Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability

摘要

According to Lisa Meloncon (2014), "...TPC [technical professional communication] practitioners and academics have few resources to understand issues related to disability studies and accessibility, and many disability scholars have little to no understanding about TPC and how it can be beneficial to the work they do" (p. 2). However, she further states that both TPC and disability studies have many of the same theoretical grounds, in that they both focus on the construction of disability through the social makeup of disability identity. With this theoretical groundwork comes the concept of accessibility and Meloncon addresses that "When we filter our understanding of disability studies...our attention is drawn to the ways in which technologies enable and include or disable and exclude both users and practice" (p. 5). In this way, scholars can begin to construct the intersections between technology and disability, as well as establish a conversation about "universal design" (a term coined in 1985 by architect Ronald Mace), as Aimi Hamraie does in their 2017 text, Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability. Hamraie works to analyze the rhetoric behind the concept of Universal Design1 (as it exists in the United States post-ADA), arguing that, "the commonsense refrain 'the world was not designed with disability in mind' is the notion that making built environments is an exercise of power entangled with the politics of knowing" (p. 14). Hamraie's text extends this conversation by interrogating assumptions of the contemporary usage of Universal Design and introducing the idea of "access-knowledge" (a term coined by Hamraie, based on Foucault's theory of "power-knowledge"). Although the text is grounded in design and written from the perspective of a scholar in the Medicine and Health field, technical communicators will be able to recognize the conversation and they, along with designers and instructors, can overall replicate Hamraie's approach to Universal Design.