Overview

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 Dokumaci draws on ethnographic work with differently disabled people whose ingenuity, labor, and artfulness allow them to achieve these seemingly simple tasks. Dokumaci 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. Dokumaci shows how disabled people's activist affordances present the potential for a more liveable and accessible world for all of us.

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9781478016601

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Reviews

"“In this exciting work Arseli Dokumacı offers compelling ethnographic interviews, journal entries, and her own experiences of difficulties with rheumatoid arthritis. Her accounts of the lives of her interlocutors are rich and evocative and form the basis for her idea of activist affordances: the everyday hacks that allow disabled people to manage the simplest of daily activities as they face a diminishing world of possible action and imaginaries. Addressing what it means to live with bodily challenges, Activist Affordances is critical disability studies at its intersectional best.” -- Faye Ginsburg, David B. Kriser Professor of Anthropology, New York University “Arseli Dokumacı reveals how people living with illnesses and disabilities navigate an inaccessible and ableist world by identifying the creativity, innovation, and resilience that goes into such navigation. Refusing the still-too-common notion that knowledge about disability is the province of medical experts rather than disabled people themselves, she brilliantly theorizes the accumulation of skills, negotiations, and hacks that disabled people discover to make their way in this world. And in this way, Dokumacı persuasively argues, they help concretize more accessible and just worlds.” -- Alison Kafer, author of * Feminist, Queer, Crip * ""Activist Affordances attunes readers to individual, everyday acts that could teach us how to create more habitable futures. Such a perspective opens new spaces for scholarly and political debates on activism, disability, and the preservation of the planet."" -- Kostadin Karavasilev * LSE Review of Books *"

In this exciting work Arseli Dokumaci offers compelling ethnographic interviews, journal entries, and her own experiences of difficulties with rheumatoid arthritis. Her accounts of the lives of her interlocutors are rich and evocative and form the basis for her idea of activist affordances: the everyday hacks that allow disabled people to manage the simplest of daily activities as they face a diminishing world of possible action and imaginaries. Addressing what it means to live with bodily challenges, Activist Affordances is critical disability studies at its intersectional best. -- Faye Ginsburg, David B. Kriser Professor of Anthropology, New York University Arseli Dokumaci reveals how people living with illnesses and disabilities navigate an inaccessible and ableist world by identifying the creativity, innovation, and resilience that goes into such navigation. Refusing the still-too-common notion that knowledge about disability is the province of medical experts rather than disabled people themselves, she brilliantly theorizes the accumulation of skills, negotiations, and hacks that disabled people discover to make their way in this world. And in this way, Dokumaci persuasively argues, they help concretize more accessible and just worlds. -- Alison Kafer, author of * Feminist, Queer, Crip *

Author Information

Arseli Dokumacı is Canada Research Chair in Critical Disability Studies and Media Technologies and Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University.

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