91Ö±²¥

To cite this work: Goodley, R. (2025). Access as a colleague. Disability Dialogues. 91Ö±²¥: iHuman, University of 91Ö±²¥. 

Ruby Goodley is a first year PhD student at the University of Leeds in the School of Sociology and Social Policy. Her project explores the experiences of disabled anthropologists in university settings, in order to promote more inclusive research cultures in Higher Education.

Access is a buzzword in Disability Studies; often framed as a checklist to fix issues for disabled people (Fritsch, 2016). For example, in university settings disabled students or scholars offer up accommodations they need to navigate the inaccessible spaces of the university. This might include lift access if they are a wheelchair-user or alternative text for screen readers if they are visually impaired. However, this conceptualization is contested in Disability studies. Many scholars now argue that access ‘involves an ongoing, interpersonal process of relating and taking responsibility for our inevitable encroachment on each other’ (Valentine, 2020:78). 

Valentine’s quote opens a possibility to conceive of access as a colleague in the workplace. What would it mean to have access to sit in the room? Perhaps not as a physical entity, but an affective feeling that everybody considers. As human beings, access might never be solved or completed, because every human being needs a different form of access to navigate spaces. But access might be understood as ‘an unfolding negotiation’ (Hartblay 2020, 529, drawing on Moser and Law 1999); if every situation in our world started with questions such as - can everyone contribute and access this space? What people may have a bigger voice in this room today? Is this situation favouring certain bodies over others? 

When access becomes a colleague in our spaces, it will help to encourage interdependence between human beings. Or in other words, people can become affordances for each other (Dokumaci, 2020:S101) through the medium of access. By this I am referring to Dokumaci’s idea that disabled people learn to dwell and live in inaccessible worlds through relying on people as their medium to offer a way of navigating the earth differently. Access as colleague does not have to explicitly refer to disabled people. New mothers need access as colleague in workplaces to pump breastmilk or leave work earlier to attend to childcare duties. Religious folk need access to prayer rooms in their places of work. The multiplicity of access, and conceiving this entity as a colleague, might help us to provide a place of harmony and inclusivity for all types of humanity. 

References 

Dokumaci, A. (2020). ‘People as Affordances: Building Disability Worlds through Care Intimacy’, Current Anthropology, 61(S21), pp.S97-S108). DOI: 10.1086/705783

Fritsch, K. (2016). ‘Accessible.’ In Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle, edited by Kelly Fritsch, Claire O’Connor, and A.K. Thompson, (23–28). Chico, CA: AK Press.

Valentine, M. (2020). Shifting the weight of inaccessibility: Access Intimacy as a Critical Phenomenological Ethos, PUNCTA, 3(2), 76-94. https://doi.org/10.5399/pjcp.v3i2.9