Access Vernaculars

Access Vernaculars explores moments when accessible design fails. Observing how both disabled and nondisabled people in Russia recognize and point out poorly executed accessible design in built environments, ethnographer Cassandra Hartblay traces how disabled people in one Russian city narrate experiences of pervasive inaccess, and interprets popular images of failed accessibility as critiques of the Russian state and ablenationalism. In the process, Hartblay asks how disability advocacy movements proceed when ablenationalism co-opts accessibility and calls for a critical global disability studies that pushes back against Euro-American hegemony.

Through the stories disabled people tell about access and inaccess, this book examines local terminology used by those with mobility impairments to describe the built environment—a unique lexicon combining translated terms from global disability advocacy with Russophone words inherited from generations of political advocacy. These ethnographic accounts demonstrate the ways vocabularies of disability access spread in friction, taking on dynamic and unexpected meanings in transnational sociopolitical contexts. Access Vernaculars presents a global perspective on the intersection of critical disability studies and sociocultural anthropology.

Cassandra Hartblay is Associate Professor in the Department of Health and Society at the University of Toronto Scarborough and graduate faculty in the Department of Anthropology and at the Centre for European and Eurasian Studies. She is the author of I Was Never Alone or Oporniki.

Access Vernaculars is a groundbreaking ethnography of access, disability, and design that pushes the boundaries of global disability studies. Refusing simplistic North-South or able/disabled binaries, Hartblay introduces 'global access friction' and 'inaccess stories' as incisive analytic tools for understanding the messy, often contradictory ways that accessibility is imagined, implemented, and lived. This is required reading for anyone interested in critical disability studies, design anthropology, and the global politics of infrastructure.

Maria Christina Galmarini, author of Ambassadors of Social Progress:

Grounded in larger historiographical conversations, Access Vernaculars makes original and important arguments about the state of contemporary disability politics in Russia and contains insightful observations based on a significant amount of ethnographic evidence.

Michele Friedner, University of Chicago:

Access Vernaculars is an eagerly awaited and beautifully ethnographic book, in which Hartblay deftly moves across scales, spaces, and languages to insightfully analyze global access frictions and argue for the importance of access vernaculars in specific contexts.

Claire Shaw, author of Deaf in the USSR:

Access Vernaculars is solidly researched and engagingly written. Cassandra Hartblay provides a thought-provoking contribution to critical disability studies, both in general and in the Slavic context.