Name pronunciation: Arseli (R-cell-e) Dokumacı (Do-q-ma-dʒ) 

Land acknowledgement 

Shé:kon! Hi!  

My name is Arseli Dokumacı. I am an immigrant settler living on stolen Indigenous Lands, and if I am able to write these lines, work, teach, read, and live a life in Tiohtià:ke, it is because Kanien’kehá:ka Nation have, for centuries, taken care of the Land, and continues to do so despite the colonial settler state. I am grateful to the Kanien’kehá:ka (people of the flint) and to the Land for letting me live here peacefully, enjoy looking at the trees, breathe the air they clean, have access to food and clean drinking water and grow vegetables every summer.  

I was born and raised in Turkey and immigrated to Canada. While I am not a descendent of colonizers, I benefit from the multiple infrastructures of the colonial system in so-called Canada. I try to alleviate the harms caused by my settler status and privileges through committing myself to creating and supporting anti-colonialist spaces and initiatives, decolonizing my pedagogical practices and syllabi, and the broader efforts at decolonization within the university and beyond.

 

About my work 

I am interested in the tiny details of everyday life. Like the gesture of a hand or a fleeting glance or a scratch on an everyday object. These details escape our habituated perceptions and slip through the cracks, and I wonder: What stories would these details tell? What meanings do they hold? What worlds do they make? Importantly, what would happen if we didn’t let them slip through the cracks? I seek answers to these questions, sometimes by using the camera, sometimes by drawing, sometimes by talking to people, sometimes by observing and sometimes by merely imagining.  

In the past, this fascination has taken me to the following trajectories:  

• I live with invisible disability and chronic pain, but how do other invisibly disabled people in chronic pain live their everyday lives? How do they get through the day? I want to know! 

• OK. I’ve chased this curiosity but wait! How do then differently disabled people live the everyday? How do they relate to the same object or space, say, the metro? What can the metro be and feel like to a blind person, a d/Deaf person, a person living with mobility-related disability?  
• I am sitting in a hospital corridor, waiting for the doctor to call me. A nurse comes and asks me to fill in a form called the Health Assessment Questionnaire, and I am fascinated by it. Who on earth has thought of asking me – the patient – to quantify my pain level or how easily I got out of bed or buttoned my shirt? When is it that the medical professionals thought of counting these, why and for what purposes? 
• In the end of a visual ethnographic project, where I worked with a blind participant, I want to create a video and I want to make it accessible to blind audiences. How do I do that? With Audio Description (AD), for sure. But how do I do the AD in a way that centers the AD? How can I make AD do more work than mere access provision?  
• Himm OK, I live with a disability, but is disability something that I just live with? Or is it something more than that? Is disability actually a method for me? A method for being in the world, and a method of how I do what I do.  

These curiosities have led to a series of projects, artworks and publications, including my first book Activist Affordances: How disabled people improvise more habitable worlds, which is coming out with Duke University Press in January 2023, and my articles, “People as affordances”, “Disability as Method”, and “A Theory of Micro-activist Affordances” which have, respectively, appeared in Current Anthropology, Disability Studies Quarterly, and The South Atlantic Quarterly. My video work, “Activist Affordances” has recently been exhibited as part of the 8^th Bienal de Arte Contemporáneo de la Fundación ONCE in Madrid (October 2022), and in the past, I contributed to various national and international exhibitions such as “The Flesh of the World” exhibition (2015) curated by Amanda Cachia.