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This is a hybrid event - you can join us online or in person.

Celebrate the release of Arseli Dokumaci’s book!

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 clothes off can be difficult if not impossible.

In Activist Affordances, Dokumacı draws on ethnographic work with differently disabled people whose ingenuity, labor, and artfulness allows them to achieve these seemingly simple tasks. Dokumacı 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 that she calls “activist affordances.” Even as the 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. In this way, Dokumacı shows how disabled people’s activist affordances present the potential for a more liveable and accessible world for all of us.

Books can be ordered directly from Duke University Press at 30% off with code: E23DKMCI

https://www.dukeupress.edu/activist-affordances

About the author

Arseli Dokumaci is Canada Research Chair in Critical Disability Studies and Media Technologies and Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University. She directs the Access in the Making (AIM) Lab, a research unit run by researchers, artists, and activists who work on issues of access, disability, environment and care through research and creative experimentation. For more about AIM Lab, please visit: accessinthemaking.ca

About the event

This is a joint event between the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health, and the research groups Culture, Medicine and Power and Mental Health and Society, both within the Department for Global Health and Social Medicine at King's College London.

You can join us in person or online. Register your free place here:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/activist-affordances-how-disabled-people-improvise-more-habitable-worlds-tickets-600170535227

Event details

Council Room, K2.29, King's College London Strand London WC2R 2LS / Zoom
Strand Campus
Strand, London, WC2R 2LS