Experiencing disability is inherently disorienting. The environment, as years of disability activism have shown us, is built with a very limited conception of the human being in mind. But the environment can also be disorienting when experiencing bodily pain, chronic disease and debilitation. I argue that disability, in all of its various manifestations, is experienced as the shrinking of the environment and its readily available affordances. But, as I shall also argue, precisely at such moments of shrinking, something else happens: When the environment is narrowed in its offerings the creative space of performance (on or offstage) opens up to afford other possibilities. This very potential of invention is precisely how I conceptualize everyday lives lived with disability as analogous to the reimagined space of aesthetic performance and its reorientations.
This project will explore micro-activists’ affordances in relation to media ecologies, crip hacks, and everyday improvisations (Dokumaci 2020; Dokumaci 2016).