Resisting normality with cultural accessibility and slow technology

Johnson, M. A., Chandler, E., & Rice, C. (2024). Resisting normality with cultural accessibility and slow technology. Leonardo 57(2): 215–220. https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02502

Abstract

Though the Covid-19 virus continues to circulate, there is an increasing insistence that the world “return to normal.” In this paper we resist this pull to normalcy and the way it devalues the knowledges, vitality, and livelihoods of disabled people. We examine the crip technoscience practices used during the 2022 digital gathering Practicing the Social: Entanglements of Art and Social Justice, situating them as examples of cultural accessibility that engage with slow technology to provoke crip(ped) ways of being in time. We argue that sustained engagement with cultural accessibility offers a different path through the pandemic, one that centers access and resists the way necropolitics devalues disabled life.