People as Affordances

Abstract

This article builds on the critical disability theory of affordances that I have been developing through ethnographic inquiries and the notion of “microactivist affordances,” by which I mean micro and everyday acts of world building with which disabled people literally make up, and at the same time make up for, whatever affordance fails to readily materialize in their environments. Drawing from fieldwork in Turkey and Quebec with people who have chronic pain and mobility-related disabilities, I explore how microactivist affordances emerge, not through the complementarity of a single perceiver and the world but through the complementarity of multiple perceivers and the world, within the particular material conditions of living with disability. Taking into account the sociality of my interlocutors’ microactivist affordances and their, after Ginsburg and Rapp, “disability worlds,” I propose the notion of “people as affordances” as a way to describe how people can enable the emergence of, or directly become, affordances for one another, especially where no other affordances exist. I then explore the various forms that “people as affordances” may take and that allow people to create access by their own means, and the socialities within which that access creation may—or may fail to—materialize. Finally, I suggest that “people as affordances” can provide new ways of understanding care that I, after Mia Mingus’s work, conceptualize as “care intimacy.”

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