What AIM Lab is?

AIM is an anti-colonial, anti-ableist, feminist research Lab focused on issues of access, disability, environment and care.

As a working space, AIM Lab is open only to AIM Lab Steering Committee members. (Affiliates and residents have supervised access to AIM Lab space on selected dates.)

What AIM Lab is not?

AIM is not an access service provider.

AIM Lab is not a public co-working space.

What AIM does

  • develop a series of protocols that would enable us to operate as an anti-colonial, anti-ableist, feminist research Lab (such as, Protocols for Events, Protocols for Communication, Protocols on Accessible Websites, etc.),
  • create a range of resources, toolkits and how-to’s for familiarizing oneself with access work (See, for example, our recent exhibition Audio description in the Making. This exhibition involves a video lecture on Introduction to Audio Description by Thomas Reid and Cheryl Green. If you are new to audio description and want to learn more, then this video-lecture is a great resource!),
  • engage in access from a creative, critical and intersectional framework,
  • generate knowledge that is based on the lived experiences and expertise of disabled people (see, for instance, our lab members’ publications and other dissemination activities),
  • spread the joy of practicing access and making access work everyone’s concern and responsibility.

What AIM does not do

  • does not offer services for making [an event, a project, any initiative, etc.] accessible,
  • does not conduct access audits,
  • does not assess the accessibility of your [x] and give recommendations on how you can improve the accessibility of your [x],
  • does not retrofit access to a project that has already begun without access in mind.
  • does not claim to be the experts on access,
  • does not offer trainings on access,
  • AIM is not here to teach you about access. If you wish to learn more about access and disability justice, we recommend that you look at the publicly available resources that we provide on our websites and that you take on doing the access work yourself.

Want to collaborate with AIM?

Thank you for thinking of AIM and your interest in collaborating with us. We have a protocol for partnerships which applies to our review of the requests we receive. We invite you to have a look at our partnership protocol first in order to better understand whether your request fits within our principles for collaboration, and if it does, what the next steps are (for example, signing a Memorandum for Understanding).

Please be advised that at AIM, we value process, reciprocity, and building relationships over time in any collaboration. For us, collaboration means that AIM is invited to the collaboration from the beginning and on equal terms with other collaborators. We refuse to be part of projects, events, initiatives, etc. that have already begun without us unless there were understandable barriers.