Arseli Dokumaci - Activist Affordances: Disability, Shrinkage, and Improvisation

For people living with disability, everyday undertakings may require ingenuity, effort, carefulness, and artfulness. This talk draws on visual ethnographies with disabled people living in Turkey and Quebec, tracing the immense labourand creativity that it takes for them to navigate the everyday. Bringing together theories of affordance, performance, and disability, it proposes “activist affordances” as a way to nameand recognize these extremely tiny and artful choreographies that disabled people have to doeach day for a more liveable world. Even as an environment shrinks to a set of constraints rather than opportunities, the improvisatory space of performance allows disabled people to imagine that same environment otherwise through activist affordances, presenting the potential for a more livable and accessible world.

ARSELI DOKUMACI

Canada Research Chair in Critical Disability Studies and Media Technologies, Concordia University
Author of Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds
Director, Access in the Making Lab

* The event will not count for the event requirement for Intro to WGSS students