislation protecting disabled people from discrimination in public spaces, programs, and public life including employment, education, transportation, and its framing of accessibility often remedies disability inequities by providing access. However, access in this formulation remains provided to disabled people by the museum, often adapting the “typical” museum to accommodate specific visitors’ needs.³

Patty Berne, Co-Founder, Executive and Artistic Director of the disability justice performance project Sins Invalid, argues

rights-based strategies often address the symptoms of inequity but not the root. The root of disability oppression is ableism [the belief the nondisabled people are superior to disabled people] and we must work to understand it, combat it, and create alternative practices rooted in justice.⁴

We consider how disability justice⁵ and critical access studies⁶ disrupt the limitations of framing access and disability through compliance,⁷ acceptance, and tolerance.⁸ To frame critical access,⁹ Aimi Hamraie builds from Patty Berne’s ten principles of disability justice:¹⁰

The disability justice movement, which is led by disabled people of color and queer disabled people, shifts the conversation about access from compliance to principles such as “intersectionality,” “leadership of the most impacted,” “anti-capitalist politic,” “cross-disability solidarity,” “interdependence,” “collective access,” and “collective liberation.”¹¹

As academics and educators, we have both experienced encounters with ableism and sanism¹² in museum contexts. While addressing policies and practices is important, what if a deep commitment to disability justice and critical access in museums means formulating more complex questions over the identification of “best” practices? What if the call to museum educators is to consider what sources and experiences inform questions around disability, the arts, access, and museum education? We propose that disability justice and critical disability studies are integral to the future of museums as they move from object-oriented institutions to socially responsive, radically inclusive organizations that recognize the complexity of visitor identity and lived experience.¹³

While it is important to consider a range of issues in relation to engaging audiences, it is first imperative to understand and situate our pedagogical practices as museum educators away from ableist orientations. Furthermore, it is essential that we position ourselves in thoughtful and authentic ways in these discussions. Centering disabled folks in the work of museum education necessitates asking who we are, individually and collectively. For example, consider the following: Who are your colleagues? Who are museum educators? Who are you?

We recognize the critical, political, and complex relationships between identity and language and diverse physical, cognitive, emotional, and sensory experiences. We use identity-first language (“disabled person”), reclaimed terms (e.g. Mad, Crip, and Sick), and the term “bodymind”¹⁴ (referencing body(and)mind as inseparable and entangled). When we use the phrase “disabled people,” we do so acknowledging that not all individuals identify as such, and suggest that readers encounter the term disability with the understanding that it is not homogenous, but a multiplicity.

Distinctions between person-first and identity-first language point to different ways in which individuals understand disability identity and forms of activism. Many people are taught to use person-first language (e.g. “person with a disability,” “individuals with cancer”) and some prefer to use person-first language when referring to their lived experience of disability. Those who prefer person-first language describe it as understood as “respectful language” that “puts the person before the disability,” and “describes what a person has, not who a person is.”¹⁵ However, advocates for identity-first language (e.g. “disabled person,” “autistic person,” “d/Deaf”) often frame disability as a cultural identity (“disability culture,” “autistic culture,” “d/Deaf culture”). Reclaimed terms such as Mad and Sick similarly seek to disrupt these terms’ pejorative histories, critically reasserting their use to frame collective experience and reject medicalized language.¹⁶ Similarly, the word crip is reclaimed, referencing the full word “cripple” which can be an action (cripping) and way of knowing (cripistemologies, a blend of crip and epistemologies). The multiple and complex ways language functions is important socially, politically, and culturally. Asking how individuals identify is a crucial practice.

The inclusive practice of forming questions: the problem with solving problems

Emphasizing the importance of posing critical questions, rather than simply making reparative suggestions, challenges the positioning of disability as a problem to be solved. Disability studies scholar and activist Alison Kafer describes disability as “a site of questions rather than firm definitions.”¹⁷ Disability and disabled bodies exist within a historical legacy of violence, harm, and oppression enacted through ableist solutions directed at the “problem” of disability.¹⁸ The social model of disability emerged from early critiques of medical and individual models, challenging the notion that disability is located in the individual—rather, it is the result of social and cultural barriers. Writer Eli Clare¹⁹ describes how addressing the “problem” of disability through cure, pity, charity, etc., privileges bodies that are whole, reproductive, cis-heteronormative, compliant, capable workers.

For museum educators and others in cultural and educational spaces, much professional development on accessibility amounts to an etiquette course that offers lists of specific actions to check off as they are completed. Such solutions most often perpetuate rather than address inequity, marginalization, and systems of harm, including institutionalization and the violence of eugenic histories. However, the underlying ideas inherent to each of these methods for solving disability problems linger in best practices and best intentions—even in museums. The normative expectations and standards of public spaces and education conform to and are produced through what artist and activist Aimi Hamraie calls the “normate template.”²⁰ For these reasons, fostering questions that consider whose expertise and what logic, knowledge, and experience²¹ begin with the integral practice of unlearning²² how disability’s meaning is produced in museum spaces and pedagogies. Furthermore, we urge museum educators who are not disabled to lean into a space of unknowing that provokes the kinds of reflective questions that may generate actions in the movement toward critical social justice for their constituents.

Activist Sara Hendren, designer of the Accessible Icon Project,²³ writes: “Problems are not ‘puzzles’ to be solved. That metaphor assumes that all the necessary pieces are already on the table, they just need to be rearranged and reprogrammed.”²⁴ Those with the most knowledge are often not at the planning table. Sara Hendren describes how transformation and change mean to “slog through the hard stuff … friction, a willingness to embody and suspend un-resolve.”²⁵ Unlearning ableism involves challenging normative bodymind privilege, particularly as disability oppression intersects with racism, transphobia, heterosexism, and more. Crip forms of knowing and making, including the work of artists, activists, writers, and scholars in our article, include tactics for “crip world-building,” for “unlearning” ableism,²⁶ and reimagining museums.²⁷

In the following sections, we introduce the work of Aimi Hamraie’s Mapping Access project; artist Shannon Finnegan; curator and educator Taraneh Fazeli; and multiple writers and activists including Mia Mingus to frame three concepts that emerge through disability justice. We consider how each of these individuals engage issues surrounding access in public spaces—including museums—through the arts, design, writing, and activism. We include reflection questions to enable readers, specifically museum educators, to engage these artists, writers, and activists’ work through their own experiences. The first three sections explore: (1) critical access and “leadership of those most impacted”:²⁸ (2) crip time and flexibility; and (3) (curatorial) care and collective responsibility. The article concludes with a discussion of Mia Mingus’ liberatory access. While our writing centers art and the advocacy that it can engender, the tripartite framework is applicable to the work of educators in myriad museum spaces.

Critical access and “leadership of the most impacted”

The disability justice principle leadership of the most impacted emphasizes “lifting up, listening to, reading, following, and highlighting the perspectives of those who are most impacted by the systems of ableism, racism, sexism, transmisogyny, colonization, police violence, and more.”²⁹ This principle asserts that disabled people are not “looking to academics and experts” for ways to challenge ableism and enact meaningful change. Disabled people are those experts. Aimi Hamraie’s Mapping Access Project centers the leadership of the most impacted to develop more complex understands of accessibility.

Hamraie’s Mapping Access Project prioritizes the critical practice of asking questions. Questions central to Hamraie’s project are also important for museums: “What is the architecture of inclusion? How do buildings, pathways, and design elements create inclusive spaces?”³⁰ If we “read” our built environment “as a text, what does [it] reveal about valued public citizens?”³¹ Hamraie contrasts what they describe as critical access studies to compliance-based access. Critical access prioritizes marginalized users as experts in defining accessibility needs, while compliance-based access privileges established regulations and policies as primary sources for meeting established “codes.” Hamraie’s Mapping Access Project³² is a critical, participatory, data collection and mapping project. The Mapping Access Project makes “the built environment (rather than disabled bodies) the objects of study.”³³ Marginalized users are “the experts who devise [the] accessibility criteria” that guides the project while “allies collaborate on data collection.”³⁴ Hamraie’s participatory methodology for mapping public spaces (e.g. college campuses, cities) uses critical crowdsourcing, community conversations, and user-generated surveys. During large-scale “map-a-thons,” participants record their experiences of accessibility and inaccessibility in public spaces. The digital maps integrate geographic information system (GIS) technology to layer multiple people’s experiences of accessibility and inaccessibility across the same physical locations. As such, accessibility becomes narrated with greater complexity. Rather than simply identifying the proper width of a door or that a building has a ramp, Hamraie’s participants identify “accessible entrances that lead to stairs.”³⁵ A building’s one all-gender bathroom is on the highest floor. The bathroom entrance is behind café tables in a public student social area. In this building, a person cannot have access to a bathroom that is both wheelchair accessible and an all-gender bathroom. Access that is intersectional includes lactation rooms, all-gender bathrooms, cultural centers, prayer rooms, and more.

In addition to leadership of the most impacted, Hamraie’s Mapping Access Project centers other key disability justice principles such as “intersectionality,” “cross-disability solidarity,” “collective access,” and “collective liberation.”³⁶ The Mapping Access Project invites museum educators to consider whose expertise informs their understanding of access and disability as well as presenting an important methodology and community-based practice. In museums, how do publics become homogenized and placed into discrete categories? How can “access-making” become a collective process? Those who participated in the map-a-thons were invited to discuss questions such as: What are the qualities of spaces that anticipate and include you on campus?³⁷

If museums were to be read as texts, what do they tell us about who are valued citizens? What do they tell us about whose expertise informs museum practices? Museum educators can use this project as a model for imagining collaborative strategies to collectively inform future practice, guided by the leadership of those most impacted for gathering information around access and inclusive spaces. Museum educators can facilitate community conversation in which participants identify “community-generated versions of accessibility codes, which can create new standards for accountability”—essentially, asking what makes the museum accessible and accountable, then sharing those observations broadly.³⁸ The questions that Hamraie uses are easily translated to a museum project: For example, What are the qualities of the museum entrance/gallery space/exhibition/program that anticipate and include you? What opportunities exist for you to collaborate with museums in designing engagement activities and exhibitions?

Crip time and flexibility: “it was hard to get here … rest here if you agree”

Imagine moving through a gallery or museum space and encountering bright blue benches or chairs with one of the following statements written on each one in large white print:

This exhibition has asked me to stand too long: Sit if you agree.

I’d rather be sitting. Sit if you agree.

There aren’t enough places to sit around here. Sit if you agree.

I focus better when seated. Sit if you agree.

It was hard to get here. Rest here if you agree.

Museum visits are hard on my body. Rest here if you agree.

Shannon Finnegan’s series of benches and chairs are installed in multiple museums and galleries as part of the series Do you Want Us Here or Not? (2018–2020). Finnegan’s work recalls sit-in protests, inviting “participation as an embodied argument” at the intersection of ableist expectations for bodyminds in arts spaces. Finnegan’s Do you Want Us Here or Not?—similar to Aimi Hamraie’s disability justice-oriented design—surfaces the limitations of compliance-based orientations. In addition, Finnegan’s work draws attention to aesthetic-driven ableist practices in which decisions regarding public spaces (e.g. how many benches are available) are dictated by the desire to create a particular type of aesthetic experience in the gallery that supersedes more available seating.

Finnegan’s work also invites important questions regarding how particular bodies and minds are privileged in museum and arts spaces. Finnegan’s benches invoke the concept and experience of crip time. Crip time emerges from within disabled, Mad, Sick, and neurodivergent experiences to describe how different bodyminds experience space and time. Alison Kafer emphasizes the importance of the “notion of flexibility (not just ‘extra time’) … reimagining our notions of what can and should happen in time.”³⁹ Crip time challenges normative and normalizing expectations of pace and scheduling. “Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.”⁴⁰ While Finnegan’s work references physical bodies in normative space and time, crip time also references diverse sensory, affective, and embodied experiences that inform our experiences of spaces and time.

While museum educators often consider access through the lens of the physical body (can visitors get through the exhibition?) and educational access (can a wide spectrum of visitors understand didactic panels, labels, or other interpretive materials?), extending consideration to account for myriad experiences of time and space can disrupt the perpetuation of normativity and create more flexible spaces for all the ways in which time may be experienced (how do visitors get through the exhibition?). For example, most exhibitions are carefully hung by preparators with standard processes (labels are x font, size, and color; midpoint of a 2-D work is 54″ from the floor, objects are placed to encourage movement in a counter-clockwise manner), but the educators and other staff who are most likely to interact with visitors have little input into these decisions. How might practices change if museum staff members collectively commit to more flexibility in the creation of public pedagogical spaces? How can the expertise of disabled museum staff and visitors become central to identifying normative policies, practices, and spaces in museums? What is the difference between prioritizing flexibility in comparison to retrofitting existing spaces and learning experiences?

(Curatorial)care and collective responsibility

According to Taraneh Fazeli, institutional critique is necessary to consider the role of curators in imagining access for disabled audiences in the public site of the museum, both temporarily and for the long term.⁴¹ She argues that the original etymology of the word curate (from the Latin for to cure or to care) suggests that their role is key in the construction of access in a space that is, arguably, a public site even as it is administered by an individual who is subject to an institutional hierarchy and is the product of a complex historical legacy. While she mentions the divergent ways in which curators and artists may enact care in exhibition spaces, she only very briefly brings up the potential for educators, visitor services, and other staff to interrupt or resist this singular commitment. She notes that her own curatorial work, for the project Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying, is an “attempt to dissolve the distinctions between artists, curators, and audiences to do justice to the creativity inherent in all beings”⁴² through myriad and intersecting artists, programs, and theoretical underpinnings:

Beyond merely representing the various political conditions around corporeal spaces of impairment, the artworks and programs in the project re-envision[ed] collective wellness: many of the artists with whom I plan to work, think, and feel consider how the leaky and porous body in states of debility and disability can provide new possibilities for collectivity, privileging interdependency while also negotiating and maintaining difference through radical kinship and forms of care.⁴³

We may consider her project as inspiration for the ways in which museum staff and administrations may work together toward liberatory access rather than deriving meaning from a singular curatorial vision. Museum educators might also consider comfort and care as objectives that can be facilitated in programming and exhibitions, along with other stated goals.

This is not to say that collective care is formulaic or that it relies exclusively on the creators of exhibitions—indeed, part of our work at the intersection of disability justice and critical access concerns the ways in which museum learners are conceptualized as participants and co-creators of their experience. For example, Shannon Finnegan and Aimi Hamraie create experiences toward disability justice, noting that their work centers disabled populations by inviting embodied critique.

Shannon Finnegan’s “Anti Stairs Club Lounge” was a temporary physical space for bodies to rest near Vessel (2019), a sculpture/experience/commercial space in New York City’s Hudson Yard, replete with 154 staircases that weave together to resemble a gigantic honeycomb. The Lounge was a movable space for all bodies to voluntarily opt out of physically participating in publicly inaccessible places (such as Vessel) by relaxing, snacking, reading, and wearing orange beanies with a “no-stairs” logo emblazoned on the front.⁴⁴ This project moved toward disability justice by noting inaccessible space and expanding the experience to a site of collective care for everyone, including those who could otherwise engage with both sites. It is not unusual for museum educators to consider the ways in which museum spaces, such as exhibitions, lectures, and programs, will be inhabited by various bodies. It is also quite common for public spaces in museums to be inaccessible to those same bodies. To move toward disability justice, educators can not only critique their own offerings, but consider how addressing and changing those spaces to care for all bodies might change the focus and the reception of other opportunities of engagement.

Toward liberatory access in museum education

Throughout this article, we introduce artists, activists, designers, scholars, writers, and critical publics whose work addresses accessibility through crip knowing and disability justice. Collectively, their work brings needed complexity to navigating questions such as What makes something accessible? And how do we know? Building from the writing of disability justice activist, Mia Mingus writes

we don’t just want to make things “accessible,” [we] want to build a political container in which that access can take place in and be grounded in … access for the sake of access is not liberatory, but access for the sake of connection, justice, community, love and liberation is.⁴⁵

For Mingus, liberatory access “challenges ableism,” “questions why a place was inaccessible,” and becomes “a tool to transform the broader conditions we live in, to transform the conditions that created that inaccessibility in the first place.”⁴⁶ To this end, what if access were not simply something that is “provided,” but rather what access can “do.”

Disability justice, as characterized by the performance project Sins Invalid, situates the disabled body—specifically “disabled as queer, as brown, as black, as gender non-conforming, as trans, as women, as men, as non-binary gendered”⁴⁷—as whole beings, who work for social and economic liberation. Their treatments of the disabled body—as whole, non-conforming, intersectional, productive outside of capitalism, and working in solidarity—may inform museum educators and other museum staff who question the ways in which they form a just, sustainable, interdependent pedagogy informed by disability justice. The following questions may be generative to consider as you work toward access intimacy for your visitors, audiences, and learners:

1. As you develop your public practices, consider how you are framing your work from the outset. Any work must be relational and rely on the expertise and participation of the museum visitors. Does it do more than consider or address—that is, does it center—the experiences of disabled, Mad, and neurodiverse learners? How does it frame them as more than simply participants, but as co-creators of their experiences?

2. Are your institutional staff and board members asking, “What pedagogical practices engender access, for whom, and under what conditions? … How can we know, according to what logics and forms of expertise, and for whose benefit?”⁴⁸ How are all members of the museum staff, from security guards to curators to registrars, open to knowing and responding to the myriad ways that people experience museums, particularly when they deviate from an unspoken but ever-present normative notion of the “ideal” museum visitor?

3. How are your practices conceptualized and realized so that embodied differences are celebrated and supported, rather than treated as suspect or an afterthought?

4. How do you demonstrate a commitment and respect to all bodies, disabled and otherwise, in your exhibition and education strategies? How does your work celebrate visitors, audiences, and learners exactly as they are?

5. How can shifting the questions we ask, rather than asking if our practices are “accessible,” yield new narratives? How does the lived experience and expertise of your audiences inform your decisions on their behalf?

Through our lived experiences in museums and the integral work of activists, artists, and crip knower-makers, we envision museum pedagogies and spaces that not only enable but support a space of critical, liberatory access that centers disabled visitors’ leadership. Thinking through public practice in terms of critical access and leadership of those most impacted; crip time and flexibility; and (curatorial) care and collective responsibility creates opportunities for connection and dismantling ableism through building community rather than treating disability in isolation in physical and digital spaces.⁴⁹

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

J. T. Eisenhauer Richardson

J. T. Eisenhauer Richardson, PhD, is an Associate Professor at The Ohio State University where they teach courses in art education, arts-informed writing, disability studies, art education, and critical access. Their research emerges at the intersection of genre-queer research/writing and neurodivergent, disabled, and Mad experience. Dr. Richardson’s recent work engages trans*/crip(neuro)queer temporalities, poetics, and spaces to inform critical engagement with the construct of normalcy, inclusive practices, disability studies in arts education, and research-creation. Dr. Richardson’s scholarship is grounded in a transdisciplinary foundation of social and cultural theory and philosophy.

Dana Carlisle Kletchka

Dana Carlisle Kletchka, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Art Museum Education in the Department of Arts Administration, Education and Policy at The Ohio State University and is the Faculty Director for the Museum Education and Administration Specialization. Her research areas include post-critical art museum education theory; professional development for PreK–12 teachers in art museum contexts; the use of social media and digital technologies on interpretation and engagement in the art museum; and the professional positionality of art museum educators within the profound paradigmatic shift of art museums over the last 40 years. In 2015, she was awarded the National Art Education Association’s Art Educator of the Year for the Museum Education Division.

Notes

1 See LeFrançois, Mad Matters.

2 For additional discussion of accessibility, disability justice, and cripping museum practices, see Brophy and Hladki, “Cripping the Museum”; Derby and Wexler, Contemporary Art and Disability Studies; Keifer-Boyd et al., “Disability Justice”; Kozyra, Meaningfully Engaging Visitors with Disabilities; Kuppers, “Nothing About Us Without Us”; Papalia, “A New Model for Access in the Museum”; Sandahl, “Review of Disability.”

3 See Brophy and Hladki, “Cripping the Museum”; Kozyra, Meaningfully Engaging Visitors with Disabilities; Kuppers, “Nothing About Us Without Us”; Sandell, “Review of Disability.”

4 Berne, “What Is Disability Justice,” https://www.sinsinvalid.org/staff.

5 Ibid.

6 See Hamraie, “Mapping Access.”

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 See https://www.mapping-access.com/lab, Critical Design Lab, Founded by Aimi Hamraie.

10 See Berne, “What Is Disability Justice”: Sins Invalid—a disability justice-based performance project—offers ten principles for disability justice: (1) Intersectionality, (2) Leadership of Those Most Impacted, (3) Anti-Capitalist Politic, (4) Commitment to Cross Movement Organizing, (5) Recognizing Wholeness, (6) Sustainability, (7) Commitment to Cross Disability Solidarity, (8) Interdependence, (9) Collective Access, and (10) Collective Liberation.

11 Hamraie, “Mapping Access,” 459.

12 See Richardson, “The Art and Politics of Artists.” Sanism refers to the privilege and power afforded to what is perceived as “normal,” and “healthy” neuro-cognitive experience and presentation and the systemic oppression and marginalization of neurodivergent people including those with experience of psychiatrization and other experiences of mental distress. See also LeFrancois, Mad Matters, “Sanism may result in various forms of stigma, blatant discrimination, and a host of microaggressions,” 339. Beresford, “‘Mad’, Mad Studies.”

13 See Kletchka, “Toward Post-Critical Museologies.”

14 See Price’s definition of “bodymind” in McRuer and Johnson, “Proliferating Cripistemologies.” See also Price, “The Bodymind Problem”.

15 See https://odr.dc.gov/page/people-first-language. Office of Disability Rights, Washington, D.C.

16 Beresford, “‘Mad’, Mad Studies.”

17 Kafer, Feminist Queer Crip.

18 See Clare, Brilliant Imperfection.

19 Ibid.

20 Hamraie, Building Access Universal Design, 19.

21 Ibid.

22 Nash and Price in McRuer and Johnson, “Proliferating Cripistemologies,” 153.

23 See https://accessibleicon.org. In the Accessible Icon Project, Sara Hendren and Brian Glenney actively resist the standardized public symbol of access—the white wheelchair icon on a blue background that casts disabled people as inactive. Rather, this public participatory design activist project began in 2009 with the creation of a graphic icon of an active wheelchair user in motion.

24 Hendren, “Against Re-Branding,” para. 12.

25 Ibid.

26 “Nash and Price” in McRuer and Johnson, “Proliferating Cripistemologies,” 162.

27 See Hamraie, “Mapping Access.”

28 Hamraie, “Mapping Access,” 459.

29 See Berne, “Ten Principles of Disability Justice.”

30 See https://aimihamraie.wordpress.com/socio-spatial-practice-2/mapping-access/ “Mapping Access Project” organized by “Aimi Hamraie.”

31 Hamraie, “Mapping Access,” 459.

32 See https://www.mapping-access.com/mapping-access-methodology/ organized by Aimi Hamraie.

33 Hamraie, “Mapping Access,” 470.

34 Ibid., 469.

35 Hamraie, “Mapping Access Toolkit.”

36 See Berne, “Ten Principles of Disability Justice.”

37 Hamraie, “Mapping Access Guidelines.”

38 Ibid.

39 Kafer, Feminist Queer Crip, 27.

40 Ibid.

41 Fazeli, “Accessibility in and Beyond the Quagmire of the Present,” 26.

42 Ibid.

43 Fazeli, “Notes for ‘Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying.’”

44 See “Shannon Finnegan and Aimi Hamraie on Accessibility as a Shared Responsibility,” Art in America.

45 See Mingus, “Access Intimacy, Interdependence.”

46 Ibid.

47 See Sins Invalid, “Mission Statement,” https://www.sinsinvalid.org/mission.

48 Hamraie, “Mapping Access,” 460–6.

49 See Finnegan, “On Community, Protest, and Public Space.”