Episode 60: Conversation 4: Antifascism with Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Paul DeFazio and Scar Barclay

Aimi:Welcome to the last of our podcast conversations called Disability Meets Architecture, where we are exploring the emerging intersections of accessibility, disability, culture, and design beyond the conventions of functional access. This time we're focusing on disability design and anti-fascism, 

Jos: and we want to explore different understandings and approaches to anti-fascism, but from a interdisciplinary, disability centered perspective, and that's from both within and outside architectural discourse and practice.

What can this tell us about concepts of access, about who has access and under what conditions? This feels like a really crucial discussion to be having just now as authoritarianism and increasing discrimination against minority groups is directly and adversely impacting the lives of many disabled people across the world.

So how can we explore what might be potentially productive, frictions in how scholars and designers working with disability are responding to this moment? 

Aimi: So what do we mean by productive frictions? Often when we think of friction, we think of it as something that shuts down a discussion like a conflict, but a friction can become productive or generative when it leads to further inquiry, curiosity, and collaboration.

And in the context of disability, generative frictions have often resulted in new design practices as well as new coalitions, interdependencies, and forms of challenge and resistance. So, I'm Aimi Hamraie. I'm a disabled designer and researcher, and I direct the Critical Design Lab, which does projects on accessibility through the framework of disability culture.

Jos: And I'm Jos Boys. I've been a design activist over many years. My background's actually in kind of feminist and community based architectural practices. I was, a co-founder of the Matrix Feminist Design Collective in the 1970s and eighties in the uk. And I've also co-direct since 2007, something called The DisOrdinary Architecture Project, which brings the creativity of disabled artists, designers, and architects into collaboration with built environment, education and practice.

Aimi: Today we've invited Beatrice Adler-Bolton, a disabled and chronically ill writer, artist, and independent scholar who is the co-host of the Death Panel podcast about the political economy of health, and the author of Health Communism, a Surplus Manifesto. Beatrice will be in conversation with Scar Barclay, a genderqueer, neurodiverse architectural designer, writer and maker, working with The DisOrdinary Architecture Project and teaching at Central St. Martin's in London, and also in conversation with Paul DeFazio, an architect working with Critical Design Lab and the Institute for Human-Centered Design in Boston. If you've been tuning into our previous episodes, Scar and Paul have been here with us behind the scenes helping us with creating this series.

So we're excited to have them in the episode in conversation with Beatrice, speaking from their perspectives as politicized, disabled people who are trained in architecture. 

Jos: It's really great to have you all here. Beatrice, if I could start with you, could you please tell us a little bit about your work and how disability fits into it? 

Beatrice: Well, first of all, just thank you so much for asking me to be a part of this conversation. I'm really looking forward to this discussion and I'm grateful for the space that you all have created around this topic specifically.

It's crucially important, especially now. As Aimi said, I'm a disabled author, independent scholar, and a researcher. I also, co-founded and co-host a podcast that is a long-term ongoing, political education project that is principally concerned with both articulating a kind of antidote to contemporary health fascism, and also toward building up people's language and theory and

praxis around health and disability politics. And we've been doing this show since 2018. So it was, started in the context of the first Trump administration and became crucially important in the context of the ongoing COVID pandemic, which intensified many of the dynamics that we covered on the show, and made them more visible for many more people.

But, part of what we try and emphasize is that what we cover is not some sort of new aberration, and obviously we find ourselves in the second Trump administration now , which rose to power under the slogan, Make America Healthy Again. So part of the work that we've been doing is trying to articulate how

health, fascism and fascist conceptualizations of the body have taken us from Make America Great Again to Make America Healthy Again. Which you can only really understand by looking at disability history, theory policy, and also the history of contested public space and private space and how bodies move through space.

And, as someone who is trained in fine arts and art history and art theory, I went to Cooper Union for undergrad, which is a program that, is specifically oriented around getting artists, architecture students and engineers to collaborate and think collaboratively. So it's something that I've always thought about.

In the context of disability its not just disability as a politicized identity relative to policy, but also relative to the physical spaces that the body politic actually is either welcomed into or prohibited from, and the visual culture of public space as well.

Aimi: Wonderful. Thank you Beatrice, and we're so excited to have you here. Paul, would you like to go next and introduce yourself? Tell us a little bit about your work and how disability fits into it. 

Paul: my name's Paul DeFazio. I've been working at the Critical Design Lab for a couple of years, and I also work in the Institute for Human-Centered Design in Boston, which is a more traditional like inclusive design consultancy and research institution.

 there's like kind of an interesting tension between those two jobs, which I think will probably come out in certain ways in this conversation. And I should mention that I'm legally blind, so I entered architecture as a disabled person and part of my work with the Lab comes in response to the different kinds of discrimination and structural barriers that are still present for a lot of disabled people in architecture.

And I think that that also can connect to actually a lot of the political realities that we're facing today. 

Jos: Thank you, Paul. And Scar, tell us a little bit about yourself too.

Scar: Hi, I'm Scar. I'm a neuro queer architectural designer.

 I am particularly interested in kind of the intersection of trans queer and crip theory. And I've worked with the Disordinary Architecture Project for the last two years. Most notably on their compendium, "Many More Parts Than M" which was released in 2024, which had at least a hundred different projects, by disabled artists and architects

looking through a critical creative lens in relation to spatial practice. And since then I've kind of gone on to be involved in several of their projects. One of which being this one. Aside from that, I work for, Central St. Martins and teach on their MA Architecture program, and I do that with, [disabled artist] James Zakta-Haas, where we ran a unit this year looking at Crip theory, but also comfort.

I also kind of work within a kind of mini like research cluster looking at queer theory within that school. This year I designed an exhibition for the Museum of Transology, which is the kind of largest collection of everyday objects collected from trans, non-binary people in the UK.

Which is a really, an amazing experience. I think for me, in terms of how disability comes into my work, it's really about, when I was doing my Master's in particular, getting involved, and opening myself up to theories within disability studies and also within Crip theory.

It really just completely challenged the way in which I'd previously been taught, it's just so boring to return to previous modes of thinking about space. it's something that I've found actually made me much more comfortable in terms of my lived reality, but also, much more excited about architecture in a way that I hadn't felt for years actually at that point. 

Aimi: Thank you so much, Scar. So, Beatrice, your podcast death panel often discusses the theme of state abandonment. And you have an episode with Ruth Wilson Gilmore on the concept of organized abandonment, which is defined as the state sanctioned and or extra-legal production and exploitation of group differentiated vulnerability to premature death.

 this concept is related to things like critiques of neoliberal austerity politics, mass incarceration, of course, the response to the COVID-19 pandemic and settler colonialism. to start our conversation, I wanna think about how the idea of state abandonment works with the topic of access. the [ADA] Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990.

A lot of people don't know it was a Republican initiative rooted in ideas of productive citizenship achieved through disabled employment and access to public spaces. even though today's disability rights by today's standards are under attack by conservatives.

The ADA is extremely limited in what it can achieve for disabled people because it stipulates limits on who qualifies as disabled and what kinds of access can be afforded, what is reasonable or unreasonable and so on. something we've talked about throughout this podcast series is that the approach to meeting the legal requirements for access is often done through checklists and standards that are also inherently limited in a lot of ways.

So we're not really working at a super high level of legal protection here, but nevertheless. It is a baseline. It exists and it spurs on so many projects of going beyond the minimal standards and achieving types of access that are more creative and expansive in their scope. as I know you've also covered recently in your podcast, several states have joined a lawsuit that would have rolled back Section 5.04 recently, and this was one of the foundations of US disability rights law.

 earlier this year, the Trump administration waffled a bit on the question of access. So at first, the anti-DEI executive orders seemed to advocate for removing access from executive department programs and initiatives, and this was because under the Biden administration, they had changed it to DEIA, which was inclusive of access.

 this happened through a lot of advocacy. And so after the Trump administration got pushback against that, they said, well, of course we're not talking about federally protected disability rights. And they seemed to back down, but at the same time, there were a lot of accessibility features removed from government websites.

They stopped having ASL interpreters at press briefings. The Department of Justice Civil Rights Division has also significantly deemphasized enforcement of the ADA. And so this has brought up for a lot of folks who are involved with or adjacent to the federal government that even though the politics of access can be so fraught and nationalist and capitalist.

The withdrawal of access through state abandonment still has a noticeable impact as part of a creeping fascist politics. I'm wondering what you think about these politics of access in our present political moment. Where do we see the state abandonment of access and where can we look for strategies to maintain or create access if the state withdrawals from the enforcement of disability rights?

Beatrice: I think one of the things that I always try and emphasize when we start talking about in particular the way that disability law and policy has shaped the public perception of access, which is almost more primary than what the laws themselves dictate. We often go back to section 5.04 of the Rehabilitation Act as a kind of starting point.

And partially that's due to the fact that the disability rights movement is really connected to that fight, . One of the things that people don't talk about as often, which is part of the precipitating environment and sort of policy landscape that actually makes that fight possible is the 1968 Architectural Barriers Act known as the a BA.

This was a act passed by Congress, signed by Lyndon Johnson. And it followed some efforts by the Kennedy administration to deinstitutionalize facilities that held intellectually disabled people in the United States. So one of the efforts that that law sort of sets up is this idea of what spaces are required to be accessible.

What spaces are not required to be accessible, and it's kind of the precursor for what becomes a big part of Section 5.04. And also that's a big part of, the ADA, which is the idea that if something has federal funding, moving through it as a space, if federal funding contributes to the operation of that space, then it then is subject to these sort of minimum requirements.

Basically the buildings that the federal government in the United States rents for federal workers to be in. Those buildings were basically mandated by the a BA of 1968 to have these minimum accessibility requirements. And one of the things that the Trump administration was very clear about when they came in is that they had issues with disability hiring, right?

And that kind of process where they said that there were lots of disabled people getting jobs. They even blamed a plane crash on disabled people being employed, as workers in, air traffic control, which is categorically like false and ridiculous. But the part of the Doge effort under Elon Musk that has been chasing waste, fraud, and abuse, which while its surface,

often is talked about as if it's fiscal responsibility, but is really about policing the body politic and making broad statements about whose space and services and society ultimately are for and who they're not for. well As blaming broad structural and societal problems on individual groups.

Right. But, part of that fight against waste, fraud and abuse has been large scale divestment through the GSA of federal buildings, which, when we think about that on the abstract, that represents this kind of like fascinating rollback of even the pre-history of some of the laws that they're directly attacking, like section 5.04.

And this is where Ruthie Gilmore's concept of organized abandonment becomes so important. One of the ways that she talks about it is like. If you are living in a an apartment building and the light is out in the stairwell, the, and the landlord doesn't replace the light, right? That is organized abandonment.

And that can result in premature death in, in hundreds of different ways, whether that's someone falling down the stairs because they can't see whether that's the stairwell becoming less safe, whether that's the stairwell not being able to be cleaned because there is no light, or just the kind of quality of life of living in a space where you know that no one cares enough to replace the light.

And that's a kind of reinforcement of disposability. And this obviously is a highly racialized, lived experience in the United States. Organized abandonment is not evenly applied. And so when we think about. Especially what's going on right now and the kind of politics of state abandonment. Often we think about it in terms of direct policies that affect people at an individual level, but it also occurs in these ways that sometimes I think the people doing it don't even realize that what they're doing, because they're attacking Section 5.04, which uses the Architectural Barrier Act as its kind of precursor and uses the Civil Rights Act as its precursor to basically say that if a, space or if a program or a business or any kind of entity like a school, for example, receives federal funding, it must meet these minimum accessibility requirements.

what we saw was through policies that came after that, was that that kind of universalist approach to accessible space in the United States was translated into an individual accommodations approach.

And that has come to shape every law and policy that has been passed since the Architectural Barriers Act in 1968. part of that is the way that abandonment is so often expressed in our contemporary society and in our political economy is through the individuation of the 

Through taking things that. Should and can be universal, both conceptually and structurally, whether that's healthcare, accessible toilets, ramps braille in elevators or braille anywhere other than an elevator or the kinds of ways that we think about education being, people are only taught a SL or braille if they qualify as deaf or blind in advance.

We're not just taught that despite the fact that many people as they age, lose their sight in hearing. The kind of individuated way that we approach everything is in and of structural abandonment because these are universalist concepts that, as Ruthie saying, whether it's a disabled person who can't get up and down the stairs because there are stairs and not an elevator or stairs and not a ramp, or she joked a little old lady like me with a, cane falling down the stairs because there's no light.

That's organized abandonment at the level of the, structural, the individual and policy And when we think about the kinds of ways that, for example, like remediating something like that would be done in an individual way. And that in and of itself is structural abandonment.

Whether we're mandating that all stairwells have lights in them, or we're operating as a society and political economy with meeting people's needs in, in the most basic structural ways as a kind of starting point. that is ultimately the kind of floor, and we're operating way below in the sub-basement.

We're structural abandonment through. Individuation is the starting point, and that is treated globally as the gold standard of access policy. I mean, the ADA has been replicated by dozens of other countries. It's recognized by the UN, the WHO, as the absolute pinnacle of accessibility policy, and it is incredibly insufficient, and it is the most individuated approach to accessibility that we have seen of all accessibility policies in the United States.

It kind of represents the pinnacle of neoliberal choice as well, of the idea that accessibility is something that requires enforcement in a retroactive way rather than something that is a starting point for approaching any public space. And that has come to dictate the politics around disability in so many other ways that have nothing to do with architecture, law, policy or space, but then get translated into these kind of common sense attitudes that then shape the lives and the lived experience of disabled people in a way that then translates that structural abandonment into a highly personal, you know, one-to-one of quote unquote common sense ableism.

Aimi: Thank you for that. it sounds like part of the connection that you're drawing is that, the ADA was part of the depoliticization of disability, in relation to the built environment that there had previously been, laws like the ABA and also section 5.04, which like, even though, you know, they had pretty limited enforcement in the federal government and that was part of why section 5.04 was necessary that they were addressing, society on a structural level. by the time we got to the ADA in the 1990s, the focus is really on individual disabled people. And that's why, 20 years after the ADA, most of the lawsuits that were brought under the ADA had lost in court that they were so focused on individual accommodations that people couldn't even prove that they qualified as disabled people a lot of the time under the law in order to get the types of structural accommodations that the law entitled people to.

one of the things that I do in addition to my job as a professor is I work for the US Access Board, which is the federal agency that, writes the accessibility guidelines for the ADA and the ABA so much of their enforcement relies on other federal agencies like the Department of Justice, like the General Services Administration.

And in this moment, as you said, all of that as being withdrawn or stalled, in the same way that we see all over the government, that there's a lack of follow through with funding and things like that as a way to just stall any, movement forward.

I'm curious, Jos, as you're listening to Beatrice's response to my question, do you see parallels to the situation in the UK? 

Jos: In terms of state abandonment and,individuated systems, I think there's lots of very similar things there. I think in terms of just in terms of legal rights and policies and the way that those are developed, because we don't have,, the federal system, then that's played its way through differently. currently in the UK there's lots of attacks on both the disability, the kind of legal protections, but there's also been very savage reductions or threats of reductions in, benefit programs, which is justified by implying that disabled people are lazy or they're cheating the system. So I suppose what it feels like here, I think is also true in the States, a lot of the things that are happening are around this common sense ableism, this kind of general blaming of particular groups or particular categories of difference.

So there's a kind of attempt to really divide people into those who are deserving and those who are undeserving. both political parties in this country frequently use the expression hardworking families as being like the core group who matter. They're the people who need, support and funding, and everybody else really is potentially, either a threat or, a drag on the system.

 Scar, I guess there's two questions in that for you really. One is about how you think kind of legal rights, whether there's an equivalence to what's happening in the States, but also in terms of the languages about who is normal and who isn't, that have been developed politically for a very long time, but have been used very specifically in the current moment in the UK to really discriminate against disabled people.

Scar: Yeah, I think there was two things that really came out actually, but just while you were speaking that I think also cross over this and also link into kind of relation to anti-fascism, the idea of directness and indirect actions, which essentially create state abandonment, but also push access and disability in relation to architecture into this kind of like other category or it's dealt with separately or it's a kind of thing you have to abide by and adhere to through Part M [UK accessibility regulations] rather than something that's part of your kind of design remit.

So I think that's something which would be quite interesting to explore. And as Jos says, like there has been changes in relation to kind of austerity politics is very in at the moment and, austerity politics has the effect of kind of both positioning people who perhaps require additional support against one another and entrenching or trying to divide and split people up.

And that happens both through the narrative of what's put out in the press, but also, through this relationship of kind of feeling, feeling quite acutely under pressure, in terms of money as well. And there has been these two revisions, particularly with the Personal Independence Payment PIP and also with Universal Credit [welfare payments].

So the way in which they're pushed politically is about redistributing public money towards people they consider to be, I suppose, more deserving of it. And also pushing alongside that, rhetoric around the people who are receiving those payments in the first place.

The effect for something like DisOrdinary has been, 'cause we work a lot with different disabled artists, is that not having something like PIP, the Personal Independence P ayment or that being cut back means that many people can't necessarily maintain their practices, or would be able to continue to work with us or would be able to continue to work independently.

again, we seewhat's direct and what's indirect, where an indirect action, which is sold on the premise of getting people back into work. It's like which people are getting back into work and actually those cutbacks of PIP

will affect the people who needed it in the first place. And then I think also there's this relationship of the way the architecture works. I noticed that you also said around the idea of, what's considered political, what's considered within the architectural remit and how, things like Part M or the ADA, how, the way in which they conceptualize access as this add-on or separate thing from a kind of main design process or something that you just comply with and then it will work and that would be great. How that means that, it also gives architecture permission to depoliticize itself from it. architecture as a profession, selectively decides what's within its social and political remit and what falls outside of it and what, it would consider a neutral position to be appropriate.

But a neutral position is very rarely ever actually neutral. So I'm just wondering Beatrice, just whether you had like more thoughts on this idea of , directness and indirectness in the way in which fascism and the built environment operates, but alsohow different practitioners or different disciplines might selectively depoliticize themselves with certain issues where they feel like they perhaps don't know exactly what to do or they decided, or they've been taught that actually it's not necessarily their problem.

Beatrice: Thank you so much for that, Scar. And Jos, I think one of the main and very uncomfortable parallels between the United States and the UK right now policy-wise has to do with the waste fraud abuse angle, which is being instrumentalized against the PIP payments in particular. We had a really great conversation with John Pring who wrote the book, The Department about the Department of Works and Pensions in the UK, and the kinds of language that we're seeing in the United States proliferate right now, is also at the core of the state abandonment that's going on in the UK.

It's the same ideology maybe, coming out in different iterations, but at the core of it is really a depoliticization of the production of disability and a decentering of disability and ability from the not that it was anywhere central to normal, but a further distancing from that as a kind of normal state of life, as something that is, more universalized. I think part of what, especially Scar you're making me think about right now, in terms of the direct and indirect, expressions of individuation and of access as well, just gets to the core of also how disability as a category functions within the state.

Because, we've said, these are accommodations that are based on a legal identity or the presupposition of a legal identity that's certifiable and readily verifiable and standardized. But in the United States right now, we have calls to implement work requirements in Medicaid, which is the low income health insurance program in the United States.

And part of the way people push back on it is they say, oh, well most people on Medicaid are already working and those who don't work are disabled or caregivers. And so this is a small portion of the population that would be subject to these harms. what that ignores is that within that small sliver, which a small population being targeted has never really been a reason for that to not matter.

We see that, especially with the targeting of trans people in the United States, where it's a very small portion of the population that is receiving outsized, attention, negative attention, regardless of the scale of the population, but that small sliver of people who are not working but not legally categorized as disabled, may be disabled.

They may just not fit the legal definition of disabled by the state. So this is like why the kind of sorting mechanism itself is really at the core of this because capitalism produces and manages surplus life, whether that's people who are unemployed, people are who are on disability, people who are older, children, also people who are migrants.

Or people who work in the shadow economy. Anyone who's outside the mainstream of employment. And that's produced and managed through both a kind of spatial exclusion and a medical categorization. And so when we start thinking about like directness and indirectness and visibility and legibility, which are also so much part of the politics of access, it's especially when we're talking about like anti-fascism, we need to be thinking about also the way that legibility can also be a really core part of the fascist dynamic. Because sometimes it's about perpetuating the idea that a disabled person is legible and easily categorizable. Which is part of what's underlying the UK's, claim right now.

That there are all these people who just don't wanna work, who are just layabouts, who are cheating the working man and the working families, to get these disability payments that they haven't earned. And that, is based around the perpetuation of the common sense idea that if you see a disabled person, it's gonna be readily obvious that they're disabled and that you'll be able to verify their disability.

And this has been a problem in the UK for a long time, where you have people deputized to surveil their neighbors, essentially to report their neighbors for being disability fakers. And intervening in that one-on-one level, deputizing people as arms of the fascist state to enforce the binary between disabled and non-disabled life, as if it is something that has a kind of standardized definition that anyone can tap into.

And this is part of how capitalism actually produces disability, by enforcing the mythology that there is this line and there's this clear cut category. It's through this violent sorting of human life into, useful and useless, productive, unproductive, desirable, disposable. And so I think when we think about how to push back on this this is a political position that's created by the State's role in managing populations that are deemed non-productive, non-normative, useless, disposable.

And it's expressed in, in ways that. Also speak to the person who's, being identified as that other category, centering them in the body, politics, centering them in , the liberal political sphere, And also teaching them that their problems, their suffering, their life, not turning out the way they thought it was gonna be, is not the fault of any kind of structural or political or economic context.

But is the relation between that unproductive body that they can be the kind of deputy of the state in identifying and policing. And so ultimately, like whether we're talking about medical institutions, public space, welfare, bureaucracy, carceral systems, these are all functioning as part of this broader apparatus that sorts people into categories of worth.

And this isn't limited to disabled people in any narrow sense as well. This is like. Capitalism's current crisis tendencies, whether we're talking about rising precarity, decaying infrastructure, the collapse of public health, , the collapse of benefit systems, the push for privatization of benefit systems, the introduction of made policies, particularly, the expansion of made in Canada, the proposed introduction of made in the uk, which often serves as it's justified as being.

Sometimes it's easier to seek state approval for dying and faster than it is to receive services that you're entitled to, whether that's housing services, benefits services, medical services, et cetera. But this is, this is also this doesn't explicitly target disabled people. It targets refugees, chronically ill people, trans people, poor people, older adults.

Neurodivergent people, anyone who can be labeled, unfit, unstable, or deviant. And this is also in the United States being turned on political groups as well, on the leftist political movements that are somewhat legible to the kind of apparatus of policing and surveillance are being targeted in the very same way, which we're seeing in the targeted, kidnapping and disappearing of pro-Palestine student activists, right?

Where you have people who are being black bagged and pulled off the street by agents who are covering their faces, Who are, hiding their identities. And so when we think about, where to intervene and where, where fascism in the built environment, can facilitate this, like, I think we have to be thinking about.

Not better participation or better visibility or better inclusion. Right? But like in sabotage, how can access be sabotage, Because if a space is designed to only selectively include those who are readily verifiably disabled, is it inclusion to start from, as a kind of design principle, from a starting point to say, okay, this space is gonna start with a kind of radical accessibility that is not contained to the kind of belief that this is meeting the subset of needs.

Just to take like a really superficial example, like what if a bathroom was all disabled stalls and not one disabled stall? That I think when we think about that, we're often taught in the kind of like liberal, political and aesthetic, mode of thinking to talk about that as inclusion, right?

we've included disabled people in every bathroom stall, but that's actually a sabotage of the space being designated and divided between the binary of disabled and non-disabled, and also a kind of visual representation of who and how many disabled people are gonna be in that space. If there's only one accessible bathroom in a building that has 57 bathrooms, right?

Then you're making a kind of statement about how many disabled people are expected to be there. If every single one of those 57 bathrooms is fully accessible, that's a sabotage of the kind of fascist portrayal of public spaces being for the strong, healthy majority, which doesn't really exist.

That could use the standard stall and we'll never need the disability stall. So I think when we're thinking about making interventions, because spatial exclusion is one of the primary kind of tools of this management, both in terms of space, but also in terms of creating a visual culture, of disability being part of this binary of deserving and undeserving.

We have to be thinking about this not just as enforcing social values, or creating space for access, but access as sabotage, as refusal of fascist visual culture and the fascist ideology about space.

Jos: I was wondering if I could bring you into the conversation because I was just thinking about this idea of, can architecture be a form of kind of sabotage and refusal? a form of challenge and resistance. Yeah.

Paul: on the topic of refusal, I think that that's a really important tool that an architect has that I think is often not emphasized. You can say, I would prefer not to do that project. You can refuse to make a design decision that actively causes harm in a fascist way, like, inclusive design that might be like co-opted by hostile architecture like we have in the Boston Public Transit system. Or, like after school shootings with people like Ted Cruz, the turning of public schools into like prison, hybrid school, typologies, like those kinds of things are very obviously fascist.

designers definitely have a role to play in terms of refusing to do that kind of work or pushing people away from that kind of work., But I also think about, this person who,was a cancer patient at a hospital and he would get parking fines every time that he went to the hospital because of the length of his cancer treatment.

And then he would have to pay, over and over again. And he attacked the parking meter with spray foam and the essay kind of argues that that's a form of access creation. It's kind of like access as attack or an attack on the built environment.

it's important to talk about because it actually is hard for me to imagine architects taking a position like that in like an architecture school or an architecture firm right now. it feels like the idea of this very insurgent, architecture or like tactical architecture that would refuse fascist decisions that existed before Trump, to be honest, in the built environment in America.

we already had a built environment that segregates and excludes and makes certain bodies feel like they don't fit in. , And selectively abandon certain populations. Like I don't think that's like a new thing in American architecture. but I, the political reality that we have right now makes it so obvious that hopefully it can be a little more of a wake up call for people who are working in like the design disciplines and just thinking that they can go along and like not think about these things.

Another way, I think too is like contesting code. Like actually looking at things like the ADA and not treating them as these like sacred, things that have been passed down forever and always have to be the way they are, but arguing with 'em, annotating them or even like doing deeper critiques like, Marta Russell in her book Beyond Ramps has a really critique of the ADA's connection with capitalist politics and the way in which we have this access machine in the US that produces these mass produced, features and design elements that are coded as access.

 there are ways that you can resist that , and simply by creating strongholds outside of the mainstream access system and working, like you're doing with DisOrdinary or like is happening in the Critical Design Lab to think about how we can create access immediately for the people around us, using ways that are not coded as access in building codes or standards or the mainstream inclusion dialogue that's co-opted by corporations.

I do think there's a direct action tactical refusal aspect route and then there, but there's also definitely the way that we take care of the people around us and the way that we create new forms of access just in, in our immediate contexts.

Jos: I feel like that's so important to put it in a, longer historical context really. So I, something that was also coming up for me that is a question for everybody really is that this kind of divide and rule is version of capitalism, has had versions of it and worked its way through for a very long time.

And I was just thinking it feels like there's something very particular in the current moment, which is this move to authoritarianism, to a kind of some new version of fascism. In Health Communism we, really engage in a historical materialist kind of argument around, trying to situate this phenomenon, not even within the US State, as something that's a, global phenomenon, but also something that's, predates the US.

Beatrice: I think it's really core to the political economy of capitalism. We had to pick a place to start. That story, we could have gone back further. We had, only so many pages allowed by the publisher, so we had to be judicious about where we were gonna start.

And so we start with the British Poor Laws, which come after the Black Death in the UK, where you have a lot of laborers die. And so there's a increased power for the laborers that remain in terms of being able to refuse certain types of work, to work for people who treat them better, to decline working for people who don't pay as well, to demand better pay.

And so you have this kind of moment where a lot of the, what we would call like social welfare supports at the time are being run through donations, through churches through the religious charity system before the idea of charity is like more of a private notion.

it's more of a function of this kind of extra state, superstructure of the church, where it's about redistribution as much as it is about ideology and membership. And so you have this moment where the assistance being provided by the church is made illegal. You have an attempt to categorize people and begin to create a system of sorting around disability and idleness, where labor power becomes the kind of impetus for what category you are sorted into.

And this is the beginning of the working poor, the deserving poor, the idle poor, and the disabled. And whether you're disabled through your own fault or through no fault of your own, where this starts to become categorization and it's about sorting people in order to determine who gets shipped off to a workhouse and who goes to an alms house, both or prison camps, but they're slightly different.

The expectations of, what your body is supposed to do when you're in that camp is different. And it's, I think one of the things that we always try and emphasize on Death Panel, is just because this is a long historical phenomenon, does not mean that its continuation is mandated by some, destiny of history.

I do think that these politics have been heightened for many people as a result of COVID. But I think this is also a longstanding, increase in this dynamic. We could go back to the Gulf Wars, we could go back to, the AIDS crisis and the kind of height of the HIV AIDS epidemic.

There are so many moments where this system in the last a hundred years and this kind of approach to the body politic and to who the we is for really, I think as capitalism has increased its legibility of the population, which is about making the operations of the state more efficient. I'm thinking of the work of James C. Scott here, seeing like a state where he talks about, part of the ways that the state functions is it's not really there to provide benefits, right? It's not there to keep people safe. The benefits that we're entitled to are hard fought concessions, though they are inadequate, but they're hard fought concessions that create a kind of benevolent mask for the state.

The primary function of a state is to have a view of the population that makes its own functions more efficient. And the function of the state is to perpetuate itself, to maintain power, to suppress dissent, to facilitate and make more efficient processes of enclosure and border management.

So I think as the US state, has developed over the last a hundred years, it's not done so in a vacuum, all states have developed together in, in this context, and we've had increasing attempts to make the kind of legibility of the population more and more sophisticated. And I think when state states try and see, they try and count to see, right?

And this kind of process of counting, we can just tie right back into things like, the idea of the average man and the kind of core ideology that, underlies the idea of normal. And so I think capitalism has relied on the kind of mythology of normality to become more powerful and more efficient at managing the population.

And as that has progressed, it has for some, brought this more to the fore for others, developed this further. But it's also standardized this fascist approach to population management, not just as a political I ideology, but as a spatial project of really how modern states conceptualize their territory, their sovereignty, their currency even comes down to a kind of view of the population that is made efficient through the use of statistical, means and averages and the idea that bodies can be easily sorted by standard prescribed metrics for variations in human experience and in body mind.

Aimi: I wanna pick up on this thread of legibility and illegibility, thinking about the legibility of frameworks and forms of critique that are a threat to the state. So we've seen conservative attacks on wokeness and first critical race theory and now DEI, and the boundary work that is done around all of those things. Like the Biden administration put accessibility in with DEI and it became DEIA and then that made access legible as a target for DOGE and executive orders and other things. And even like DEI itself, the ways that, literal keywords are used to find grants and shut them down.

it was literally just like a question of searching for words that they associate with an ideology. often in disability studies and in Crip theory, we talk about the difference between

Crip as an individual identity and Crip politics as an orientation, against liberal disability rights frameworks or like towards disability justice. what would be ways to bring forward our critiques of the way that disability and precarity and, state abandonment and hierarchy and all of these things are working together, that don't easily lend themselves to some DOGE in turn using AI to search in ADAtabase and to try to group it together with other things and shut it down.

what are some ways that, maybe through design practice or the kinds of like political projects that we could actually create strategic forms of illegibility.

Scar: there's also something that operates within spatial practice, which is around narrative and storytelling and the need, particularly within architecture in the way in which we often present work, and convey it, the need for kind of clear and easy storytelling. And within that, there often isn't much capacity for the idea of something not being immediately obvious. there's, something about the idea of the architect as being someone who controls how people move through space or experience space, and that there's a right to determine that. And so I think that there's also other ways in which the architecture profession operates, which are very, very deeply embedded, which means that means of cracking open the conversation, through these methods of complexity and, difference and variation and diverse experience and not necessarily always available or require a kind of slowing down of that whole process.

Paul: Yeah, I think that.

designers can set up their tools in a way that makes it easy for someone with fascist ideology to use and appropriate them or harder. And I think what Scar is talking about really relates to that. Like the single author of, thebuilding as a total work of art as we've seen in architects like Adolf Los, or, a lot of modernist, architects.

And I, I think that tradition and romanticization of having total authority over the way that people use space is still a fantasy that many designers have. But I think that there is potentially, a way to reimagine architectural tools so

that they can be used by everyone. And people have more agency within the built environment. when you imagine like people using your building, what do you imagine that they do and how much do you imagine them actually being able to resist to the vision that you had for that space?

And how do you create those affordances and tolerances? there was like this project I did, in. my master's thesis, which was proposals for different kinds of disability culture spaces, and one of them was a hospital, but like within that hospital you put a, forum or like a space where people can contest health practices and that sort of creates a very different model of what a person does in a medical space because usually medical spaces are not designed for you to have any real agency.

 you're supposed to have your life and disability dictated to you by the authority of a doctor. And, one strategy that, that potentially points to is that we can actually. Dismantle the systems that we have in place and reconfigure them to say, what does it mean to be like a protesting citizen within the space of a hospital I think there's the possibility of dismantling these different systems and troubling them by, misusing them 

And I think that has to be rooted in this idea of, individual agency and also collective care rather than, this designer as savior or designer as author, vision of what like designers do 

Beatrice: I so appreciate both those, points, one thing it brings to mind is, what questions are we leading with now? The kind of approach to access, and the institutional educational model is, to kind of oversimplify like, how can we design for inclusion And I think one thing that, what you both are saying makes me think of is that if we take that oversimplified starting point and reframe the question, perhaps that's a, a path towards getting toward a kind of, strategic illegibility you know, how can we design for inclusion is about legibility and inclusion.

But rather than design for inclusion, which of course assumes a normal as we've been talking about this whole time, and that's part of the core problem, we could start from something like, whose exclusion is being maintained through our design choices?, What are we being asked to sustain in our design?

I don't know what it would mean to, design against the impulsive inclusion towards something that's seeking to be sabotaged through, eliminating the normal from that process and that question. I mean, it's really about how do we get to the point within the imperfect structures that we're in.

the easy answer is we completely scrap the entire system of education and start from scratch. But is there a way to using the politics of sabotage and refusal, is there a way also using the kinds of improvisational techniques of crypt theory, also to make interventions in a way now that are messy and imperfect, but which take us away from this reliance on normal is a kind of centralized concept that other decision making flows from.

Maybe anti-fascist design is about abandoning the fantasy of the normal and finding a way to work with. Questions of what am I being asked to sustain? What exclusion is being maintained through these choices? If we move forward from those questions rather than like, how do we include X group and include Y group, which then brings us to the territory of the eugenic ideology of competing needs, becoming the negotiation at the heart of, that decision making process.

It's just approaching the same question from a very different perspective, but we're achieving the same structural ends. It's just coming from a completely different ideology that gets us towards like embracing non legibility or strategic illegibility.

Especially in an era of rising fascism, embracing non legibility or strategic illegibility gets us around the kind of compulsions of the state towards the violence of counting and sorting. Not every body needs to be categorized if we're approaching design, not from the position of inclusion, but from the position of maintenance and exclusion.

Not every form of care needs to be professionalized or documented in that context. And I think there's power in opacity and safety and refusal that we can approach in very imperfect, messy ways within the current, political economy of design and construction and architecture that we are already existing in that already dictate so much of, our built environment.

What we've come to is that like anti-fascist design must sabotage the kind of fascist fantasies of health and of, clean and orderly bordering regimes, right. And of sorting. And so if we're trying to obstruct those flows of violence, we have to do things like interfere with surveillance.

We have to create design that offers shelter rather than, creating, hostile,architecture to prevent people from sleeping on benches. Obviously there are limitations and this is, limited through the kind of economy of, of design, which is its own thing. But when we're thinking about. Interrupting harm in the present tense, we're not talking about a kind of utopian vision of a perfect space, right? We're talking about how we can use theory and praxis to interrupt some of that harm in very small ways, in the hope that our actions can create a ripple effect to, shift what is being maintained by, by that space and by the practice of design.

And I'm curious how you think we might be able to resist the fascist impulse towards legibility that is really so embedded both in institutional design and in the kind of well-meaning inclusive design perspective that is so often the primary way that it particularly students are taught to encounter this idea in the first place, because if the kind of first encounter with accessibility is going to be often through a politics of inclusion, and I think what would it mean for someone to encounter this rather than through a politics of inclusion, but through a kind of politics of opacity and messiness and refusal.

You know, how do we balance the very obvious need for voice and presence with the political necessity of refusal and the kind of protection of opacity, right? Especially for people whose, presence is treated as a design problem that needs to be solved. 

Paul: It makes me think that like so much of like actually what needs to happen to do those kinds of interventions is to also resist the austerity logic that we get backed into by things like, the ADA or even inclusive design, which I think takes the ADA as the floor and says, we need to go above that floor.

But what it actually does, I think in some cases, , is that it legitimizes withholding everything beyond the ADA. In other words, like you have this minimalist framework that says in architecture, can you go inside a building? Can you use the bathroom and can you walk around without getting injured or killed?

And then you're forced to defend that from continually being dismantled. And then in the meantime you have the state continually revising its obligations to say that the things that covered the basic needs for disabled people to survive are unnecessary luxuries.

And then you have to defend against that. 'Cause in a lot of cases, like I, deal with and use code like in my job and, even like just today, I was, going to, the store to get a new computer charger, because mine broke and I was crossing the street and I'm blind.

So I like, I need like a tactile or vibrant, tactile warning signal to cross the street. And so I'm walking and about half the streets have them and half the streets don't. So that creates ADAngerous, situation. But then I also feel two emotions.

One is the sort of frustration with the lack of the safe ability to cross the street. But then on the other hand, I feel like I'm supposed to have this kind of gratitude for the vibrotactile signals that do exist. And then that puts me in a position of defending the status quo. And that, in a sneaky way reinforces that austerity logic where I then am advocating for, the ability to cross the street without getting hit by a car as opposed to like a disabled fantasy of a much better future, for all of us.

 It just makes me think about like the way that, in moderate liberal positions you end up defending something that's way far below what we actually need to be advocating for, if we even want people to be excited about things like access or, disability culture in the built environment.

Because we're forced to have these arguments where we're defending the baseline, which is continually under attack, and that suppresses continually the creativity of disabled people and actually also the creativity of architects who, might be able to, be useful allies in terms of thinking about how disabled space could look.

But so often, like you have this really specific and prescriptive vision of okay, so a disabled person needs to get into this building, so you give them this ramp with these particular measurements and specifications and this is how it has to look and this is the place where you're gonna buy it from.

And that becomes this way of, actually forwarding the creative intellect of someone who actually maybe could have designed something better or thought about something better. And it turns it into this chore and this obligation and this legal responsibility that has to be carried out in a particular way that's been prescribed. And then you lose the ability to actually imagine something better than that.

Scar: I think it's interesting that kind of interplay of, as you were saying Paul, like that interplay of, functional access and then a desire to really create new modes, and be recognized in relation to creative practice as well. there's always that kind of dialogue which exists in architectural space where there's a disinterest around kind of functional access, but also it carries on being extremely important.

So I wonder whether there's a question around what it means to go beyond functional access, what it means to create projects where you are bringing in these ideas, which kind of become more expansive, but not letting go of that understanding of how people actually access space, and moved through space in the UK Part M is building guidance, in relation to access, in relation to specifically in functional access. But the way it works in the UK is I, we have less space in many instances and the built environment is largely already constructed. And so when we get that kind of interaction between Part M and an already constructed, built environment, you often get these moments where people don't necessarily need to comply or can make the argument that they don't need to comply with Part M because they can't manage to retrofit that into the existing building. So there is again, this other layer around how ideas of heritage and kind of, within that kind of national identity interplay with both a historic built environment, which hasn't welcome people with diverse needs, but then also has a kind of desire to sustain and maintain itself, in a way as part of a part of national identity.

Talking through these ideas of kind of refusal,, I think there's the kind of precarity of, employment that exists within architecture. I think people, most people assume that it's actually quite steady and quite well paid, but at the moment the landscape of architectural practice in the UK is quite precarious and that, so a lot of people wouldn't necessarily feel that they could refuse in a lot of instances.

So understanding whether there are ways to work within , those systems that you're dependent on. But survival for income, whether it's possible to operate within those systems. And a part of that I think is maybe about asking questions. Because actually a lot of the things we're talking about, all these structures of, normalcy, they're quite fragile a lot of ways.

They have quite a kind of a fragile underpinning and a key tool in that is curiosity and imagination, and to bring that back to the initial point of the idea of, well, how do you operate between this idea of the functional and the kind of beyond functional? I would actually, Jos, whether you've got something to say to this 

Jos: I think that's a really interesting question. And actually from my experience of teaching over many years, even functional access in architecture schools doesn't really get covered until much later stages in that it's seen as being a block on creativity on how you think about what you're doing. And so it seems something which you can ignore as an undergraduate student and then become something that is only talked about in terms of legal compliance once you get onto the latest stages of study.

And, people that I know in the States it feels like they would say very similar things, so it's not even, you know, there functional access and then we might do it a different way. In a way the tensions that, that Paul was talking about, about, fighting for what is currently being lost by disabled people.

And, that you're fighting for those very basic standards of needs. That it's a kind of a similar thing seems to me to make divisions across the built environment kind of professions and education. So you get, a whole subculture, a very important subculture of, access consultants who kind of one, do the job when it comes to professional design. They do it on behalf of the architects so the architects don't need to learn about even functional access. But that's what that role is. It's to fight to make sure that those, baseline things are in there and, better than the baseline, you know, really pushing for that, but within that set of parameters.

So the way that it has developed as a [01:05:00] educational system and then as a system of practice kind of just keeps us caught in this loop of, yes, we need to fight for this stuff. And the trouble is that stops us thinking beyond it. I mean, there are always examples of people who break through that.

I remember seeing very early on when I got involved in this subject where the tutor asked their students to design completely inaccessible buildings. So the idea was that it might be a building where the only way in is to climb up a rope and into a third floor window.

And so by flipping it like that, it is in a way that kind of subversion that relates to what you've been talking about. Beatrice. The idea was that by asking them to do that, they became much more aware of what is assumed to be normal. They became much more aware of the business of how you get into a building became, just much more conscious about it, but also in this kind of quite creative, playful way that I feel like, things like that that actually do really shift.

And kind of shock people into thinking differently, I think is another version of what we've been discussing. And I really like Beatrice's idea about shifting the question that it isn't about how we design for inclusion. It is about how we are reinforcing particular categories of difference.

How does design do that? Whether that's around gender, around sexuality, around race, around disability, what's going on there? What is, what's actually happening in the mechanisms that we use? For me, there are some quite radical things that need to happen, but they're not about throwing the whole system out and changing it.

They are about shifting a kind of culture, which we all know is quite toxic culture quite often within both architecture as a practice and as a subject that you study. Maybe snowballing these moments of subversion so that They want to be seen as designers that challenge the norm rather than the designers that make beautiful buildings. that could be very interesting and might, and again, could be quite small scale, but scattered and hybrid and, building up to a kind of cultural shift.

Scar: as Jos was saying this idea of like, dunno whether it's necessarily realistic at this stage to totally reform a system which doesn't desire to be reformed in any way. But there is something about how it also has this power of devouring itself, which is doing at the moment in relation to architectural practice. And I think that actually there are things that are within Crip theory and disability studies, which can be really valuable tools in navigating that it's actually really necessary for reshaping architectural practice. So that it has a greater level of care to the people who are within the profession, but also the people that kind of design spaces with. And I think this idea of kind of anti-fascism, if you're designing in this way, you're designing according to kind of disability studies and disability justice, you're inherently doing work, which ends up being anti-fascist because those are the kind of core tenaments of that work in the first place. these ideas of how you distribute agency, how do you tell more complex and more personal stories, and also the depth that brings is really important and also really quite beautiful and necessary in terms of the acuteness of both kind of US and UK political positions.

I think that actually sometimes it is really necessary to take those positions of refusal or, re entanglement rather than trying to prize it apart or adjust necessarily to that kind of new landscape. But to just decide like, no.

Paul: One thing we're seeing in architecture that really relates to what you were talking about was this move towards unprofessional practice or undisciplined practice, which is courses that are popping up in certain schools that are about, really talking about the ways that the profession of architecture is exclusionary and the ways of practicing that we have right now really don't work.

And I think as disabled people, like we all have experienced that reality. I definitely think that that's a really interesting area to explore and think about how you can actually change practice to be more, I don't want to use the word inclusive but to, change practice so it takes disabled people and allows us to flourish and be ourselves and like work in the ways that we want to.

Jos: Absolutely. And I think that, I think all, Beatrice's idea of sabotage, but also, that there is these kind of creative forms of subversion and challenge and, reinvention at that kind of, at that local level, there is a lot of that going on. that's something we need to build on, in this way, which is about it being messy and imperfect, but, it that it does exist, which is really important.

Aimi: When I was listening to you all speak, I thought about the first episode that we recorded in [01:10:00] this series, 

 a conversation that we had in that episode, which I think is relevant to this one, is that so many of the structures that we are talking about are not as rigid as we think that they are. Things like standards and codes are not universal or ahistorical.

They are socially produced through processes of contention and deliberation and they're produced by people on the basis of specific ways of knowing and practicing. Even though we tend to think of them as a dominant framework or an ideology, they can also be undone, by asking different kinds of questions, by introducing different kinds of data, and approaches and strategies.

It's just interesting to tie that back to what we've been talking about and think about that as a form of resistance also to fascism. That one form of prefigurative politics might be to think about other things that standards can be in other approaches to those, whether that is expanding the types of standards that exist or the way that they work and the way that they're enforced and how people are learning about them and approaching them.

And there's of course, like a really long history of disabled designers engaging with those strategies and questions.

Scar: I also think it's important to recognize that actually that's really, really difficult work and it's quite tiring doing that work and resisting against different systems, and requires this kind of moment of kind of mutual care and mutual aid, , which needs to occur now more than ever, across people from different social justice movements in that kind of mutual identification of how we're all under threat and being separated from space and being excluded, whether that be directly or indirectly.

Aimi: You've been listening to Disability Meets Architecture, a series of episodes of the Contra Podcast focused on the productive frictions within critical access theory.

Disability meets Architecture was created by Jos Boys from The DisOrdinary Architecture Project, and Aimi Hamraie from the Critical Design Lab and the Contra Podcast with support from Scar Barlay and Paul DeFazio, and funding from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Our editor is Ilana Nevins.

You can find out more about this project and our respective organizations on Instagram @diordinaryarchitecture, @criticaldesignlab, and @labsforliberation. The Contra Podcast is licensed under a creative commons attribution, non-commercial share, like 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.