May 14, 2025
Transcript
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:
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.
Aimi Hamraie:
Technology is culture. And so when we work with it and we hack it and we create new tech, we're also engaging in, in cultural making, cultural production, and I'm hoping that people can draw on what we're doing here for that.
Aimi Hamraie:
Hi, this is Aimi Hamraie.
Kelsie Acton:
Hi. And I'm Kelsie Acton.
Aimi Hamraie:
And we are here for a wrap up episode of this season of Contra. Kelsie, do you wanna say a little bit about yourself?
Kelsie Acton:
Yeah. Hi, I am Kelsie Acton. She / her. I am a white woman with pale blue glasses and my hair is pulled back and I am sitting in a very beige room right now in my hometown of Edmonton.
Aimi Hamraie:
and I'm Aimi Hamraie. I use / they them pronouns. I am a olive skin trans masculine person. I have short, dark, curly hair and glasses. I'm in a yellow room in Nashville, Tennessee.
The first thing we're gonna do is talk about our roles in the project. So if you've been listening to this season of Contra, we have been talking about and using materials from the Remote Access Archive. The Remote Access Archive is a digital collection and a community archive that documents the way that disabled people, whether individually or in community, have used technology for remote forms of participation, learning, social life, work and things like that. And the time span is before and during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. So do you wanna say a little bit about your role in the project, Kelsie?
Kelsie Acton:
Yeah. I am the project manager of the Remote Access Archive, which means that I spent the first phase of the project, uh, working with you and doing a lot of outreach to find materials for the project. And then later as the team grew, I coordinated this really wonderful team of neurodivergent and disabled researchers to bring in more materials, to make those materials more accessible and then also to think really deeply about the connections between the materials in the archive and trying to assign keywords and figure out how to make the archive usable for other researchers.
Aimi Hamraie:
And I, Aimi, have been co-PI with Kelsie on this project for the last three years. The kinds of things that I did were sort of like applying for grants, conceiving of the project, doing interviews, giving feedback on the work that was being done. And now we're doing a bunch of design work to create the platform that this data will live in and making this podcast and other ways to get the information out into the world.
[short musical interlude, boppy, upbeat music]
So Kelsie and I are members of the Critical Design Lab, which is an international collaborative of disabled designers, researchers, artists, filmmakers, nightlife, people, like all sorts of folks. And I direct the Lab and I'm a professor, and Kelsie has occupied many different roles in the Lab over time from being a member of different project teams to being the project manager for the Remote Access Archive for the last few years.
And something important to know about our lab and the way that we work is that we use the methodologies of critical design and also of critical disability studies and crip technoscience. And so what we do is we take popular forms, whether those are, you know, architectural forms like buildings, or urban forms like cities, or media like podcasts, websites, art exhibits and now an archive. And we really study them and we say, what is the typical form that this takes? And then we start to ask questions about, you know, if we were to center access in a really radical and open-ended way, how would we change the form of this thing? And we have done that with this podcast. We've done it with all sorts of stuff.
And one of the ways that we have done that is with the archive and really looking at like how are archives usually made in academic settings and in community settings and adding in elements that critique those typical forms and also enable new possibilities and ways of connecting and collaborating. So we're gonna talk about that also over the course of this episode.
[short musical interlude, boppy, upbeat music]
Kelsie Acton:
Do you wanna start at the start? So when did you first start thinking about remote access?
Aim Hamraie:
Oh, boy. So I feel like, you know, I'm of an age where remote access has always been part of my life and was definitely part of how I was navigating the world as a young, disabled person, even though I didn't know that that's what was going on with me at the time.
I was one of those people who was kind of like an early adopter of the internet. My dad was an engineer. And in the eighties we had a computer at home that he used for his engineering stuff, but that also had a modem that you could use to dial up into other people's computers. Like the worldwide web didn't exist, but you could dial up into other people's computers, which were like servers, sort of like a Discord server, and you could download stuff and you could talk to people and things like that.
And so that was part of my childhood. And using AOL, America online instant messenger and chat rooms and stuff was a part of my childhood. And it was really like how I realized that I prefer to communicate in a typed form and that it's a lot easier for me to socialize in a typed form. And you know, when I grew up and found out I was autistic, it all made sense and I met a lot of other people who had that similar experience. And I actually like met other autistic kids when I was a kid on AOL, too. And we would talk about access needs, and I remember just being like, oh yeah, like I need the same stuff that you do, even though no one has told me that I'm autistic. So that that was part of it.
The other part was that I became chronically ill in my early twenties and it sort of coincided with when I learned about. Disability studies as a field from my mentor, Rosemary Garland-Thompson, and came into disability culture. And it kind of like all happened like within the same year.
So, because of my chronic illness, there were a lot of situations where I couldn't go into public because there were exposures that would make things worse. And so, I started to connect with people online again in different ways. In disability community, there was a lot of like live journal back then, but also things like early live streams of events and other things.
And one thing I remember really distinctly was like in the same year actually, that I learned about disability justice from Stacey Park Milbern and Mia Mingus, who were living in Atlanta where I was at the time. And I'd learned about disability justice from them and Moya Bailey, who's still my collaborator. The Occupy Movement started and I was part of organizing disability justice spaces and anti-racist spaces within the Occupy Movement.
And we really struggled to bring access into that movement, but we would do things like, we worked on getting a live stream for the general assemblies and talking to people about how access is an intersectional issue, and remote access was a really big part of that. And so for people who couldn't go camp out and sleep in tents every night or be there in person every day, we created a lot of different ways for people to participate. Some were digital, like using a live stream, using Tumblr.
But somewhere more analog. Like, we had a phone tree. And that is for people who don't know. It's like when you draw a tree and you put people's names on it and you're responsible for getting a call from someone and then passing on that information to certain other people who are on the tree.mAnd so these kinds of technologies are just like really ubiquitous and the disability organizing that I was doing and have continued to do.
And then I guess the third thing is, you know, I grew up in an Iranian diaspora family, and our family members live on pretty much every continent except for Antarctica. We've always had to connect remotely and most of the people in my family are disabled, and so there are a lot of access considerations around that. But it's like super normal for me to like be close to people who are far away and to use technology to navigate that. So those are some of my origin stories.
Kelsie Acton:
Yeah, it's super interesting. I feel like I can see little bits of remote access in my life, but I think Critical Design Lab was the first time I really fully came into remote access. I came into Disability World through dance and performing arts, which academically critiques this idea of liveness and co-presence. But, people on the ground tend to like talk about being in the same room as something that's almost a religious experience, that it's so core to the way you work on things.
But, I also was living in Edmonton, which for folks who know Canada, everything's really far away. So there was not a lot of disability arts people close to us.
I remember… so this was before I like quit my terrible day job and went back and did a PhD because I was so in love with the disability arts. But, I was doing all this disability dance and while I was doing endless phone calls for my government job, I would have YouTube on and I would have Graeae’s... I had these highlight clips from their version of Threepenny Opera, and I'd sit there with people talking at me in my ear and I'd just be watching where they placed their BSL interpreters and how they were lighting them and where they were projecting the captioning on the set and like how…. And then also AXIS had a few dance videos online. So I just remember sitting and watching Mark Brew’s piece with Alice Shepherd over and over and over again.
And then, I came into my PhD and partway through found out that I was neurodivergent. I remember finding out and did that thing that you shouldn't do, which was drop my diagnosis into an academic database and found like the most horrifying, depressing stats.
And I just remember closing the laptop and being like, I think I need to go on Twitter. And I went and found autistic Twitter and ADHD Twitter and it was amazing. And like the thing I absolutely needed at that moment and not a whole bunch of terrible academic articles debating about diagnostic criteria.
And, it was through autistic Twitter that I found CDL. And I found out about your book and I followed you. And then there was a call for new members of CDL and I applied, and the rest is history. But I also think that that coming into CDL was the first time that I had worked entirely online and was suddenly like, oh, there's a lot of things about this that work for me.
And then, moving into the pandemic, and this was just months before we started this project, suddenly being like, oh, I have so much more energy. I can focus so much better when I'm working primarily online. And also I feel like my social connections are better. I'm suddenly meeting lots of people. Socializing feels really fun and exciting in a way that had never had before.
Aimi Hamraie:
Yeah, that's really interesting, Kelsie. I don't think I knew some of those things about you. And yeah, it's interesting that you found CDL through Twitter, which is also a space that was, I think, really important for many of us, until recent events and like the demise of that platform. I also really like relate to having so many important social connections and opportunities and stuff through thata.
And, this is something you and I talk about a lot, like we've worked together for many years now, very closely. We've never met in person, but I forget that constantly 'cause it just, it doesn't matter. And there are a lot of people like that in my life who I know from Twitter and they're part of my academic world or my social world. And it's just like wild to think about like what would've happened if that hadn't existed?
And then this thing about the pandemic starting and we already had everything in place 'cause this is what we had been doing. And it's probably also worth talking about, going back to what you were saying about Canada and distance and things being far away. Like, the reason why Critical Design Lab is a remote lab is because I've been here in Tennessee for 12 years and there are some students that I can work with that are here and local, but the people that I wanna work with who are in my community, who are thinking about the same things, they're all over the world and we needed to find each other in order to do this work. It wasn't just like standard academic research. And I think about that a lot.
I think about like disability community as kind of a diaspora and that we're spread out, but we find each other and there are things that it's very useful to be in person for, and probably if our disabilities were different, like it would be essential. Like, you know, in thinking about like John Lee Clark, who is a deaf-blind person, he writes about distant and kind of the expectations that people be far away instead of being close and touching. And so that's like a really different disability experience.
It's like without the internet, this whole culture that we're part of and that we're trying to document wouldn't have existed in the same way. And I think we found really interesting ways that people connected before the internet and before the pandemic. But, then this just like massive complexity and intensification of disability culture around technology in recent years.
[short musical interlude, boppy, upbeat music]
Kelsie Acton:
So in the midst of all of that, when did you decide that, and how did you decide, that what the world needed was an archive of all of this?
Aimi Hamraie:
So, I'm a historian and I work on recent history and the methodology of recent history is a little bit archival and a little bit ethnographic. And, when I was working on my first book about universal design, the time span of that was like a century, but it was really like my lifetime. Like, the term universal design was coined the year that I was born. And so, I had these ways of thinking about like, what if in during my life I had been documenting this phenomenon all along.
And, as a historian, when stuff starts to happen, I immediately start to wonder who's documenting this? You know, with the Occupy Movement and Black Lives Matter, like there were archives that kinda sprung up almost immediately to collect protest signs and various forms of data. There were people archiving like Twitter with those hashtags and things like that. I really, I think a lot about history in the making as being all around us and what might be important to keep in the record for the future.
And then the other thing is there's this maybe purposeful forgetting of a lot of things that happens really quickly. So when the pandemic started, and like for a lot of people, not for everyone, but for a lot of people, stuff started to shift online there was this moment of like…
Yeah, like there's so much possibility and disabled people know what to do and we're inviting other people into our spaces and stuff.
And just as quickly it was taken away and it was as if it never happened. And people talk about it like a distant past or a past that just like didn't exist. And so it felt really urgent to me to leave an archive of this as it's happening to show the volume and intensity of it, and also how far back it goes and to cast a really wide net.
And that's kind of for our own knowledge, but it's also for things [00:20:00] like when you apply for accommodations and your boss is like, that's not a thing. No one's ever done that before, it's too expensive. You can be like, here's this archive of all of the ways that in fact, people figured out how to do this with very little resources, and so we can do it too. And so there's this kind of practical element of it as well.
And so we started archiving not that long after the pandemic began. I remember you and I talked about the project and we applied for funding from the Social Science Research Council. I would say it was probably in 2021 that we started our data collection, right?
Kelsie Acton:
Yes. Yeah, 2021.
Aimi Hamraie:
Yeah. I'm curious, Kelsie, like what were you thinking about remote access back then and like when we started to talk about this project, what were your kind of hopes and expectations for it?
Kelsie Acton:
First and foremostly, I just moved to England and I was so grateful to be employed and not move back to my parents' basement in Canada.
But thinking about the actual project itself, there are a few things that I was seeing that I was really excited to document, and some of those things interestingly ended up in the archive and some of them really didn't. So, there was this incredible explosion of culture online and I think often with disabled people and queer people who were served disability adjacent, doing the most exciting and most interesting work to create…
I think about your remote access parties that you were doing with Kevin and Moira and all those other folks over. Over in London, there were these like incredible queer burlesque events that because of my access needs, ormally I would never access and suddenly there's this whole world of stuff that was available to me online. So I think we got some of that.
I was also really excited by this moment, early in the pandemic, where disabled people were just teaching the world how to do this. Like I put together guides around how to run good online meetings. But it also felt like every other disabled person was… had written a guide about how to run a good online meeting because we knew. And also, we had the people to call to be like, Hey, deaf friend, pinning the interpreter doesn't exist yet, but what can we do to make sure that we pause every time zoom reconfigures the screen? And there were sort of these incredibly nuanced protocols that were coming out at that moment, and people were sharing really, really widely.
I think I was also really excited by the workplace element of it… of if we can figure out how to work online, what does this mean for the future? And I think I was more hopeful about that than you were. I think you were very prescient about like how fast that was gonna go away. And we got, interestingly, we got less of that than I expected. But, those were sort of the things I was initially really excited by.
Aimi Hamraie:
That makes sense. And, you know we were taking a crowdsourcing approach, so we're sort of limited by what people wanted to send us and who even found out about the project. And there's so much that was happening that we couldn't document. There's just like so many things in the world. And it's kind of one of the things about doing really recent history or history in the making that the events are much smaller and more frequent.
And, it's different than acquiring something from like a major event for a museum or something like that. And so, there is a lot of absence in in the archive as well. I think like some of the things that I was hoping to find were, like you were saying, like these moments of ingenuity technologies that disabled people created or were early adopters of. And we do have a lot of that. There are some older things that I will still continue to look for like telegrams sent by disabled people to each other and that sort of stuff. We have some documentation of like radio and blind communities. But, it would be great to find out if there's like more of an archive of that somewhere. People using Ham radio to communicate and things like that. Just like these analog technologies that, you know, for reasons that historians of technology have pointed out, like they're really important to document 'cause they're actually physically disintegrating and if we don't try to find them, they're just gonna be lost to the historical record. So those would be like good projects for someone to work on in the future too, if they wanted to build on this.
Kelsie Acton:
Were there other things you were hoping to find, or that we did find, that she thought we would?
Aimi Hamraie:
We know, anecdotally, a lot of things and I wanted to like have documentation of them too. They're kind of these like stories that we tell in disability community about like, you know, all the times we were denied remote access and things like that. And we have a little bit of documentation of that, but I think it's such a ubiquitous thing that a lot of people just didn't save those emails or whatever. So, it would be an interesting project for someone to work on too is, as like the kind of archive of No. But, we definitely have some of it.
And I think like that's maybe a sort of instance in which like having a quantity of data in the future could be helpful 'cause it could help track discrimination and things like that. Like the fact that no universities wanna do any online accommodations now at all, I think is pretty significant.
Kelsie: Acton:
Yeah, very much.
Aimi Hamraie:
I'm curious, what was it like for you being the project manager as this project was rolling out?
Kelsie Acton:
It was really joyous. You brought together really, really cool people with incredibly different backgrounds who all had really exciting things to add to the project.
And I'm really grateful for the experience because I think I grew a lot in terms of like just how to communicate with people about what are we going to do, what's the big arc of the project, and how does your little piece fit into that? And I learned those skills are much harder than I thought before starting this project.
I think there were a lot of points of incredible joy around discovering disability knowledge and disability connections people didn't know had happened.
So I think about…we had lots of conversations when we were working on the literature review about what people were finding, especially because we were really deliberately looking at remote access outside of North America and Europe. So, thinking about in places where the internet infrastructure is really different, how are people using cell phones to get around this? How are people using radio? And the ingenuity of that.
And then, yeah, for me, one of the great joys, especially when we moved into working on access and working on keywords and people were really, really engaging, especially with the oral histories, was members of the team coming in and just wanting to talk about what they had read in these oral histories or in these documents. And just the wonder of what disabled people were doing and the ways other disabled people were thinking about remote access and remote and access generally. Yeah.
Aimi Hamraie:
Yeah, I love that. I love that so much. 'cause I think there are things that we think we know about our communities and our histories, but then also the ability to like feel wonder and curiosity is what like connects us to disabled people all over the world and to our disabled ancestors and helps us to figure out how to do things, you know, that maybe we're struggling with.
And, something I just think a lot about in these like encroaching fascist times is that when we feel hopeless someone else has probably felt that way before and grappled with this particular problem before and we just need to find them and and ask them what to do. And so, o I think that there's like some of that in the archive too.
And, I love knowing that the affect of joy and wonder and curiosity was built into how people were experiencing data collection which is not always the most interesting thing. And I definitely remember the meetings too that you're describing, where people were kind of showing up, being like, did you know? And there are just so many things.
[short musical interlude, boppy, upbeat music]
I wanna talk about what project management is for a second because pretty much like all of us working on this project we're neurodivergent and most of us have ADHD and many of us are autistic. And project management is often associated with executive function, which is something that we may struggle with and is itself like such an ableist construct.
I think like what we have tried to do in Critical Design Lab is to create interdependence as a form of kind of distributed executive function. And I know like for me, I hired you as a project manager 'cause my brain couldn't handle all of the different parts of this project, and so I needed help. And there's like a little bit of an assistive technology element to having project management. But also, like the people working on the archive, we were all kind of like helping each other meet access needs and meet other needs and there was a lot of interdependence and like relationship building.
And, one of the things that I really remember is that about two years ago, my dad was in the ICU before he died and I was recovering from surgery. And so I'd had all of these oral history interviews scheduled and my life was just imploding and I couldn't do them. And so, you took over doing like a lot of those and then I remember you like talking about the conversations and the new relationships that you got to build with like people that I already knew and I talked to a bunch of times. So there's like this kind of like web of connection that came out of asking for help and then also generating this data in kind of a relational framework. I don't know, do you have any like thoughts or reflections on that?
Kelsie Acton:
Yeah. This was something I knew a little bit from disability arts but I was putting into entirely new context is… for m, part of the joy of project managing was trying to be like what is the thing that makes you really excited and happy to work? And what are you really good at? And how much of that work can I funnel to you? So, that's one thought and that's interconnected and I'll weave it all together in a moment.
And, this actually might be a function, a little bit about remote access, but I actually think it's in some ways applicable to many, many forms of working relationships is… I'm gonna misquote you, but I think I remember you saying like, we can figure out anything, you just need to communicate. And, I think I really tried to hold that and share that with everyone I was working with. And always if people said, I have a huge paper due next week, I'm not gonna do my full… It gave me space to always be like, yes, great. I know.
And you really beautifully modeling what it meant to say, “Hey, my life is really hard right now. I need some help,” meant that, yeah, when I was leaving my arts job and I stopped sleeping more than two hours a night and my brain was kind of imploding, I was able to come to you and say, “We have this big advisory board meeting in a month and there's a whole bunch of stuff that has to happen, but my brain is not good at fine detail work..it takes me a lot of time, is absolutely not capable of it at all in two hours of sleep a night.”
So, we were able to talk to Amery, who was a member of the project, who worked on it for a few years, who is incredible at fine, detailed, like minuscule work. And you did this really beautiful job of being like, what can you hand over to Amery that your brain can't do right now? How do you shift the work around so things still get done, like we don't drop the balls, but it doesn't mean you have to carry them aways.
Aimi Hamraie:
So beautiful, Kelsie. And I think that you explained it so succinctly, it's that kind of thing that I think like those of us who are in disability community, especially like neurodivergent and like chronically ill spaces, like we do that. And we do that for each other. And it's not always as apparent from the outside.
And so, sometimes people assume that we can't do things of complexity because it requires too much executive function and like especially in a remote, collaborative setting, it's so important because it's really easy for people to just disappear. You know? Like, you're not showing up in an office every day where you see each other face to face. And so people could just disappear, and sometimes they do.
But also in like a weird way, like the fact that there are all these digital tools like helps us with stuff. It's easier to like make it clear where we're at with the project. Like, what is on the to-do list, what it needs to get shifted over here and kind of like breaks it down some more. And so, I think like for me, I've like learned to manage my ADHD by being in these kind of like interdependent project management situations. 'Cause yeah, it's like when you're just doing it yourself, you probably don't have someone to be like, okay, what are all the parts? And which parts can we do now, and which parts can we do later? But that's something we can do for each other even when we can't do it ourselves like entirely in that moment.
Kelsie Acton:
Yeah, very, very much.
[short musical interlude, boppy, upbeat music]
Aimi Hamraie:
What's been the most satisfying dimension of the project for you?
Kelsie Acton:
It's actually a really hard question because we've worked with all these great people and I'm so incredibly proud of the work that they did and the things they came up with. Like you mentioned, we have oral history interviews with really, really incredible people who have really important things to say.
Yeah, I'm really proud of how I've grown and changed as a researcher over the course of the project. So, in some ways it's really hard for me to identify one thing that makes me happy. Is there anything for you that you look at as a highlight?
Aimi Hamraie:
I think the relationships that we've built have been really satisfying for me. Also working on the podcast because, you know, we've been working on this project for so many years and some of those interviews were done many years ago. And so, getting to get back into them and listen to them a million times for editing and to think about the order and like what kind of story we're telling, that has been really great.
Also, seeing the digital exhibitions that people in the Lab have made, like Avianna Miller and you, Kelsie, made this great story map timeline that is on the website and there's a really great exhibition about the comments section of blogs that has a very cool nineties tech aesthetic and that discovers a lot of really interesting connections between disabled people on the internet.
Like, in my historian nerd brain, which is maybe like a little bit of like a lizard brain type thing, that's like the deeply satisfying stuff where I'm like, my basic needs are met because these connections are being found. And, that's what historical research is all about. It's like the great thing about doing really research on recent histories is like you can trace these networks of people and understand their relationships.
Kelsie Acton:
Yeah. I got so obsessed with newsletters. You knew all this history, but I didn't know about the histories of the Ragged Edge, of The Mouth, and the Toomey Gazette, things like that. And just the fact that like disabled people were mailing these mimeographed or photocopied things across the country and building culture in a way that I think was, to me, really recognizable as somebody who’d found a lot of community and disability culture on Twitter, but it blew my mind that it was happening at this totally different timescale… that I had this sort of immediate feedback of Twitter, but people were waiting months between these newsletters.
Aimi Hamraie:
Yeah, totally. Those like social networks through print culture that we
don't have as much of anymore. Like pen pals and, you know, people that you share stuff with through the mail. Sky Cubacub, who we did an interview with, does do a print newsletter, or did for a couple years, and it was so great to get it because even though I knew them like personally and we followed each other on social media and stuff, I really enjoyed like getting to read all of their life updates and project updates and this kind of like tri-fold, like one page printout thing that they would send and they would always send like stickers and patches and stuff with it. So, that was like really joyful.
And I love hearing about you getting to interact with that stuff too because yeah, we're a little like generationally removed. I think from a lot of that disability print culture. We're more of the internet generation. I think we're about the same age. What was the hardest part of the project for you?
Kelsie Acton:
So, the potential bigness of it. Remote access is huge. It's the entire internet and it's every telephone call and… but it's also like every radio broadcast and every care package mailed. And I think trying to figure out like how much should we get? I think from arts work, like, there's a pattern to project management in arts or to producing in arts where like you have a show at the end and you know how many people you expect in your audience and you know how long that show should be.
I was suddenly in a project where there wasn't any of those usual boundaries that I had had in my working life previously. Like, time is very confusing to me. It is all one space. You're laughing and nodding on the screen. So, I remember starting the access work of like cleaning up transcripts, getting them into really beautiful forms, figuring out how we were going to make sure that all the PDFs were accessible to people using screen readers. And I was just like, I have no idea how long any of this is gonna take. I have told Aimi I think this is gonna take this long, but I entirely made that up. I have no basis for what I just told Aimi. And we're just gonna start and I'm going to see if that's actually what's gonna happen.
Aimi Hamraie:
Yeah, there's like this historical expands and then there's like the time and depth that takes to create accessible materials. And, as we're recording this, still working on building the website 'cause things just take longer than you expect them to as they get more complicated.
One of the reasons why we said that the archive could be the period of time before and during the pandemic, which is like all of time, is that even though there's a lot of material that exists, we didn't wanna limit stuff that people were sending to us. And so we didn't wanna say like, oh, this is from 1920 so it doesn't count or whatever. And that's kind of like the nice thing about building an archive versus writing a book. Like, when we go to write the book about this, people might be like, well, why didn't you say it was limited by this time? But we're just kind of providing information to people. But, there are these technological problems with documenting something at such a high volume.
And one of the things is that, you know, when Twitter became X, we were afraid that it was just gonna cease to exist or something. We didn't know what was gonna happen. And so we started downloading disability community hashtags. So we just have thousands of pages of PDFs that sort of maintain like what it looked like for future generations. And, you know, our advisory board members also pointed out different technologies that exist for like maintaining some of the more dynamic features of a website when you download it as opposed to a PDF. And, you know, the Internet Archive is doing a lot of that work too. And we had to like pause everything. I remember when we were like, uh, Twitter's going to cease as we like paused everything, downloaded all this stuff for like weeks. I don't know, it mostly just seems like people are leaving that site now more than anything else. But yeah, what was your experience of that?
Kelsie Acton:
Yeah. So I think for me, there's a couple of interesting things because there was, yeah, this moment and I was scrambling to figure out how to document this. And Cavar, who's a member of the research team, is this really brilliant researcher who works a lot with Tumblr. And they were like internet archive. But, the really fascinating thing was I went and tried the Internet Archive and was like, can we just like shift key hashtags into the Internet Archive?
The Internet Archive at that point… because I think every single group that had used Twitter, disabled people, but every other community, they had used Twitter that way was having the same moment we were having. So, the Internet Archive was taking like five days to upload a single hashtag from Twitter. So that was why I ditched the internet archive and went, can we pull it into a PDF? Yeah. If I'd known that Twitter was gonna be around for a bit longer, I would've let that first wave of panic pass and then we could have dropped everything into the internet archive.
But, we didn't know at that point. I hadn't gone and done training on like cool social media research techniques, which is fascinatingly far outside of my training as a dance person. So, yeah.
Aimi Hamraie:
But, Kelsie, like, I think it was a good impulse to download those PDFs because there is something about the longevity of them.
Like they're not meant to replace the Internet Archive, but a future historian can still use them to like understand what was going on and they can get a sense of like how we as ordinary people who are not library scientists were interacting with that material. That's the kind of like community archive aspect of this too is like being resourceful and using the tools that we have to leave traces of these events.
You know, and then someone else will also do it and they'll do it in a different way. I think about like Alice Wong's Disability Visibility project and the Crip The Vote hashtag, and just like all the ways that Alice creates archives, you know, it's just gonna be different. But, it'll be like useful information for the future.
Kelsie:Acton:
Yeah. Sometimes I think about putting the list of hashtags we pulled because you went on Twitter and asked people what should we pull? And in some ways, even if we don't put those actual pages up, just that list of hashtags is this incredible document of what was really important to disability Twitter at that moment? What did people not want to lose?
Aimi Hamraie:
Yeah, I think it would be great to have that on there. And then if people wanna look at those PDF for some reason they can get in touch with us.
[short musical interlude, boppy, upbeat music]
So, this might be a good time to talk about kind of the final products of this project, at least at this phase. So we're preparing the website. Probably by the time this episode airs, it'll be up. And it includes a lot of different things, and we're kind of thinking of it as a critical archive and a community archive.
And, the reason why it's a critical archive is we spent a lot of time in the early design of the project talking to librarians and archivists about the different methods of archiving and also of displaying archival information. And there are different technologies for doing that. There are even archival technologies that kind of…Mukurtu, which is one of them, which like assigns different levels of access to different types of people based on their role in the community. And it's created for indigenous archives.
So, we were trying to think about like, what is like a library archive like? And then what can our community archive be like? And which conventions do we need to keep and which ones don't we need to keep?
So some of the ones that we kept are having like an item log and a finding aid, but the way that we handled metadata is a little different and we really prioritized access. So, having, you know, searchable and screen reader accessible PDFs and image descriptions and having exhibitions that will be ongoing and more people will make going into the future. Because, we're not just thinking of this as a resource for academic researchers. It's really just for anybody who wants to know more about it. Is there anything you wanna say about that stuff in terms of the form of the final product?
Kelsie Acton:
In many ways it's an example of what CDL really does well and what we often celebrate when we're working on access is once we get into tech, this phrase gets a little bit harder, but, that really like DIY, what's the tools that we can use that are immediately accessible to us and will be immediately accessible to broader communities? And also thinking really hard about when is really specialized access labor necessary and are there ways around it?
So Martina, who worked on the project for a year is brilliant with PDFs and incredible around PDF access. But she started working through this huge pile of. not screen reader accessible PDFs that we had accumulated over the course of the project. And the amount of time it takes to make a PDF really, really good and readable and coherent to a screen reader is about a day for a document. So, she was very quickly said to me, “we're not gonna finish.” And between the two of us, this was the point where we came up with the solution of creating a Word document version of all of these non-screen reader friendly PDFs.
I've done like a tiny little bit of archive work, but I'm not a historian. So I'm gonna say this with a grain of salt: From what I understand, having multiple versions of a document and having a document that you can change and in many ways runs counter to how we think archives should work, because it's about preservation.
But, I think in some ways what we ended up with was.. And the solution Martina came up with was a far more accessible version because the Word document versions are not just screen reader accessible. You can also resize them. You can change the color to what you need. And in some ways, that solution that anyone on the team could do once we had established the protocol and we could move really quickly through all these documents, break some archive rules, but also creates better access.
Aimi Hamraie:
Yeah. Yeah, totally. Reminds me of this thing that Kevin Gotkin says in the remote access parties. I'm paraphrasing this, but it's something like,Y”ou are encouraged to violate the social norms and the name of access.” And, I think it's also like a critical design move to do that. And it's not like we don't have the originals also. But, like having a manipulable a document for access also means that we are able to like make evident the way that we all intervene and change knowledge, like when we study it. And one of the ways that disability changes the world is when access like introduces new forms. And, the ability to do that might mean that someone has like an insight about something that they wouldn't have the world wouldn't have otherwise.
So I think it's really valuable and I see also how it's like the antithesis of the kind of like preservation move.
But you know, it reminds me of like when people 3D print like ancient objects so that you can touch them. It's just another version that gives a different type of access.
[short musical interlude, boppy, upbeat music]
So how are we hoping people use the archive?
Kelsie Acton:
So, I hope that people use the archive… I think in much the way that myself and the team have used the archive, which is to find joy in new ways of working with various technologies of remote participation and maybe doing better access. We did an oral history interview with Mirabai, whose last name I've forgotten, but..
Aimi Hamraie:
Knight, yeah.
Kelsie Acton:
Mirabai Knight, yeah, who's this incredible stenographer. And I came out of that interview and was like, oh, I knew some things about how to support live captioning previously. But now I know, I really deeply understand the technology and the training. So now I can do an even better job of making sure that when I have live captioners in a room, that live captioning is the absolute best it can be for whoever's using it.
Aimi Hamraie:
Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a lot of like disability culture knowledge in the archive that people can learn from even if they're not interested in the remoteness aspect of it.
I really hope that people take the content and the archive and make art. Like, I think there's just so much in there that can spark like creative imagination and we have a great collection of all of the processes and documents that went into the Remote Access Crip Nightlife Party that having Gotkin and moiran williams and Yoyo Lin and other people have been organizing. And just like, all of the kind of like moves within that of now we're gonna create this new practice of sound description modeled off of image description or, here's how we're gonna use the like language translation channel and Zoom to do audio description.
Like, I think that they can enable a lot of creativity with technology and, as I was telling my students yesterday at my class on Disability, Culture and Technology, like technology is culture. And so when we work with it and we hack it and we create new tech, we're also engaging and in cultural making, cultural production, and I'm hoping that people can draw on what we're doing here for that.
And also, you know, this podcast has a Creative Commons license so people can remix it or take stuff from it as long as you don't make money off of it, basically.
Oh, I also wanted to say earlier, like, in terms of the final product, like the podcast season itself, we sort of conceived of it. It's like a version of the archive because it has the oral histories, but it also has all these great document and image descriptions that you did, Kelsie, to give people a sense of the items that are in there as a preview, but also it's a way of engaging with archival data that doesn't usually exist. Like you don't usually get like a voice or interpretive version of the items, so I hope that people make good use of that too.
Kelsie Acton:
Do you have, I guess, hopes for what the archive will do in the world or how people will use it?
Aimi Hamraie:
I hope that people are able to get all the accommodations they need for remote access. I hope that organizers who treat disability like an afterthought can understand how essential access is for the work that we need to do in the coming years, and to use these methods for organizing creatively our resistance. I hope that educators are also able to use this so that students can understand disability culture more a the technologies that disabled people create and use. What about you, Kelsie?
Kelsie Acton:
All of that. I also hope people make art, too. I have lots of like half formed long-term dreams where I'm just like, I think there could be so much interesting art that could come from this archive.
I also think there's this really beautiful thread that runs through a lot of the archive that talks about cross-impairment work and cross-disability community work. I don't think I've figured it out entirely yet, but I think that's one of the things that technologies of remote participation have enabled is that sometimes historically impairment groups have been siloed, and these technologies often brought people together across impairment experiences.
But one of the things I know really deeply is that good cross-impairment practice requires a lot of disability knowledge and also that that disability knowledge is sometimes really hard to get, and often I've only got it by fucking up. I hope people use the archive as, yeah, a way to gain some of that cross-impairment and cross-disability community knowledge.
Aimi Hamraie:
Yeah, I love that. I guess one more thing I'll add is originally this was conceived as a book project and it still is. And, when I wrote my first book, a lot of the archives that I was working with were like people's boxes in their houses, like under the stairs. It wasn't a lot of materials that other scholars got to work with and write about.
And so the field of interlocutors that I had was smaller and very intimate. You know, my friend Bess Williamson and I will like share archival documents with each other. We write about really similar stuff. But, as an extension of the social project of remote access, I wanted a broader community of scholars to be able to write articles and whatever with these materials so that when we write our book, we also have a broader literature to engage with. And that's part of the like relational commitment of this project too. I think a lot of times when people do archival projects, there's this kind of… I wanna be the first one to write about this or whatever, but for me, what's the point of all of this if we're not making it available and getting our ideas challenged also by other people's takes on it.
So, I'm really excited to see what people do with this project we've been working on for the last three years. And, thank you to everyone for listening to this season of the podcast and to this longer episode. And, we're just so grateful to all of you for being in our community and for supporting us. And, look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Kelsie Acton:
Yeah, I wanna like add so much gratitude to you and everyone who's worked on the project over the last three years. We are all so incredible and our advisory board who sometimes there was questions that I felt very intimidated by and they were always like so supportive and so kind. Thank you to everyone who's, yeah, been in any way part of this project.
Aim Hamraie:
And thank you to you, Kelsie, for keeping all the balls in the air.
Kelsie Acton:
For passing them appropriately to people as necessary.
[Rhythmic pops. Strings ripple and play as Aimi speaks]
Aimi Hamraie:
Yeah, absolutely.
You've been listening to Contra a podcast about disability design, justice, and the life world. 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 about our projects, including the Remote Access Archive at www.criticaldesignlab.com. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe on Spotify rate and leave a review.
This season of Contra is edited by Ilana Nevins. Kelsie Acton and Aimi Hamraie developed the episodes. The Contra Podcast is licensed under a creative commons attribution, non-commercial ShareAlike International 3.0 license. That means you can remix, repost, or recycle any of the content as long as you cite the original source, aren't making money, you don't change the credits, and you share it under the same license.
[music fades out]
Episode Details
Themes:
- Remote access and archiving remote access
- Disability communities and collaborative access
Links:
Contra* is a podcast about disability, design justice, and the lifeworld.
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