Universal Design (UD) is a movement to produce built environments that are accessible to a broad range of human variation. Though UD is often taken for granted as synonymous with the best, most inclusive, forms of disability access, the values, methodologies, and epistemologies that underlie UD require closer scrutiny. This paper uses feminist and…[Read more]

On geopolitics, disability rhetoric, and the CRPD

In feminist technoscience studies (FTS), the term technoscience conveys that scientific knowledge and technological worlds are active constructions of entangled material, social, and historical agents. Feminist analyses of assisted reproduction, environmental harm, digital media, and cyborg bodies constitute some of the work of FTS, a close…[Read more]

Disability has become a hot topic for feminist philosophy in recent years. Special issues of Hypatia and Disability Studies Quarterly, multiple conference keynote addresses, and a growing cadre of scholars are exploring the intersections of feminist and critical disability thought. As a disabled feminist scholar, I perceive these trends as a…[Read more]

In this paper, I argue for historical epistemology as a methodology for critical disability studies (DS) by looking to Foucault’s archaeology of cure in History of Madness. While the moral, medical, and social models of disability frame disability history as a progressive movement and replacement of moral and medical authority with s…[Read more]

Although Universal Design gains popularity as a common sense strategy for crafting built environments for all users, accessibility for disabled people remains a marginal area of inquiry within design practice and theory. This article argues that the tension between accessibility and Universal Design stems from inadequate critical and historical…[Read more]