Location
Today’s events will take place at The Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning, 301 York Street. You can find directions on our website.
Schedule
Grab some refreshments and connect with symposium attendees!
9:00-9:05 am: Opening Remarks
9:05-10:05 am: deCRIPtion: Shaping Disability Futures Through Disability Culture and Creative Access(Panel)
Joy Young, Piyush Mishra, Amelia-Marie Altstadt, Amanda Scheff, Donna Dante Gary
This panel discusses deCRIPtion, a poetry and storytelling workshop series created by a cohort of teaching artists and disability scholars, which treats creative access as an inventive, aesthetic, and collective practice rather than a retrofitted accommodation. deCRIPtion sees disability culture as methodology, reshaping how we think about participation, authorship, and performance. In doing so, it expands how we imagine the creation of access and space, opening disability futures grounded in interdependence, justice, and collective imagination.
10:15-10:35 am: The Oscar Show and My Independent Life
Oscar Segal
Oscar Segal, a 28-year-old man with autism, through his own self-marketing and because, in many ways, his outgoing behavior defies the stereotype of people with autism, has been the subject of a number of short films about independence and autism made by various social service agencies. Oscar made his first short film, The Oscar Show, based on a YouTube interview program he developed with people who are important to him, who are mostly social service professionals. My Independent Life leaves the confines of the Zoom studio and shows Oscar in his world, Oscar as the interviewee and as the filmmaker of The Oscar Show speaking to the audience at the Q & A after a screening at the Arlington International Film Festival in Boston.
10:35-11 am: Q&A/Discussion
Moderator: Julie Loppacher
11:55 am-12 pm: Opening Remarks
12-12:20 pm: Without Exception: accessible interpretation and co-curation
Jennifer Gilbert (This presenter will be virtual)
This presentation focuses on the importance of foregrounding access for exhibitions and events held within galleries and museums, to ensure they better serve diverse audiences and their requirements. It will also look at the role of co-curation, co-produced events, and equal opportunities, giving agency to deaf, disabled, and neurodivergent artists. This comes after the launch of co-curated disabled artist exhibitions ‘LOOK HERE’ at Haverford College (September 2025) and ‘Kaleidoscopic Realms’ at Nottingham Museum (June 2024).
12:20-12:40 pm: Inventing Access: Image Description as Narrative Translation in Museum Space
chad iwertz duffy, Perse Klopp, Dr. Andrea Gyorody
This presentation examines image description as a creative, interpretive practice that shapes how audiences encounter and remember visual art. Drawing on /The Art of Description: Inventing Access in the Weisman Museum/, an interdisciplinary project with undergraduate researchers, the presentation demonstrates how descriptive choices mediate visibility, emotion, and cultural meaning. By framing description not as compliance but as rhetorical invention, this work highlights how accessibility practices generate new narratives and deepen public engagement with art.
12:40-1 pm: Break
1-1:20 pm: Alcoves of Care: The (sick) bed as infrastructure
Oona Robertson (This presenter will be virtual)
In this presentation Robertson discusses the domestic space as a crucial yet underexplored site of access, exploring the dailiness of disability through the study of domestic architecture and the history of furniture design. Using an ongoing design project focused on crip approaches to “sickbeds” as a case study, Robertson discusses the speculative practicalities of built space in reorienting our relationships to our bodies, to each other, and to our world.
1:20-2 pm: Q&A/Discussion
Moderator: Nivetha Karthikeyan
11:55 am- 12 pm: Opening Remarks
12-1 pm: Access Artistry: A Nest Collab Research Initiative
Julia Havard, Noah Sanchez, and Love Crews
The term “access artistry” has recently emerged to describe the artistry inherent to crafting accessibility and the ways that accessibility can change art practice, creative pedagogy, and performance. A team of researchers from The Nest Collab, a chronic illness and disability justice project, associated with the University of California Davis, will share their nascent “Access Artistry Project.” The team will discuss their project design, insights from interviews with access artists, and their own experiments in access in the arts. Drawing from the pedagogical legacy of “access dramaturgy” (Kopit, Dorr, and Bridger 2024), the team will explore what it means to treat access as an art form in and of itself, rather than a checklist or legal mandate. They ask, why is access artistry beginning to take hold now and what are the emergent strategies, techniques, and approaches to accessible world-building that access artistry makes space for?
1-1:15 pm: Break
1:15-1:40 pm: Stories of Disability: Lived Experience to inform Critical Access in Architectural Design
Mariangel Meza
Considering the lived experiences of people with disabilities is necessary to inform architectural design. This study presents stories collected from individuals with disabilities living in Minneapolis, MN, using participatory methods and narrative inquiry. Moving beyond accessibility code compliance, it offers nuanced insights into critical access. A curated digital collection of stories serves as a knowledge-sharing and advocacy tool, highlighting the need and importance of integrating disabled voices into architecture.
1:40-2 pm: Q&A/Discussion
Moderator: Joel Sanders
2:55-3 pm: Opening Remarks
3-3:20 pm: Crip Fetishism: An Autoethnography of the Living Labor in Critical Disability Studies in the U.S
Jaewon Byun
My writing has two specific implications for critical disability studies, but also draws attention to disability and accessibility more broadly in higher education. First, this writing sheds light on studentship in critical disability studies, joining other published considerations about the institutionalization of the field. This paper invites critical reflection about educational accessibility in the field of critical disability studies from the perspective of graduate students. Second, this writing strengthens critical disability studies in transnational social justice organizing by considering its geographical aspects. The experience of moving to three different continents provides a broader understanding of the diverse cultural contexts surrounding disabled students.
3:20-3:40 pm: in/Visibly Dis/Abled, in/Visibly Queer: Disclosure in the Academy
Lesley Nora Siegel
The way dis/abled queers dance between identity liberation and disability needs within systems that are staunchly ableist and heteronormative is rarely explored. This is particularly salient for us Crip Queers traversing higher education. This narrative presents, confronts, and challenges the experiences of faculty navigating the halls of higher education and seeks to interrogate what it means to teach across the spectrums of queerness and dis/ability, visibility and invisibility in the academy.
3:40-4 pm: Break
4-4:20 pm: Mary and Me: Crip Archival Encounters in Digital Space
Riley Sutherland (This presenter will be virtual)
I will share my experiences navigating the U.S. National Archives as a disabled researcher to study Mary, a disabled enslaved woman. This case raises questions such as: what narratives go unsung due to inaccessible archival methods? What can we gain by considering digital archives not just surrogates for in-person experiences, but places in their own right? I conclude by reviewing two accessible digital archives, to consider how scholars can expand archival accessibility with digital tools.
4:20-4:40 pm: Signing as Hearing Accompliceship Praxis
Timothy Y. Loh (This presenter will be virtual)
Hearing people choosing to sign when there are deaf people present, especially in academic and other formal settings, can be a kind of praxis rooted in hearing accompliceship (Indigenous Action 2014) developed in relationship with deaf communities and grounded in access as relational process rather than obligation (Kolb and Loh 2022). By bringing sign language into “unexpected places,” hearing scholars can support deaf scholars in “cripping” the university and higher education (cf. Robinson and Henner 2018).
4:40-5 pm: Q&A/Discussion
Moderator: Jiya Pandya
2:55-3 pm: Opening Remarks
3-3:45pm: Fashion and Visual Descriptions: Sharing Your Story Through Words and Style (Workshop)
thái lu, Thương Trần, Oné Carrington, and Olivia Chapman (These presenters will be virtual)
Within textile arts and publishing, visual descriptions serve an under-looked role as both an access need and artistic practice for disabled artists and audiences alike. Led by thái lu, participants will learn about thái’s sensory disabilities, and how it informs their approaches to textiles as a matter of personal access. Participants will engage with their relationship to fashion through texture, bodily awareness, and description, sharing their physical form of expression in a guided access-centered approach.
4-4:45 pm: From Checklists to Cycles: Creating Sustainable Access with ‘The Seasonal Body Framework for Accessibility (Workshop)
Julie Nowak (This presenter will be virtual)
This workshop reimagines accessibility as a living, cyclical process rather than a static checklist. Guided by ‘The Seasonal Body Framework for Accessibility’, participants will explore four phases – Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall – that center sustainability, creativity, and interdependence. Through reflection and practice, they’ll uncover new ways to integrate disability justice and collective care into accessibility work that supports both people and organizations.
4:45-5:15 pm: Q&A/Discussion
Moderator: Eden Rea Hendrick