Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader ed Jos Boys

[jesse_the_k]

I was hopeful this very various anthology would spark some new ideas, as its mission statement is at the intersection of design-as-theory and design-as-practice.

If you have university access, you can read it online http://www.tandfebooks.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781315560076

For Interlibrary loan: Print and ebook

Three chapters made this jumbled collection worth reading; here's how you can almost read them if you don't have university access:

From Gallaudet Today, that university's alumni magazine spring 2007, Todd Byrd's essay “Deaf Space: Deaf Culture Meets Architecture in UD” dives deep into Deaf space: how designers can support visual learners and communicators. With helpful checklists: useful data to make even a temporary space Deaf friendly.

http://www.rollingrains.com/2011/04/reprinted-with-permission-deaf-space.html

“From Steep Steps to Retrofit to Universal Design, From Collapse to Austerity: Neo-liberal spaces of disability”

Jay Dolmage matches these three access attitudes with underlying assumptions about disabled people's place in the academy. An earlier version is available for download here: https://www.academia.edu/1244157/FromRetrofit_to_Universal_Design_From_Collapse_to_Occupation_Neo-Liberal_Spaces_of_Disability_

Dolmage's critique of a checklist approach to universal design is the first I've encountered. I strongly recommend it to any access activist working in our current climate.

In “The dilemma of inclusive architecture” Margaret Price demonstrates that disability presents a radical challenge to architecture due to its tendency to emerge unpredictably in spacetime. Price's personal experience with "mental disability" means her work, unlike too much of disability studies, considers more than physical impairment.

https://margaretprice.wordpress.com/writing/price-unshared-space/

Comments

THANK YOU!

[mdlbear]

The Margaret Price article was tough going (the jargon of academic architecture studies is not my native language), but it inspired me to look at -- and write about -- my experiences with depression as a disability. Especially with regard to accommodation, or rather the lack thereof.

This could be interesting.

Re: THANK YOU!

[jesse_the_k]

OH I AM SO GLAD IT RESONATED WITH YOU!

Margaret Price is such a smart writer. That essay is on the deeper end of her academic register: you may find her book Mad At School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life to be more accessible. (It's a thematically-linked series of essays.)

Or her "The Body-Mind Problem and the Absence of Pain," which is helpful cited and discussed at Allison Hitt's blog.

Any ways, the academic stuff is at the extreme of my comprehension as well, and I'm happy to chat about this in more mundane terms as well.