Access as aesthetic and relational praxis | ARIAS Reading Group

Sign up here

We are pleased to invite you to the second event in the The Ugly Sides of Care reading group series, initiated by the Care Ecologies collective, with invited guest Leni van Goidsenhoven. In dialogue with The Ugly Sides of Care project's focus on care frictions and the messy realities of relational practice, this session conceives of accessibility and access intimacy as similarly unstable and negotiated processes. Accessibility, too, emerges through dependency, discomfort, adjustment, and incomplete ways of living and working together.

Together, we will reflect on the gap between accessibility as a lived and negotiated praxis and the ways it is commonly institutionalised. Accessibility is often approached as something that can be delivered through protocols, accommodations, and checklists, and is increasingly shaped by institutional and European policy frameworks on inclusion and universal design. Although such policies and institutional frameworks remain crucial and materially necessary, they often reduce accessibility to a self-evident moral good (Hamraie 2017; Price 2024), while leaving its conceptual and philosophical grounding as relational, historical, and political underdeveloped.

We will explore the moments where accessibility goes beyond checklists and protocols: when it becomes unstable and inconvenient, when different access needs rub against one another, when adaptation remains unfinished, or when a space requires ongoing collective attunement. Drawing on Lauren Berlant's and Aimi Hamraie's works, participants are invited to think through these frictions and forms of inconvenience as situations that make visible how we are organised around norms, temporalities, and expectations. Berlant's notion of 'loosening' becomes important here: those instances in which established frameworks temporarily loosen their grip, and other ways of relating, sensing, and inhabiting space become imaginable.

No preparation needed!

Read more about the event, and sign up here. Find out more about The Ugly Sides of Care and the Care Ecologies collective on our website here.

Leni Van Goidsenhoven is Assistant Professor in Critical Disability Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her current research sits at the intersection of disability heritage, accessibility aesthetics, critical neurodiversity studies, and the medical humanities. Drawing on literary and cultural analysis, crip theory, and participatory methodologies, she examines how disability is mediated, remembered, and made meaningful through artistic, archival, and heritage practices.