disability

But when an activist affordance is choreographed, it is as if “inhabitable worlds” were already built, as if such “accessible futures” already existed, except that they exist in our actions, performances, and unfinished makings, not in some concretized object or infrastructure that may or may not be available in the locations that we happen to

We need a disability scholarship that moves beyond the question of how the built environment disables people, as the mantra of the social model goes, to how humans themselves injure and disable the environment through their crippling and destructive activities of building and unbuilding—activities that exacerbate the precarity of already disabled

Activist affordances bend the seemingly fixed forms, sand the hard edges, and give movement to the rigid layering of the world AS IF it were habitable, in as yet unimagined and undreamed-of ways.

I propose the theory of activist affordances in order to name and recognize the tiny, everyday artful battles of disabled people for more livable worlds that otherwise remain unaccounted for.

My main access to the esteem of my peers—who were, with few exceptions, mostly young, white, able-bodied men with family money—was in how little I had despite how hard I worked. This, plus my disability, plus motherhood, bathed me in a tragic light, which, if I stepped into it just right, lit me up with the look of moral superiority. I could wield

they hope that their child’s hearing age will eventually “catch up” with the child’s chronological age—an achievement that depends on the mothers’ “hard work” (in Hindi, mehanat).

This mother’s statement reveals a central theme and tension in this book: despite the increasing presence of cochlear implants, the futures of implanted children are unknown. What can an individual implanted child become, and to what extent are that child’s current paths and future trajectories shared with other deaf people with or without cochlear

Dividing the senses into discrete categories is both an act of care and a form of violence, a way of both creating and inhibiting the wholeness of people’s lifeworlds.

Cochlear implants provoke difficult questions about the boundaries between ability and disability, passing and becoming, and deaf and hearing.