The Problems of Access: A Crip Rejoinder via the Phenomenology of Spatial Belonging

Abstract

This essay denaturalizes the taken-for-granted meaning of ‘access’ and interrogates its role and lived meaning in ableist social worlds, with a focus on spaces of higher education. I suggest that legalistic approaches to access need ‘cripping’ by a disability framework. Currently, these approaches (1) miss the intersubjective sociality of being-in-the-world; (2) they prioritize a narrow conception of access focused on ‘physical’ access and ‘physical’ space (a typology I contest); (3) they approach access as frozen in time, rather than as a relational and temporally dynamic process (4); and, finally, they contribute to bureaucratizing and privatizing disability knowledge. I examine ‘access’ through the lens of belonging by asking how we orient ourselves in spaces shaped by oppressive social norms. I argue that ableist lifeworlds generate serious disorientations for disabled people that are lasting, structurally enforced, and harmful or debilitating.

University Inclusion Practices – Re-Encountering the Status Quo: An Interpretive Approach

“…Insofar as these conceptions remain unnoticed and unexamined, they are reproduced within ameliorative actions. Wonder is a way to interrupt the reproduction of more of the same by forging a focus on the receding grounds of possibility that provide for the appearance of disability, including its appearance as a problem requiring solutions (Mitchell and Snyder, 1997;Lajoie, 2021;Michalko, 2002: 13).…”