Episode Summary: Arseli Dokumaci, "Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds" (New Books Network, Jan 4, 2026)
Main Theme
This episode features an in-depth conversation between host Clayton Gerard and Dr. Arseli Dokumaci about her book, Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds (Duke University Press, 2023). Drawing on her personal experience with chronic illness and ethnographic work with differently disabled people, Dr. Dokumaci explores how disability can be a source of creativity, world-making, and solidarity. The conversation highlights the concept of "activist affordances"—the improvisational tactics disabled people employ to make inhospitable worlds more livable—and expands this thinking to include bodies, environments, care, ableism, and even planetary crisis.
Key Discussion Points and Insights
1. Introduction to Dr. Arseli Dokumaci and Her Work
- Dr. Dokumaci's Background: Turkish-born, now in Montreal, Canada; Assistant Professor at Concordia, Canada Research Chair in Critical Disability Studies and Media Technologies, and Director of Access in the Making Lab (03:02).
- Access in the Making Lab: Collective exploring disability, access, environment, and care through experimental creative approaches.
2. Origins of the Book and Personal Motivation
- Personal Connection: Dokumaci has had rheumatoid arthritis since her early teens, fueling her desire to find herself in other disabled people’s stories and to create a sense of community (06:10).
- Main Aim: To show how disabled lives, even within constraints, can be creative, thriving, and communal, countering stereotypes of solely suffering or limitation.
Quote:
“You end up being a continuous like full time creator even in the most... ordinary... actions. Like how do you put on a shoe? How do you open... a jar, or how do you put on a shirt? ...That continuous experimentation and finding your own ways of living through the everyday is a story that I wanted to tell.”
—Arseli Dokumaci (07:30)
3. Theoretical Contributions: Defining "Activist Affordances"
- Affordances: Borrowed from ecological psychology (James Gibson)—action possibilities that emerge from the mutual organism-environment relationship (11:08).
- Activism: Framed as “a way of world-making out of necessity,” not just desire—born from constrained environments (11:50).
- Activist Affordances: The improvisational action possibilities created by disabled people when the environment does not reciprocate or meet their needs.
Quote:
"You're making worlds... because the current world, as it is configured and put in front of you, is not giving you... a livable environment where you can survive and thrive."
—Arseli Dokumaci (12:18)
4. Performance, Improvisation, and Creativity in Everyday Life
- Performance Studies Lens: Every tiny act (e.g., lifting a mug) becomes a creative performance—a form of world-building, with both ephemeral and lasting effects (15:38).
- Micropolitics of Inventiveness: Even mundane tasks become opportunities for disabled people to enact agency and ingenuity, often with unseen results.
Illustrative Example:
- Henry Moving a Mug: Participant’s careful choreography to avoid pain and mess—an ephemeral but deeply meaningful performance that changes how he inhabits the world (16:45).
Quote:
"The world around him... is designed in a way that he cannot find a reciprocity... He is creating a world where his pain will be felt the least."
—Arseli Dokumaci (18:00)
5. The Concept of Shrinkage: Disability as Ecological Relation
- Shrinkage: The process by which environments “shrink”—diminish in opportunities—due to pain, chronic illness, or external catastrophe. This forces continual improvisation (21:31).
- Ecological Approach: Disability conceived not as residing exclusively in body or society, but as a property of their mutual relationship (24:50).
- Solidarity and Coalition: Shrinkage as a methodology for building connections across a range of disabling and marginalizing experiences, even beyond human bodies.
Quote:
“Disability as a methodology, not an object of study, like as a lens. ...it is an ecological understanding... looking at the reciprocal relations between the two, and how shrinkage emerges from those relations.”
—Arseli Dokumaci (25:00)
6. Chronic Pain, Negative Affordances, and Social Connection
- Negative Affordance: Environments do not always offer opportunities—they can also generate obstacles, pain, or harm (28:26).
- Chronic Pain and Disease: Not just individualized experiences; pain can be a basis for solidarity, connecting people who share shrinking worlds.
Personal Insight:
- Dokumaci’s own experience of being bed-bound inspired her thinking about shrinkage and how to move from isolation to sociality through shared hardship (29:10).
Quote:
“It is a negative affordance in the sense that... the environment could afford... for ill. ...If I try to lift this mug, the contours of that mug might actually induce pain in me because my finger joints are terrible...”
—Arseli Dokumaci (31:45)
7. The Habitus of Ableism
- Habitus of Ableism: Beyond overt discrimination, ableism is ingrained in unconscious, embodied social practices. It is enacted without conscious thought and is perpetuated through societal learning (36:22).
- Everyday Actions: Ableism can be found in casual gestures, movements, and unexamined routines—necessitating a deeper, more reflexive response to accessibility.
Quote:
“There are places that Ableism also happens and it is in everyday actions... gestures, things that we do very casually and without necessarily pondering upon it.”
—Arseli Dokumaci (40:28)
8. Documenting Activist Affordances: Sharing Tactics for Habitable Worlds
- Desire for Collective Archive: There's a strong community need for sharing tactics and micro-inventions—“a living archive”—to spread creativity and solidarity (41:48).
- Personal and Family Examples: Host shares memories of his grandmother’s environmental adaptations, leading to a discussion on how even family arrangements and gestures are forms of activist affordance (44:09).
Quote:
“I hope... this kind of archive... can serve as a springboard for all the disabled people or anyone living in shrunken worlds to... share their activist affordances with one another.”
—Arseli Dokumaci (43:10)
9. People as Affordances: Care, Kinship, and Sociality
- Beyond Individualism: Activist affordances are not always solitary; people—including family, friends, caregivers—become extensions of the body/environment system (46:00).
- Kinship Reimagined: Connection and care reshape traditional relationships and create new forms of solidarity and love, e.g., a child adapting how she holds her grandmother's hand, or a father carrying his disabled son to school in rural Turkey (via the work of Faye Ginsburg and Rainer Ab).
Quote:
“There is so much more in the creation of activist affordances than just a wish to minimize the pain. There’s also the effect of love for each other, the care for each other... So all those aspects of our relationships to one another [are] built into the creation of an activist affordance.”
—Arseli Dokumaci (52:40)
10. Expanding to Planetary Shrinkage and Disability Justice Politics
- Planet as Disabled: The concept of shrinkage expands beyond human bodies to include rivers, mountains, and whole ecosystems undergoing destruction or loss of function (55:09).
- Interlocking Crises: Disability politics and environmental/climate politics are inseparable in the face of disaster, catastrophe, and slow violence.
Quote:
“...where are we not looking as disability studies scholars? …What if there is disability also in, like, in organisms? …I don't think we can talk about disability politics without talking about climate catastrophe.”
—Arseli Dokumaci (57:00 and 59:50)
11. Disaster, Accountability, and Structural Disabling
- Infrastructures as Disability-Making Machines: Disasters like earthquakes highlight how unchecked development, corruption, and uncaring infrastructures systematically create “mass disablement” (62:39).
- Accountability: Emphasis on holding public and private bodies responsible for environments that generate disability through neglect, exclusion, or active harm.
Quote:
“How are we creating environments that are going to be becoming, through lack of care or designed uncare built into them, disability making machines?”
—Arseli Dokumaci (65:20)
12. Resources and Further Engagement
- Access in the Making Lab: Ongoing projects examining disability, environment, colonialism, and alternative forms of access and knowledge (70:06).
- Recommended Reading: Jay Dolmage on academia's ableist and eugenic histories; works on care webs, environmental justice, and feminist disability studies.
Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments
- “[Living as disabled] is actually livable. It's actually possible. I mean, sometimes even... you can thrive in that world against all odds.”
— Arseli Dokumaci (09:57) - “Performance... is both ephemeral... but it also has the power to stay... accumulate in the body, it can accumulate in the environment. It has that staying power...”
— Arseli Dokumaci (16:00) - “Nothing about this has to do with nature... how are we creating environments that are going to be becoming disability making machines?”
— Arseli Dokumaci (66:56)
Timestamps by Segment
- Guest Introduction & Book Overview: 01:33–05:03
- Personal Motivation, Community, & Creativity: 06:10–10:27
- Defining Activist Affordances: 11:08–15:05
- Performance & Everyday Creativity: 15:38–21:31
- Shrinkage & Ecological Disability: 21:31–28:26
- Chronic Pain/Negative Affordance: 28:26–35:33
- Habitus of Ableism: 36:22–41:16
- Documenting & Archiving Activist Affordances: 41:48–44:09
- People as Affordances & Kinship: 46:00–54:07
- Planetary Shrinkage & Environmental Justice: 55:09–62:39
- Disaster, Accountability & Structural Disabling: 62:39–69:42
- Resources & Final Reflections: 70:06–73:03
Further Resources
- Access in the Making Lab: accessinthemakinglab.ca
- Recommended Reading: Jay Dolmage - Academic Ableism, Alison Kafer - Feminist, Queer, Crip, Eli Clare, Sunaura Taylor, Faye Ginsburg, Rainer Ab (new kinship imaginaries).
This episode is essential listening for anyone interested in critical disability studies, social theory, environmental justice, and the everyday inventiveness required to produce not just more accessible but more habitable worlds for all.