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Event Announcement: Shrinkage and Activist Affordances

Hosted by New York University’s Center for Disability Studies, AIM Lab director, Arseli Dokumaci, will be in conversation with Michele Friedner for the event “Shrinkage and Activist Affordances”.

For more information visit https://disabilitystudies.nyu.edu/event/virtual-book-launch-activist-affordances-how-disabled-people-improvise-more-habitable-worlds-author-arseli-dokumaci-with-michele-friedner/

Join us as Arseli Dokumaci and Michele Friedner engage in a conversation about shrinking worlds and activist affordances. Following a brief viewing and discussion of Arseli’s ethnographic videos showing activist affordances in action, Arseli and Michele will facilitate and open up a conversation about the immense amount of effort and creative work disabled people do everyday, building inhabitable worlds from the ground up.

Register here

Event is free and open to the public.

ASL and live captions will be provided.

Please email accessibility needs as they relate to this event to msf440@nyu.edu.

Book cover split into two. On top is a black rectangle with the book title “Activist Affordances: How disabled people improvise more habitable worlds”. Below is an image of a hand (in a close-up) holding a spoon innovatively.

Book cover split into two. On top is a black rectangle with the book title
“Activist Affordances: How disabled people improvise more habitable worlds”. Below is an image of a hand (in a close-up) holding a spoon innovatively.

Arseli Dokumaci (she/hers) is a Canada Research Chair in Critical Disability Studies and Media Technologies, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University. Her scholarly and creative work lies at the crossovers of disability studies, performance studies and medical anthropology. Arseli is the director of Access in the making (AIM) Lab, and the author of Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Livable Worlds (Duke UP, 2023).

Hello, this is Arseli, an olive-skinned woman in her early 40s, gently smiling at the camera. I’m outside with a jumper on, where the grass is still green, and the trees have leaves.
Photo credit, Roi Saade 2022.

Hello, this is Arseli, an olive-skinned woman in her early 40s, gently smiling at the camera. I’m outside with a jumper on, where the grass is still green, and the trees have leaves.

Michele Friedner is a medical anthropologist in the University of Chicago’s Department of Comparative Human Development. She works mostly on deafness and disability in India and is the author of Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India (2015) and Sensory Futures: Deafness and Cochlear Implant Infrastructures in India (2022) as well as a number of journal articles and commentaries.

A white woman with wavy reddish hair and a grey blazer awkwardly holds a small reddish dog. The woman is smiling at the camera while the dog looks unhappy and is possibly glowering.
Photo by Joe Sterbenc

A white woman with wavy reddish hair and a grey blazer awkwardly holds a small reddish dog. The woman is smiling at the camera while the dog looks unhappy and is possibly glowering.