Access for Us: Responding with Care Amidst Precarity

This tutorial explores the use of Access Riders as a practice that centers our bodyminds (bodies and minds together).

An Access Rider, i.e. a comprehensive document that outlines one’s access needs, is a work-tool developed by champions of disability justice, and its purpose is to make space, tenderly care for, and promote thriving for anyone who uses them. As a framework, Disability Justice joyfully requires that those of us with non-normative bodies and minds are recognized as the knowers and makers and lovers that we are. Access Riders create the possibility of naming values and access requirements to cut down on communication labor and access-making-exhaustion in all of our work situations, and instead move towards access intimacy, a term coined by Mia Mingus to capture that elusive feeling of comfort when someone else simply “gets” your access needs.

Sharings in this tutorial are about access-rider practices and some somatic practices that increase our capacity to respond from a place of care rather than reactivity amidst hegemonic violences.

Please find the mentioned online pad here: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/futuress-access-for-us

Ren Loren Britton (they/them) is an artist/designer tuning with practices of Critical Pedagogy, Trans*FeministTechnoScience, and Disability Justice. Their research plays with queer proliferations of otherwises, they practice joyful accountability to matters of anti-racism, collaboration, Black Feminisms, instability, Trans*Feminisms, and transformation. With Iz Paehr as MELT, they study and experiment with shape-shifting processes as they meet technologies, sensory media, and pedagogies in a warming world (Meltionary). Britton is currently a fellow with their project Counting Feelings with medienwerk.nrw + Department of Art & Art Theory at the University of Cologne as well as a fellow with the design department of the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam, NL.

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