IN-PERSON: Learning. Life. Work

Abstract

The pandemic initiated a broad cultural shift towards opportunities for online work and social gathering. This shift responded to long-time demands from disabled people for more remote access, but did not contribute to histories of disability activism and community care. Drawing on recent scholarship in critical access studies, which suggests that we should bring a critical lens to the aims of access and that access always has the potential to make a critical intervention, we argue that hybrid/remote practices are necessary to facilitating access and social participation but could more directly contribute to the aims of disability and social justice movements. As practitioners who are broadly focused on higher education and participatory research, we understand remote access—across the contexts of work, activism, and leisure—to be a foundational practice for learning, life, and work, yet one that demands a critical perspective and an awareness of its connection to disability community. As such, our presentation will be structured as a conversation in which we reflect on our distinct contexts and practices, and describe the ways we enact critical access in our hybrid work, teaching, and research. Positioned from our three distinct but related areas of practice—classroom pedagogy, program facilitation, and community engagement—we discuss the potential and politics of including hybrid/remote components in these domains. We also share our experiences of the “access frictions” that can emerge from such approaches, investigating the ways such frictions can reinforce or exacerbate inequalities and social and economic injustices for disabled people.