Access as Practice: Disability, Accessible Design, and History
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As I draft this essay, a global pandemic fundamentally alters everyday life. Each day brings closures of brick-and-mortar archives, libraries, classrooms, and campuses; these and cancelations of in-person conferences and freezes on hiring have disrupted, narrowed, and foreclosed practices of historians. In the wider context of the United States, members of society experience in various ways the stress of reduced access to essential services and treasured amenities. In both corporate and social media, people weigh the benefits of access and of a return to work against the risk of loss of life.
The impact of COVID and the varied responses to this pandemic have brought into stark relief a truth that disabled, mad, and chronically ill people, and especially BIPOC and LGBTQ members of these overlapping communities, have long known: access is political. As two recent books on Universal Design and disability illustrate, access also is contingent, contextual, and shifting. In other words, it's historical. Uneven and inadequate access—to health care, transportation, shelter, and other sustaining resources—fuels an extensive lived history of inequality and oppression within and across U.S. borders.
In each of their works on the history and politics of designing and disability, scholars Aimi Hamraie and Bess Williamson render legible the ways that access embodies dynamic and fluctuating ideas about users, citizenship, productivity, independence, authority, and knowledge itself. Using examples from architectural and product design, these historians illustrate how the twin hammers of ableism and neoliberalism have shaped the contours of access and the material realities of disabled people and those in close relations with them, as well as nondisabled people. [End Page 618]
In presuming what a body should be, rehabilitation and medical specialists, policymakers, and architects across the nineteenth and early twentieth century defined and practiced access in intentionally narrow ways. Conforming to norms—the capitalist logic followed—reflected values of productivity, individualism, and fitness. In this context, the problem of disability resided primarily in individual people, as did its solution: disabled people were expected to adapt and assimilate in order to (partially) belong. According to Williamson and Hamraie, disabled people fundamentally rejected this view of access, disability, and citizenship. Particularly during the second half of the twentieth century, they increasingly demanded a new framework and more expansive access practices.
By critiquing the materiality of disability, these two books bridge the fields of disability studies and disability history. They also extend scholarship on access, Universal Design, and disability theory by scholar-practitioners such as Rob Imrie and Elaine Ostroff and historical works on disability rights activism by Katherine Ott, Paul Longmore, Lindsey Patterson, and Kim Nielsen.1
What is especially exciting about Hamraie's and Williamson's work is their attention to access as an historical process—what Hamraie calls "knowledge-making." As Hamraie explains, "Since the mid-19th century, specific relations of knowing-making—situated histories of embodiment, ideology, science, technology, and design—have shaped the possibilities for and the politics of accessible world-building" (p. 6). For these scholars, this history is part of the critical study of access as a constructed concept. In this regard, their work is immediately and powerfully relevant to all historians. The study of history is shaped by those who create access or deny access to historical data, interpretation, and transmission: What constitutes a valid source? Which information is authoritative? How is information legitimately stored and transmitted?
Often described as the building block of history, the archive molds historical knowledge: What sources are collected, preserved, how they are identified and disseminated, and who are the intended recipients reflect structures of power and opportunities to enact or resist social transformations.
Any historian (or moviegoer) can imagine a scholar undertaking an afternoon of intense study. Arriving at an archive—be it a grand edifice or nondescript hole in the wall—the...
