Resisting Normality with Cultural Accessibility and Slow Technology

Abstract

Although the COVID-19 virus continues to circulate, there is an increasing insistence that the world “return to normal.” In this paper the authors resist this pull to normalcy and the way it devalues the knowledges, vitality, and livelihoods of disabled people. They examine the crip technoscience practices used during the 2022 digital gathering Practicing the Social: Entanglements of Art and Social Justice, situating them as examples of cultural accessibility that engage with slow technology to provoke crip(ped) ways of being in time. They argue that sustained engagement with cultural accessibility offers a different path through the pandemic, one that centers access and resists the way necropolitics devalues disabled life.

Misfits Meet Art and Technology: Cripping Transmethodologies

“…As the case studies we have selected show, the creatively disruptive ways disabled artists access, use, create, and interact with technology confound eugenic-norms governing western understandings of embodiment and with this, the euro-masculine-abled subject’s privileged status as authoritative architect-arbiter of “knowledge” and “culture” ( Braidotti, 2013 ; Chen, 2012 ). Disability arts works to pry open spaces of knowledge and cultural production for non-normative creativities to presence and activate our abounding vitalities ( Collins et al, 2022 ; Collins et al, 2023a & 2023b ; Johnson et al, 2024 ; Rice, Pendleton Jiménez, et al, 2020 ; Rice et al, 2017 ; Taylor et al, 2023 ).…”