Access Worlds

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course provides the tools for coming to an expansive account of "access" by examining its conceptual ambiguities and practical consequences for individuals, communities, institutions, and nation-states. Students will be invited to interrogate diverse scholarly perspectives on access that posit it as measurable entities, as empowerment and rights, as social justice, and as an ethnographic method to question and imagine otherwise. Through selected interdisciplinary literature ranging from ethnographies to policy documents to activist manifestos, students will learn to analyze how different conceptions of accessibility correspond to sociohistorical contexts such as the Euro-American postwar social development, the civil rights and independent living movement, de-institutionalization, and the globalization of the bio-psycho-social model as a legal framework of disability advocacy. In the urban context, how do cities become the precondition of our understanding of access? How do we think about access in relation to nature? This course prepares us to think about how visions, practices, and relationships of access influence the interventions that urban planners, architects, application designers, state bureaucrats, and activists make in the everyday lives of disabled people.