Summary: Interrogating intersections between disability justice and the blending of natural/built environments
Description: Information and design professionals are concerned with ensuring that all people can access information and other media. As noted in prior modules, this area of study involves a number of complex and budding fields. We consider this module from the perspective of access to resources (environmental, human-built, or a combination) for all bodies and minds, disability in relation to perceptions of the environment, and toxicity in relation to notions of disability.
Since the 1960s, activists have led the disability justice movement in the United States as a civil rights issue. In the late 1990s, proponents adopted Universal Design methodologies to insert disability justice into the design of built environments. They applied this strategy to integrate the needs of people with disabilities into modern conceptions of public design thinking (Williamson, 2019). According to Levine (2013) and Hamraie (2017), advocates have defined Universal Design in the following ways:
- An “inclusive approach that benefits the entire population”
- Specific guidelines to meet “legal mandates” for accessibility targeted at disabled users
- A “market-driven concept” based on “contemporary societies with their diverse populations”
- A “civil rights issue focused on eliminating discrimination against one minority group”
All of these viewpoints share a common theme: most critical work in disability justice has focused primarily on relationships between disabled experiences and built environments, not natural environments. This module emphasizes significant blending between built and natural environments as we seek proper ways to place disability within complex situations.
To inform this module, we offer analysis inspired from an anthology by Ray, Sibara, and Alaimo (2017), entitled Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory. The anthology’s summary indicates its use of interdisciplinary thinking to examine “ways in which the built environment privileges some bodies and minds over others” and “ways in which toxic environments engender chronic illness and disability or how environmental illnesses disrupt dominant paradigms for scrutinizing ‘disability.’”
The two dominant disability paradigms are the medical and social models. Shakespeare (2017) defines these models: “The social model requires understanding some key dichotomies, the first of which is that an individual impairment differs from the social construction of disability that might surround that impairment. The earlier medical models tended to focus on disability as an individual deficit to be cured, but the social model identifies disability as a culturally and historically specific phenomenon. Additionally, the social model distinguishes between disabled people as an oppressed group and the non-disabled people that are the causes or contributors to that oppression.”
The social model focuses acute attention on contextual and systemic factors that interact with disabled experiences. But these disability paradigms take on new meaning when juxtaposed with blended environments that are neither wholly built nor wholly natural. How can disability justice movements achieve important and necessary civil rights goals in light of these complicating factors?
We increase this tension by highlighting human contributions to environmental toxicity that remake and challenge conceptions of disability. For example, Lécuyer (2017) analyzes labor and toxicity in Silicon Valley semiconductor fabrication plants in the 1980s. Fortun (2004) explains how in the wake of the Bhopal disaster, disability becomes a one-dimensional object to invoke pity and spark change. Fraught environmental realities challenge the value that justice movements assign to disabled experiences. In Chapter 2 of the anthology, Valerie Ann Johnson distills this conflict: “What is not seen is the implicit assumption that we want healthy environments so that we do not end up damaged (i.e., disabled)” (Johnson 2017: 77). Tensions arise when people’s disabilities take on various forms (hereditary, acquired, temporary, contextual) and when the quality of their lives is driven by privilege and accessibility (or lack thereof). These areas are ripe for additional thought, research, and discussion.
Readings:
Fortun, Kim. “From Bhopal to the informating of environmentalism: Risk communication in historical perspective.” Osiris 19 (2004): 283-296.
Hamraie, A. (2017). Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Retrieved April 30, 2019, from Project MUSE database.
Johnson, Valerie-Ann. “Bringing Together Feminist Disability Studies and Environmental Justice.” In Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory. Edited by Ray, Sarah Jaquette, Jay Sibara, and Stacy Alaimo. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017.
Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.
Lécuyer, Christophe. “From Clean Rooms to Dirty Water: Labor, Semiconductor Firms, and the Struggle over Pollution and Workplace Hazards in Silicon Valley.” Information & Culture: A Journal of History 52, no. 3 (July 20, 2017): 304–33. https://doi.org/10/gfzshx.
Levine, Denise. (2013). Universal Design. New York (Buffalo, N.Y.: Center for Inclusive Design and Environmental Access), 8.
Ray, Sarah Jaquette and Jay Sibara, “Introduction.” In Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory. Edited by Ray, Sarah Jaquette, Jay Sibara, and Stacy Alaimo. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017.
Shakespeare, Tom. “Chapter 13: The Social Model of Disability.” In The Disability Studies Reader. Compiled by Davis, Lennard J. 5th ed. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017. Web.
Williamson, Bess. “Introduction: Disability, Design and Rights in the Twentieth Century. Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design. New York: New York UP (2019): 1-16.
Discussion Questions:
- In what ways might Universal Design methodologies have unforeseen negative effects on natural environments? Who could be involved in remediating these effects and how?
- What actions can environmental justice activists consider in order to account for situations of toxicity that lead to “preventable” disabling or illness?
- How can we leverage the valuable work of disability justice to challenge the assignment of “damaged” identities to people?
- What are the “correct” ways to use resource-intensive infrastructure to support people with disabilities?