Enacting reciprocity and solidarity: critical access as methodology


Eliza Chandler, Toronto Metropolitan University; Megan Johnson, University of Guelph; Carla Rice, ReVision Centre for Art and Social Justice; Elisabeth Harrison, ReVision Centre for Art and Social Justice

This presentation explores how disability studies research can mobilize critical approaches to access through methodology to carry out projects that disrupt “academic ableism” and create physical and digital spaces that anticipated non-normative scholars and co-researchers at the centre of knowledge exchange. Working with critical access studies, we offer three examples from our shared research programs. We discuss how we build research designs through an approach to access that moves beyond logistics to foster “cultures of desirability,” respond to “access frictions” which inevitably arise, challenge notions that researchers can and should be seeking out verifiable truths, and build towards crip-feminist futures.

This paper will be presented at the following session: