Episode 52: Contra* Sex and Intimacy with Brian Lobel

The podcast introductory segment is composed to evoke friction. It begins with the sound of an elevator crunching as it goes up. A robotic voice says “floor two.” Then music with a mysterious tone comes on. A series of voices define Contra. Layered voices say:

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Contra is friction… Contra is texture… Contra is questions…Nuanced…Collaborative…Contra* is world-changing…Contra is innovation, messy, solidarity, interdependence…Contra is thinking about design critically. Contra is a podcast.

 

Throughout, there are sounds of typing, texting and Zoom being opened. 

Then an electric guitar bass note fades into the sound of a digital call ringing and starting. The intro ends with the sound of a Facetime call ringing and then picked up.

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Brian Lobel:

I was diagnosed with cancer in 2001. I mostly finished my cancer, kind-of-worlds, about a year later. But found myself really dedicated to doing work about the cancer experience. Particularly as this is a community - one of the reasons it has a challenging relationship with disability is that people with cancer are often pressured to leave the cancer community if they’re cured. 

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[Bright pops. Strings ripple under Aimi’s voice.]

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Aimi Hamraie: 

Welcome back to the Contra* podcast. I’m your host, Aimi Hamraie. Just so you know, this episode is about sex. So if you don’t want to know about that, it’s okay to skip this episode. On this season of Contra* we’re drawing on the Remote Access Archive, a free online archive that documents how disabled people and communities have used technology for remote participation both during and before the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Today’s episode features an interview with Brian Lobel, co-founder of the Sex with Cancer project. It was recorded by Kelsie Acton on March 22nd, 2023 via Zoom. Brian and Kelsie talk about the role of telephone hotlines and internet in disabled and queer sex advocacy. 

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Brian Lobel:

I’m Brian Lobel. I am originally from upstate New York and I currently live in London, UK. I’m white, Jewish. And gender, male. He/him pronouns. I’ve got gorgeous curly brown hair. I’ve got - today I’m wearing a shirt with a blue stripe diagonal, a big swooping aquamarine diagonal, like a beauty queen sash, but it's just on a shirt. I’m white, Jewish, with a big nose. I am most comparable to the cartoon character Linguini from the movie Ratatouille. 

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Kelsie Acton:

Amazing. This is Kelsie doing this interview. I’m a white woman in my late 30s. Long brown curly hair. And I’m, as usual you can see the very grim-magnolia-yellow I think is the word for that, of my London flat.

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Do you identify as a disabled person or a person with a disability?

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Brian Lobel:

I do not.

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Kelsie Acton:

And do you consider yourself to be part of community or disability culture?

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Brian Lobel:

Yes. I’ve started doing the work that we’re going to be talking about today when I was diagnosed with cancer 20 years ago, I’ve been working as a patient advocate, patient experience advocate for 20 years. And most of my PhD work was related to how we can use disability frameworks to understand the experience of illness. Sometimes disability includes illness and chronic illness, but I also think there are very distinct differences that happen. I’ve also been part of the disability community for a long time now. It’s the community that I work closest with, it’s the community that my friends are most related to, and it's where my heart and politics are most aligned. So, I’d like to believe so. And I hope that people who define around being part of the disability community would say that I was a part of that community as well.

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Kelsie Acton:

Brilliant. So please tell me what Sex with Cancer is.

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Brian Lobel:

Sex with Cancer is a project that I co-founded with my colleague Joon-Lynn Goh. We started this project kind of formally in 2018. Sex with Cancer premiered in 2021. And what Sex with Cancer was and is, is the world's first sex toy shop dedicated to cancer patients and those who they love and or wanna have sex with. I give it the very quick strapline of saying, it's the world's first sex toy shop for cancer patients. It's a lot more than that. It was an attempt to open up the conversation between cancer and sex positivity, sensuality, intimacy, etc. 

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As I said, I was diagnosed with cancer in 2001. I mostly finished my cancer-kind-of-worlds about a year later, but found myself really dedicated to doing work about the cancer experience. Particularly as this is a community - one of the reasons why it has a challenging relationship with disability is that people in the cancer community are often pressured to leave the cancer community if they're cured.

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So the question of cure comes up a lot in disability discourses, but I think something with cancer is that there is this question of, I've survived, I no longer have cancer, I no longer define as part of this community. I wish to get out of it as quickly as possible. So cure holds a really uneasy relationship with where disability discourses are. Of course, the reason why cancer patients are obsessed with the question of cure is, without it they will die. So they wish to see their world through a medical model of experience, whereas most disabled people will have a relationship with the medical world but are mostly disabled by society's inability to make reasonable adjustments for them. 

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[Upbeat, jazzy chords]

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Kelsie Acton:

So it's the world's first sex toy shop for people with cancer and their lovers and other folks. But you said it's also more.

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Brian Lobel:

Yeah, we used to say it was the first sex story shop for cancer patients and their admirers. But then it sounded a little bit fetishistic. I didn't see that, I actually love the idea of someone admiring my body with its scars, it's weirdness. You see a lot of people who don't want to be fetishized, but there's also something about finding that lover that loves your body where it is. Now of course the extreme of that is fetishization but actually saying, actually, I like you appreciating my scars, I like you liking my growths or my amputations or, you know, if I lose my hair and you like the soft skin like – there's something beyond the fetishizing-or-not-liking dichotomy or binary. So when we started the first world's first sex toy shop with cancer we realized that it needed to be something that was seen from a number of different angles. 

So Sex with Cancer was originally going to be an in-person installation and we raised money accordingly. We were supposed to start in March 2020. We were very quick during the pandemic, when the pandemic was on the horizon, we said you know what, this is not happening as a full in-person installation. And of course the UK kind of art scene is predicated on this touring model, which we had set up, and we said, that's not happening. This is – it's not that – the world might go back in 6 months. Of course, everyone thought that or we were hopeful of that, but we knew very quickly that getting cancer patients or people with any kind of compromised immunity in a space together was just not gonna happen. What was interesting is that when we were setting it up it also was like, Oh, my god! People go to the internet for sex advice, I don't know why anyone would think that people want to come to a public space to have a conversation. People don't go to sex therapists. They don't talk to their doctor in-person about it. They're much more comfortable talking and researching about sex on the internet. But of course, what's on the internet is bad. 

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Well in the world of cancer, what you have on the internet is almost exclusively fertility preservation and sexual function. So you can find a lot online about erectile dysfunction, how to save your eggs, how to save your sperm. And of course when I had testicular cancer, fertility preservation was always part of the conversation. As being a queer twenty-year-old – it was a different conversation that my body was needing to have. But we really found that there was a huge gap in people talking about sex positivity, body change, intimacy, kind of the mourning that one is allowed to do about a body that is lost, the adjustment into a new body, and one that is filled with pleasure and possibilities as opposed to scars and vaginal dryness and erectile dysfunction, which of course is true for a lot of people with cancer. But we're just trying to reframe the narrative. 

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So we did that in a number of different steps. So I'll just jump into the particularities of Sex with Cancer. When we decide that it was going to be an online space, we realized that it had to be a multi-kind-of-disciplinary ask. So number one the sex toy shop is a sex toy shop. We work with Sh! Women's Emporium, which for the last now probably 20 years, has been answering people's sex problems. Your local sex toy seller is always more knowledgeable than your doctor or nurse about problems with sex, because they've been curing people's sex problems for centuries. So we partner with Sh!, who'd been doing that in an informal capacity, that kind of work. We collected the top over 500 questions related to sex and cancer. And then we narrowed that down, I think that we have 14 questions that we ended up dealing with. And then running each of those top questions – look 500 questions, a lot of them coalesced around a number of themes. So that we might not have dealt with the very specific, specific, specific. We kind of generally themed the questions, that we then posed to patients, nurses, sex therapists, sex toy sellers, and a few different other professionals are in there. 

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We wanted, instead of thinking of the internet as a space that gives a definitive answer, thinking of opening up the possibilities of a lot of expertise. Joon-Lynn and I are not sex toy experts. We are not – we haven't worked in that world of sex positivity for a long time, where there's a lot of people who have done that great work over many years. And instead of thinking like, we have to become the only experts, we are thinking of how do we form this from a patient experience of wanting a multitude of voices? And saying, you know what the nurse is very right on things, but it was really the sex therapist whose insight got me the right way. People are as unique as their circumstance, their family, their sexuality, their cancer diagnosis. So the first section that we have around sex with cancer was this “ask function” which was collating these questions, getting them, spinning them through a lot of different voices, and then a lot of those connecting to a product. We make very little money off of the shop – it's a link like most influencers would use a link and they make a little profit. That's not what we aim to do, but we aim to solve the problems that can be solved with a lubricant, solve the problems that can be solved with a dilator, solve the problems that can be solved with a tickler, these are things that if someone is struggling instead of them undergoing £500 worth of therapy, private therapy in the UK right now, to then come up with a solution and say, you know what? Try a lube. Try a dilator. Get on a journey of interest. So that's why the shop is there. It's less about us becoming billionaires, because we really didn’t.

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The next piece of the puzzle was a number of art commissions that we did. This was because we – what we understood when we looked into the community, we realized that there were not a lot of stories, and not a lot of voices. And when a doctor tells you, if you're a breast cancer patient who's on Tamoxifen, you'll experience vaginal dryness for the rest of your life. That's a fact that you can read online. What does that look like? What does that feel like? If you are a man who has prostate surgery, you will probably have erectile dysfunction for at least some of your life, if not the rest of your life. And if you're a 50 year old man you might decide that's not good enough actually for you. And so we decided to find some really amazing artists to work with. And we commissioned work particularly around a group of heterosexual men who had been working on questions around prostate cancer, a group of women dealing with their own questions of pleasure as their body changes, those are women 40 and up, which is also voices that you don't often hear. And then we also worked with a group of young people that called themselves the Candid Cancer Collective that made a zine around young people's experience of sex and cancer.

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Joon-Lynn and I both also created art commissions. Joon-Lynn, a really beautiful essay about what it means to run a business that's related to health, and mine was the Sex with Cancer Conversation Competency Certification exam, which is a tongue-in-cheek way for people to become certified conversation holders about challenging topics. So these commissions, which still live on our websites, are about expanding the conversation, giving voice to voices that aren't often heard. 

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And then the final piece of the puzzle was we did nominations for Sex with Cancer National Champions, and we found one who is a therapist who works in Edinburgh, and one who runs Macmillan Cancer Center in Northwest London. And we asked people, who are the best people working inside of health? There's so much patient-led work that is just talking about how shit doctors are. And bad experiences with doctors and nurses are legion. Legion. But we were like, there are also really good people doing this work, or people are trying to do this work. Can we amplify these voices? 

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So for me, it's the questions, the answering, the products, the commissions, the medical world, that is trying to create a bit of noise in the sector. And that is what Sex with Cancer is. I know it's a very long answer to a short question but that's what it is. And right now we're just figuring out the next steps, for who will helm that project, beyond Joon-Lynn and I, are transitioning away from it. But we're looking for new cancer-led organizations that wanna take that model up and we would transition that in with them. So that's what we are. 

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[Upbeat, jazzy chords]

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Kelsie Acton:

So you've talked a little bit about the idea and the need. When did you and Joon-Lynn decide to start working on this?

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Brian Lobel:

So I've been working on cancer work since 2003 really actively. I toured the US and Canada with my show to medical schools. I did my PhD on cancer and performance. My twenties were dedicated to telling my own story about cancer. My thirties were about collating other voices and empowering other voices to kind of tell their own stories from a number of different angles. And then my forties, which I've just started, I'm just 41 now, is really about trying to round that work to really make sure it lasts and it sticks. 

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So I started thinking about the question of sex and cancer, 2014. 2014 I became a Wellcome Fellow. Wellcome used to have this amazing fellowship, the world was your oyster, and it was tons of funding and tons of access. And I was like, I'm really interested in why the world of cancer is, so bad at talking about sex. Obviously one of the main reasons why is because cancer is currently dealt with via a charity model. Right? So cancer charities raise their own money. It's very different than other parts of the NHS or other public healthcare initiatives, and we are, the cancer community is, seemingly okay with relying on Macmillan or Cancer Research UK or Maggie's or Teenage Cancer Trust. And with due respect to those places, if they didn't exist that cancer world would collapse because of how it's been. But the danger when something is raised money on, and this is what disability activists have been talking about for ages, which is that like, we don't want your charity, we just want justice. That's all we want. You know a ramp is not charity. It helps, it enables me access to the world, and it also will be helpful for everyone else in the world. It's very simple.

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So what Barbara Ehrenreich’s work really highlighted in the early 2010s, like the policing of positivity, and that really related to fundraising, it's the same thing that my cancer work, which was looking at Lance Armstrong as a –

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Kelsie Acton:

Oh, my god!

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Brian Lobel:

I knew that there was something wrong with him before – I think it was 2013 that he was finally outed but I knew that there was something wrong with his leadership. We had very similar diagnoses, we had the same medical team. But that idea of bigger, stronger, faster after cancer, I knew was a lie. This is all the reason why charities are a problem. 

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So I reached out to Cancer Research UK, who was not interested in talking about sex or doing anything with sex toys. Macmillan was not interested. Teenage Cancer Trust was not interested. And I found this amazing woman, she was working in London at the time, she works in Oxford now, and she had written a book, a pamphlet on sex with cancer – sex and cancer – sexual function and cancer for young people, because she was a teenage cancer nurse. They would not let her publish it. Or rather they would let her publish it after it went through all their legal things around safeguarding. Because, of course, with teenagers you have some young people who are above the age of consent and some who are below. And she was like, I'm just trying to get people information that they need, that’s all I'm trying to do. Which, of course, that's the struggle of anyone who works in sexual health for young people. But I was like, Oh, my god, this is so infuriating! 

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So I started a few events. Sex Cancer and Cocktails in 2015 - 2016, that was part of my Wellcome residency, and then it kind of quieted down a little bit. And then Joon-Lynn was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2018. We're very good friends. We've known each other for a long time. She's also got to be one of the most genius cultural producers and kind of thinkers and activists in the country. She very beautifully rejected a MBE a number of years ago for her work with refugees. She’s brilliant, brilliant. And when she was diagnosed with cancer, of course I went and say, how are you? But should we also start a business? And I don't know why I did that. But she was just like, yeah, Brian, why don't I do this treatment first, and then let's sort that out later. So that's really where it started. And we started thinking about the frame and the form of what it would be, 2019, and Joon-Lynn's work is really embedded in community responsiveness, antiracism work, anti-xenophobia work, anti-Asian hate crimes, and a lot of activism that she was doing in her own life. We're thinking about, how can we create something that feels useful, forward thinking, embedding all of our values that we have, and fun. And actually, while the pandemic was in it's kind of most early phase having this project was such a joy to be working with because we were doing a lot of zooms, it was really meaningful, we were connecting with a lot of people. 

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Just trying to think about, how can you set up a business – a “business”, but it's an artwork, but it's framed as a business. Because actually art is too related to charity and pity. And we know that – “business” – we're going to make money, we want to make money on it. And if you just articulate that, and you say, you know what, it's the way a lot of patients understand access to the work. They don't want something that's pity by default. They’re like, you know what, you're recommending a product? I'll spend £16 on a dilator set. Okay, let's do it. Why not? In the same way that a cancer patient would say, you know what? Today I'm going to buy a really nice shea butter for my hair, or I'm gonna really indulge in a scented pillow. We're really far away from seeing where the NHS or any medical services provide them, and in that absence we can fight for that for sure because holistic care and all those things feed into positive mental health during a cancer experience. But we also know like, come on, capitalism also is a frame that people understand: I buy this, it fulfils something for me. So we were kind of playing with that. Anyway, that's another long answer to a question. I'm sorry.

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Kelsie Acton:

No, it's brilliant. 

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[Upbeat, jazzy chords]

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So I wanna circle back to the idea of the website and the remote aspect. You've talked about how creating work online, as opposed to taking this as a touring installation around, removed some major barriers around COVID. It also removed some barriers around people's shame and stigma. Has there been anything else that having this live online has enabled?

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Brian Lobel:

It felt like the easiest way to speak to the audience that we wanted to speak to, not asking them to go anywhere, not asking them to identify themselves publicly around a sexuality, around a gender, around an illness. 

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It was interesting, because the questions if you look at them, there's a number that talk about sexual function: erectile dysfunction, scars, scar pain, back pain, etc. But there's also a lot that’s related to shame. A lot that's related to shame. And also a lot that's about adventure. And actually the amount that people think that they're like, I feel embarrassed about my body, or I don't want to be touched, or I'm too exhausted to be touched. There's a lot of shame wrapped up in those things. And people would have a hard time speaking with strangers, unless people are committing to being for a day in a space where you can do all that kind of gentle work.

But also I think people would not share the kind of adventure that – there's a question in there that says like: you know what, ever since my cancer I've decided I really want to be in an open relationship, how do I start that conversation? Ever since I started cancer I would like to start engaging in anal sex. They will never say that in person. Now I wish that we lived in a bigger, better world. But also those are questions of what personal kinks are, they demand a level of safe space that's just really hard to make in a long space, you can't just drop in. Our original idea was a drop-in space that you could be gently led through a process. It's impossible with this work. It's so quiet, it's so intimate that actually I think it's less about the face-to-face and more about the face-to-face doesn't enable a 12 hour engagement. So this way and the performance that I made for the commission, which is an online game, it takes about between 20 minutes and an hour and a half. But you can take 20 minutes, or you can take an hour and a half. And that's really hard to do in public. People like – particularly related to the arts – they like a start time, they like a finish time. That's just not the way people want to have conversations about sex. The reason also why doctors and nurses can often be really bad at this work is because they have to do an appointment in 7 to 20 minutes.

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And no matter what you do – part of our goal and I'm not sure if we got there yet with Sex with Cancer was – what we want it to be – because it was originally called fuckingcancer.com, which I still think is a great name, but the problem with it is that a doctor would never hand out a business card that says fucking cancer on it, which I understand. 

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But we want to put the card for Sex with Cancer in every cancer patient’s packet. Because we also know that when someone has said: you have cancer, that malignancy is serious, you need chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery or you're gonna die, we have to move you to palliative care. All that shit. People might not be thinking about pleasure or orgasm, immediate. Everyone said to me when I had testicular cancer, oh, don't worry, you're gonna have plenty of erections, and you're gonna blah blah blah! I know that your anxieties around young men is, can they have sex in the way that society wants them to have sex. I might need a little bit more time. Do I need to move home? Will my healthcare cover this? Will my mother be scared when I tell her? Will I lose my hair? Will that interrupt my sexual development? All those things are the questions. 

But the goal would be to put a card in that packet. You might not think about it in your first five days of cancer, but you're probably gonna think about it in your first week. You're probably gonna think about it in the first month. So how can we get people when they need to be there. One of the biggest problems that they have in medical spaces is that in a ward, one nurse might be comfortable talking about it. One doctor might be great to talk about it. But what happens if they're off? What happens if it's not their shift? We want to find a way to build good thoughts, good information. And I have to say in fairness to the world about cancer, in the last two years Cancer Research UK has done more work on it. Macmillan has done more work about it.

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If that's the arc of history on this question, it does bend slowly. A decade ago no one would respond to an email. They said we would absolutely never work with anything around sex toys. So that is just time. It's time. It's great work by great sex therapists. It's great Instagram influencers. It's great patient. Cancer research has not always been led by patients, but when it is, it's really amazing. Cancer research for a very long time did not take patient voices into account at all. Which is why in the 80s, when chemotherapy started, you saw people vomiting for six years to get an extra one month of life out of them. Or the radical Halsteds, which was like: how much of a woman's breast area could I remove? Which never extended people's lives, it was just a game for surgeons. Whereas when patients lead the conversations, patients led the conversation about cancer brain. So now we're having real research done about what happens when someone has cancer brain. Is it trauma related? Is it chemical? Is it physical? Is it hormonal? What's happening there? And I think similarly, patients have been empowered more and more to say, look, I need to talk about intimacy and cancer. So then suddenly, medics are realizing, oh, we don't do this well. So we're just trying to bring those worlds together.

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Back to your question on remote. I just think it gives people the space to think. To come to it when it's the right time for them. Tuppy Owens. I believe she was the founder of the Sex Maniacs Balls in London in the late eighties, early nineties, which was HIV/AIDS fundraisers.

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Kelsie Acton:

Okay.

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Brian Lobel:

And really sex positive. She's been doing work called the Outsiders, I believe, for years and years, which is really a hotline for disabled people who have questions about sex and intimacy. And that is, in essence, I think probably her phone number. And when she has capacity she has capacity, and when she doesn't she doesn't. But the hotline is critical remote access, always has been. Gay nightline, hotlines for where's the party, where's the safe space, where can I go, if I'm a stranger, domestic abuse hotlines? Those are things where they're always ready but people also need to be ready to use them. So with remote, we're just here. We're here for you when you need. 

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And actually, there's a part of us that wants a lot more Instagram accessibility with Sex with Cancer. We just haven't really done it because we've never had capacity, but I think it also changes the dynamic of what is needed in this moment. And for a lot of people with Sex with Cancer, we just want to be a place where we go, it's okay that you asked this question, that you are dissatisfied about this. That's fine for us. We don't need to be your best friends. We don't need to solve that problem. The reality is, a lot of those problems are not going to be solved. They're not going to be resolved. They might be shifted, changed, moved into more interesting spaces. 

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Kelsie Acton:

Amazing. As you were talking, I was thinking about how one of the things we've been trying to track with this project is the patient-led advocacy around Long Covid, which has been so online based. Have you seen similar trends in recent cancer patient advocacy? Or is it still very based on in-person meetings and in-person organizing?

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Brian Lobel:

I think right now…It’s March 2023 right now, so I think at the moment there's a real fetishization of the in-person, and I don't think that that's abnormal. We went through a time of a lot of challenges around that, it does feel good to be back in-person when we can. I also notice myself, I get really exhausted really quickly when I'm together with people when I used to have boundless energy for being with people. I hope that that will change in my own life. But I also do know a lot of people who have been extended shielding, and who are part of much bigger fights around COVID medications and policy around those things. 

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The bigger impediments to being together in person has not been COVID but has actually been the strikes that are happening. Legitimate good strikes. I'm sorry the impediment has been the Tory government which is forcing nurses and train drivers to be on strike.

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So we just actually submitted a paper for a medical conference about canceling a project that we were meant to do, not with Sex with Cancer, but with a group at UCLH where we just couldn't get together. Or when we got together, or the day we were supposed to get together, two people had COVID, and then the next day there was a train strike, and the exhaustion that the healthcare industry is facing right now, not even talking about patients. Patients still have to come into hospitals on the most part. But the work that surrounds that patient care is a pick-and-mix of what can be in-person, what can't be in-person. And there's a lot of social aspects of cancer experience that I don't think is going back, which – I'm in a number of different minds about a lot of the activities that cancer patients are excited to do in-person. Which often feel like they fit to that charity model of inspiration and togetherness, with people who actually have nothing in common with. We’ll leave that to the side. It also has a lot of benefits. So I think those things have been affected very deeply. 

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I think for us with Sex with Cancer, because we never had a space to do it in-person. We don't miss in-person aspects of it. Sh! our partner, they don't have a store anymore. They work from a warehouse and they have a really amazing chat function. So I'm noticing adjustments being made in a good way. Now things with sex are predominantly in-person experiences, but not exclusively. I do think that we're in a moment of really fetishizing the need to be in person, and I think in two years time we'll find a bit more of that balance. Of what feels like a private conversation we want to have in person, that we don't want archived, we don't want zoomed and we want everyone to have access to this work. We have to give ourselves time to understand this new reality. And I think that people think that 3 years is a long time but it's really not. Behaviors of people coming together happen over decades. And the politics of who gets invited where, who has access to what, those happen over really long periods of time. So I'm being gentle with ourselves, with us, about what we find with the balance.

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Kelsie Acton:

Yes. Is there anything I should have asked you that I haven't asked you?

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Brian Lobel:

No.

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Kelsie Acton:

Or anything, that if you imagine people 200 years in the future looking at this conversation that you really want to say to them.

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Brian Lobel:

Oh, my god! Didn't we look so cute without having to wear spacesuits for the heat and the lack of oxygen? Don't we look so cute? Doesn't our skin look so cute? Listen, I think the world will be embarrassed when it looks back on how badly people talked about sex. I think they'll be embarrassed that we were working really hard to have gender inclusive language on our website and that that wasn't standard at the time. And I think they'll be embarrassed that so much of this health care has been done under strain as opposed to under everyone having the things that they need. The only way that humanity will exist in 200 years time is if we all decide collectively that our health and well-being is important, more important than capitalism and financial growth. If that continues, the world won't exist in 200 years. And if it does, well they'll be really embarrassed to see the fights that we were having here. They'll be really embarrassed for us.

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Kelsie Acton:

Amazing. That feels like a really good hope to end on.

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[rippling music and rhythmic pops underneath]

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Aimi Hamraie:

You’ve been listening to Contra*, a podcast about disability, design justice and the lifeworld. Contra* is a production of the Critical Design Lab. This season’s episodes draw on our recent project the Remote Access Archive, created by a team of disabled researchers collaborating remotely. Learn more about our projects, including the Remote Access Archive at www.criticaldesignlab.com. 

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If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe on Spotify. Rate and leave a review. 

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This season of Contra* is edited by Ilana Nevins. Kelsie Acton and Aimi Hamraie developed the episodes.

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The Contra* podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial, share alike international 3.0 license. That means you can remix, repost or recycle any of the content as long as you cite the original source, you aren’t making money, you don’t change the credits and you share it under the same license.

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[Music fades out]

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