Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds

by Arseli Dokumaci

For people who are living with disability, including various forms of chronic diseases and chronic pain, daily tasks like lifting a glass of water or taking off clothes can be difficult if not impossible. In Activist Affordances , Arseli Dokumacı draws on ethnographic work with differently disabled people whose ingenuity, labor, and artfulness allow them to achieve these seemingly simple tasks. Dokumacı shows how they use improvisation to imagine and bring into being more habitable worlds through the smallest of actions and the most fleeting of movements---what she calls “activist affordances.” Even as an environment shrinks to a set of constraints rather than opportunities, the improvisatory space of performance opens up to allow disabled people to imagine that same environment otherwise. Dokumacı shows how disabled people’s activist affordances present the potential for a more liveable and accessible world for all of us.

Genres: Disability, Disability Studies, Nonfiction

336 pages, Hardcover

Published March 3, 2023

Reviews

[FluffyNyctea]

Gaps are never quite mended, normality never achieved. Rather, through mending one realises that the gaps of this world become portals; there, twirling and clasping beyond the norm are feelers of a more habitable world. Dokumacı offers activist affordances,

…the micro, ephemeral, and performative acts/arts of world-making with which disabled people must literally make up, and at the same time make up for, whatever affordances fail to readily materialize in their environments and their remoteness to perception. (pp. 104; original emphasis)

In an ethnographic example, during rheumatoid arthritis flare ups, in which she cannot lift up her arms and the hair-combing affordance of her comb thus becomes unavailable, Yasmin coordinates her body in such a way that she can use the comb without lifting her arms. Namely, it is through ‘the improvisatory space of performance (pp. 100)’ that Yasmin transforms the environment ᴀs ɪs, one that is inaccessible to her, into an environment ᴀs ɪғ, one that becomes more amenable only in the transient space of her performance.

Activist affordances ask not for material technologies, but for bodies to enact and sustain through performance even a fleeting moment of hitherto submerged affordances, to dance between presence and absence; not for mending the gaps of this world, but for ‘defy[ing], resist[ing], and counter[ing] … normativity (pp. 120),’ for finding in your very performance a different spatio-temporality – one that does not seek durable forms, but is always in-the-making, in ‘a continual search for accessible futures … yet to arrive (pp. 204; original emphasis).’

[Bouke Van Balen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Combining ecological psychology with activistic scholarship, Dokumaci shows how the micro is connected to the macro, and how inventive disabled people are in inventing their own worlds of action and perception. In our own shrinking world, this book is relevant for everyone.

[Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thought-provoking

[Sarah Hambly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't usually include academic books on my Goodreads, but this was too good not to capture! After months of engaging with this book alongside my research, I am excited and optimistic about honouring Dokumaci's and her participants honest reflections in my work. This was an eye opening account of so many experiences of what is means to be disabled in our world today.