• Introduce access texts as political practice
• Introduce the AODA as an access framework
• Introduce the access reports for this class with Yoonmee Han

Lecture Link, Slides, Transcripts

Access Texts

Accessibility Commitment Statement - National Ballet of Canada

Close Reading

Accessibility Commitment Statement - Tangled Art+ Disability

Close Reading

Thinking with and between these statements

Interplay Between Access Texts and Access Practice

AODA

Review of Accessibility Standards under the AODA

Accessibility Standards for Customer Service

Information and Communications Standards:

Design of Public Spaces Standards

Employment Standard

Transportation Standard

Auditing and compliance

The AODA and the Cultural Sector

• Customer Service and Engagement: Cultural organizations must ensure that their staff are trained to provide accessible customer service to all patrons, including those with disabilities. This includes offering alternative formats for brochures, programs, and signage, and ensuring that events and exhibitions are accessible to all.
• Physical Accessibility: Museums and galleries must ensure their facilities meet accessibility standards, including ramps, elevators, accessible restrooms, and wide aisles for mobility devices. These changes may require retrofitting older buildings to meet modern accessibility requirements.
• Digital Accessibility: With increasing reliance on digital content (e.g., virtual exhibitions, websites, online programs), cultural organizations must ensure their digital platforms are accessible. This includes compliance with WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), which ensures that websites are navigable by screen readers and other assistive technologies.
• Inclusive Programming and Exhibits: Cultural institutions must provide exhibits and programming that reflect the diversity of their audiences, including disabled, Deaf, mad, and neurodivergent people. This might include offering relaxed performances, sensory-friendly activities, and making sure that exhibit materials are available in accessible formats (large print, audio descriptions, etc.).

Group Discussion/Reflection

• Define crip wisdom
• Think about access as intersectional access wisdom
• Introduce access frameworks
• Introduce the Cultural Accessibility Landing Page

Lecture Link and Transcript

Catching Up from Last Week: Access to what and for whom?

Access Washing

• Milbern (2019)’s example: “City government implementing anti-homeless measures under the guise of making streets more accessible to people with disabilities, with no consideration that those most harmed by this — houseless community members losing access to public space without alternative safety nets — are people w disabilities themselves. Sue Schweik, who penned a book on Ugly Laws, recently named a City of Berkeley policy for what it is — an ugly law, or ordinances that make it illegal for people considered “unsightly” to be in public space.”
• Platforming zionist writers, authors, and letting people know that ASL interpreters will be available (as if we need to hear zionist talking points and propaganda signed and spoken to us in another language?) Access—as “indexed by the provision of ASL and CART — was a mechanism to recruit a larger audience
• From Sheehi and Jafee’s 2023 interview: In 2016, Syracuse University built a 6 million dollar promenade (a walkway of sorts) through the middle of their campus purporting itself to comply with the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) and making campus more accessible for disabled students. The project however, was a privatized one that constructed itself on a city road that public buses could drive on and that students could get to using public transit. It had been privatized and corporatized, cordoning off this wealthy white university further from the broader population.

Access Exceptionalism

Cultural Accessibility Landing Page

Access Frameworks Lecture: Access as a Thinking and a Doing

Critical Frameworks for Understanding and Practicing Access

Discussion Questions

Reflection - Typical Gallery

Reflection - Tangled Gallery

What are disability arts?

• Art created by disabled people about their experience of disability (but it doesn’t have to)
• Disability art asks us to think differently about how we create art and experience culture
• Disability art is about gaining control over how we are represented

Engaging with disability arts: Micah Bazant/Sins Invalid and Persimmon Blackbridge

Critical Access

Open Access

Access Intimacy

Acces(sens)ibility

Aislinn Thomas: Ongoing Collective Effort

Concluding Questions

• Introduction to community-being and community-making through Haudensaunee, Southern, and crip guidances
• Appeals to collectivity: mutual aid and cross-movement co-consipiratorship as futurity
• Rejecting isolation, individualism, and singularities (i.e individuated access)
• Introduction to affirming pandemic ongoingness and access + covid-consicous practices as mutual aid
• COVID-19, Palestine, and the collectivization of disability, life-making, access, and risk

Lecture Materials

Mutual Aid Campaign Update

Muhammad and Mahmoud's campaign

Text from their campaign:

Lecture: Collectivizing Lifeworlds

• Mutual aid centres of interdependence (of beings and non-beings, human and non-humans alike)
• Bypasses state institutions to meet the material care and safety needs of our communities
• Rejects individualism and ideas of scarcity (replacing it with a politic of abundance and an ethos of care)
• Rooted in transformative justice, disability justice, reproductive justice and anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, radical community organizing
• Taps into people power and the principles of radical solidarity

Additional Notes to consider:

• Attending to intersectionality, intercorporeality, and inter-movement praxis within disability justice and movement work
• Crip time as intersectional justice/Un- and Re-learning temporality and how we engage with pace
• Reflecting deference vs constructive politics and standpoint epistemology (Táíwò, 2022)
• Transnational, mad crip of colour critiques

Class Recording and Transcripts

Freedom-making as place-making: mad cartographies and finding/making elsewhere

“Within Anglophone idiom, subjects go crazy, as though mad is a place or constellation of places. The ship of fools, the insane asylum, the psychiatric hospital, the carnival, the wrong side of the supposed line between genius and madness, and even the continent of Africa are frequently mapped as mad places within Western discourse…. It seems to me that madness, like diaspora, is both location and locomotion. Madness, like diaspora, is both place and process. Madness and diaspora transgress normative arrangements—of the sane and sovereign, in turn. (16–17)”

Mad Mapping Freedom

Transcripts

Introduction to the Project

Introduction to the Course

Learning Objectives

Course Delivery

Ungrading Statement

Engagement and Course Outputs

Engagement

Outputs

Political Orientation

Relationship to Land

Orientation to AI

Collective Access Statement and Course Contract

Introduction to Access Reports

Introduction to Discord

Introduction to Mentors

• To think critically and reflectively about our position in relation to the land we are on, the online space we occupy, and the digital tools we use or choose not to use, to disability studies and disability justice, and to access work;
• To engage with disability studies, crip care, crip practice, and cultural accessibility through a decolonial framework;
• To develop a deep knowledge of cultural accessibility as informed by individual and collective experiential knowledge / crip wisdom and communities of practice;
• To develop an understanding of the relationship between how organizations write about and practice access texts;
• To learn how to write and refine access texts that prefigure transformative, disability-led, and justice-based access practices;
• To work together to develop individualized access plans for specific organizations that centre cultural accessibility and respond to organizational need and community feedback;
• To critically reflect on access as a political, collective, and justice-based transformative practice.

Link to Access Reports

SHE Building Architectural Access Notes

Entrance and Elevators

Washrooms

Masking

Student Card Access

Introduction to Mentors

Lecture Recording, Slides and Transcripts

Crip Peripheries as Crip Centres: access stories/art/realities/activations from the Global South

Question

Have the Audacity: Epistemological Justice and Crossing the Epistemic Line

Falastine

Access Washing

Example:

Group Ideating Activity

DST 604: Access Activations: Building Disability-Centred Access Plans (A Workplace-Integrated Course)

 School of Disability Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University

Please note: This syllabus is a companion document to the course Press Book. This document collects course descriptions, polices, and schedules, many of which are outlined in more detail in the Press Book.

September 2nd - December 1, 2025

Fall Study Week: October 12th - 18th, 2025

Relationship to Land

Access Commitments and Political Orientations

Course Delivery

Course Description and What you will be doing

Learning Objectives

• To think critically and reflectively about our position in relation to the land we are on, the online space we occupy, and the digital tools we use or choose not to use, to disability studies and disability justice, and to access work;
• To engage with disability studies, crip care, crip practice, and cultural accessibility through a decolonial framework;
• To develop a deep knowledge of cultural accessibility as informed by individual and collective experiential knowledge / crip wisdom and communities of practice;
• To develop an understanding of the relationship between how organizations write about and practice access texts;
• To learn how to write and refine access texts that prefigure transformative, disability-led, and justice-based access practices;
• To work together to develop individualized access plans for specific organizations that centre cultural accessibility and respond to organizational need and community feedback;
• To critically reflect on access as a political, collective, and justice-based transformative practice.

Cultural Organizations

Access Reports

1. Access Plan: You are to create an access plan that is tailored to the organization you are working with. This plan will be consistent with the organization’s mandate and/or mission and support their activities and approach to community engagement as articulated in your access report and gleaned through your conversations with the organization. The plan should respond to the access needs  as articulated in your access report and gleaned through your conversations with the organization. Working together, your team will create a comprehensive document that outlines the specific accessibility needs and recommendations for the organization. The access plan will include re-written access texts (e.g., access statements, policies) and tailored cultural accessibility practices that prioritize disability-led and justice-based approaches. The goal of this plan is to ensure that the organization is able to meet the needs of disabled, Deaf, mad, and neurodivergent communities in a way that leads with disabled people’s experiential knowledge or crip wisdom (including your own!) and allow the organization to communicate and practice accessibility in ways that move beyond inclusion towards justice-based cultural transformation.
2. Implementation Strategy: The implementation strategy will provide a clear, actionable roadmap for how the organization can adopt and integrate the recommendations and access practices outlined in your access plan. This strategy will include practical steps, timelines, and resources needed to implement the changes within the organization. It will also outline how the organization can communicate these changes to their community and monitor and evaluate the impact of these changes over time. The implementation strategy will ensure that the organization has the tools and support necessary to sustain and build on the progress made toward cultural accessibility and building meaningful and reciprocal relationships with community after the course and this project concludes.

Access Activations Research Project

1. Assessment of Existing Accessibility Practices: We are working with each organization to understand how they currently understand, communicate about (through writing), and practice access. We are doing this by analyzing their access texts (e.g., access statements) and workplace documents (e.g., employee handbooks), interviewing staff, holding focus groups with community stakeholders, and sending out surveys to their broader networks. We will synthesize these findings in access reports that will summarize the organization as a whole, how they understand and practice access, and recommendations for improving access. These access reports will be given to students at the beginning of their training to inform the development of the access plans they create.
2. Access Activator Training: Over 12 weeks, students will collaborate with course instructors, cultural accessibility leaders, and each other to bolster their practice-based knowledge in critical access approaches and cultural accessibility practices grounded in disability justice and decolonial frameworks. These workshops will emphasize the connection between how organizations write about access in “access texts” and how they practice access. Access activators will apply these skills in partnership with a Toronto arts organization to create an access plan, including re-written access texts, cultural accessibility practices, and an implementation plan, informed by an access report that details the organization's current practices and areas for transformation.
3. Evaluation of Impact: We will assess the effectiveness of these access texts and plans by exploring their impact on the ways disabled, Deaf, mad, and neurodivergent people interact with and experience the cultural organizations. We will do these by conducting another set of interviews and focus groups, and sending out another round of surveys in order to assess whether or how the plans encourage real, justice-based change in the organizational structures and practices. This final assessment will focus on how the development and implementation of these access plans inspire cultural organizations to engage in broader systemic changes that address issues of justice, equity, and intersectional access.

Invitations, expectations, and evaluation

• Contributing to class discussions verbally, non-verbally, or on the Discord channel
• Writing, drawing, expressing yourself in a learning journal
• Discussions with instructors during office hours
• Taking in the lecture while doing something else (bring your gaming, crochet, beading, etc.)

Schedule of Workshops and Readings

Class One - Introduction and Crip Peripheries

• Introduction to the course and syllabus overview
• Introduction to the political orientation of this course, “crip peripheries”

Class Two - Beginning with Crip Wisdom and Lived Experience

• Defining crip wisdom
• Thinking about access as intersectional access wisdom
• Introduction to access frameworks
• Artmaking as worldmaking (Ismatu Gwendolyn)
• Introduction to the Cultural Accessibility Landing Page

Class Three - Access Texts: Communication, Reciprocity, and Building Community

• Introduction to access texts as political practice
• Introduction to the AODA as an access framework
• Introduction to the access reports for this class with Yoonmee Han

Class Four - Class Visit to Tangled Art + Disability

• We will visit Tangled Art + Disability and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s exhibit to experience disability justice and cultural accessibility in action.

• Piepzna-Samarasinha, L.L. (2021). Tiny Disabled Moment #1 Small Moments of Disabled Knowing. The Future is Disabled, 71-74

Class Five - Community, Accountability, and Covid-19

• Introduction to community-being and community-making through Haudensaunee, Southern, and crip guidances
• Appeals to collectivity: mutual aid and cross-movement co-consipiratorship as futurity
• Rejecting isolation, individualism, and singularities (i.e individuated access)
• Introduction to affirming pandemic ongoingness and access + covid-consicous practices as mutual aid
• COVID-19, Palestine, and the collectivization of disability, life-making, access, and risk

Class Six - Disability Justice

• Attending to intersectionality, intercorporeality, and inter-movement praxis within disability justice and movement work
• Crip time as intersectional justice/Un- and Re-learning temporality and how we engage with pace
• Reflecting deference vs constructive politics and standpoint epistemology (Táíwò, 2022)
• Transnational, mad crip of colour critiques

Engagement Options

TORONTO METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY COURSE MANAGEMENT POLICY 166 (TMU stuff)

Course Schedule

• to come once everyone has determined the focus of their access plans!

Access plans showcase

Office Hours

Class One: Introductions and Crip Peripheries

• Introduction to the course and syllabus overview
• Introduction to the political orientation of this course, “crip peripheries”

Discord How-to

How to Make an Account

Security Culture

Using the Class Server

What is a server?

Navigating Servers

Class Text Channels and Voice Channels Guide

Collaborative Agreements (to be co-made)

Our Values

No Tolerance Rules

Enduring Guidelines

Access Notes

• We will visit Tangled Art + Disability and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s exhibit to experience disability justice and cultural accessibility in action.

• Piepzna-Samarasinha, L.L. (2021). Tiny Disabled Moment #1 Small Moments of Disabled Knowing. The Future is Disabled, 71-74

Activity

Link to Slides

• Puar, J. Critical Disability Studies and the Question of Palestine. https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781478093725-007/html?lang=en&srsltid=AfmBOortfadHBxWJOMMBQ4tNJc509l1NrEnBzsRJzgFcNN1_ST0mvGKm
• Introduction of Crip Genealogy: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781478093725-003/html
• Pedagogy in Pandemic Times: trauma-informed practice and disability justice, with griffin epstein, Workshop4Gaza:
  • link to come

Other material

• Chandler, E., & Johnson, M. A. (2024). ‘Stories of Access’: Tangled Art+ Disability and cultural accessibility in action. Journal of Arts & Communities, 15(2), 191-205. (link coming)
• Piepzna-Samarasinha, L. L. (2020). Creating Collective Access: Crip made brilliance in Detroit and beyond. Allied Media. https://alliedmedia.org/wp-content/uploads
• Puar, J. K. (2021). Spatial debilities: Slow life and carceral capitalism in Palestine. South Atlantic Quarterly, 120(2), 393-414. https://jasbirkpuar.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Spatial-Debilities-.pdf
• Jaffee, L., & Sheehi, L. (2024). Disrupting Fixity: Palestine as Central to Decolonial Disability Justice. Review of Disability Studies: An International Journal, 19(3-4). https://rdsjournal.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1321/2790
• Bell, C. (2006). A modest proposal. The disability studies reader, 275. https://behives.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/christopher-bell_introducing-white-disability-studies-a-modest-proposal.pdf

• Crip Lineages, Crip Futures: A conversation by Stacey Park Milbern and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha in Crip Genealogies: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/63465
• Milbern, S. (2019)Notes on Access-washing: https://www.djno.ca/post/notes-on-access-washing
• Sins Invaid on Crip Wisdom: https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2016/10/10/crip-wisdom-interview-with-the-artists-of-sins-invalid/
• Hamraie, A. (2017). Introduction: Critical Access Studies. Building access : universal design and the politics of disability. University of Minnesota Press. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/torontomu/detail.action?docID=5087795

Other material

• Ismatu Gwendolyn (2024) the role of the artist is to load the gun. https://www.threadings.io/the-role-of-the-artist-is-to-load/
  • And its video lecture follow-up: The War is Not a Metaphor (2025) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZTa9cqDVHM
• Mia Mingus (2017) Access Intimacy: https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/access-intimacy-interdependence-and-disability-justice/
• Elwood Jimmy (2020) Aces(sens)ibility: https://www.artseverywhere.ca/translation/
• Carmen Papalia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LG22hxLJ36Y

Learning Journals

• to create ongoing documentation of your thoughts, feelings, learnings about the material - note things that are new to you, things that stuck with you, how you are thinking and feeling about the material, about your project, etc
• you can do this by writing (in stream of consciousness, in full paragraph form - whatever works!), drawing, voice recording, collaging, etc
• experiment with what feels like it deepens your engagement! Take note if anything feels like it impedes your engagement or learning!

Access Check in

Next Steps

• Read through your organization’s access report carefully.
• Meet with your group to discuss initial impressions and possible directions.
• Set up a meeting with Yoonmee, Lisa (research team members who authored the reports), and myself to clarify questions and decide on your group’s area of focus. We’ll also discuss the possibility of a site visit to your organization and we will put you in touch with your mentor and the organization staff you’ll collaborate with.

Link to Access Reports

Materials to Focus On:

• Syrus Marcus Ware’s video (video gallery)
• Considering the Care Clause, Access Anthology with Cyn Rozenboom: https://tangledarts.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Access-Anthology-July-5-2023-screedn-reader-friendly-RGB.pdf

Other Material:

• Hamraie Fritsch: https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/29607
• Sheppard: https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/30459/24816

• Interview with Katie Babcock
• Spade, D (2020). Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/dean-spade-mutual-aid
  • You can also watch Spade’’s video 101 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k2KZwKgtzI
• Kimmerer, R. (2013) Chapter 1: Sky Woman Falling Braiding Sweetgrass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_BYbAshB4A
• Mia Mingus (2022). You are not entitled to our deaths: Covid, Abled Supremacy, and Interdependence: https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2022/01/16/you-are-not-entitled-to-our-deaths-covid-abled-supremacy-interdependence/

• Alice Wong (2023). Why Palestine is a disability issue: https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2023/12/02/why-palestinian-liberation-is-disability-justice/
• Carrie Sandahl (2020). Curated Crip Wisdom in the Time of Corona: https://cms.ahs.uic.edu/inside-ahs/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2020/05/Curated-Crip-Wisdom-in-the-Time-of-Corona-by-Carrie-Sandahl.pdf
• Fritsch, K. (2010). INTIMATE ASSEMBLAGES: DISABILITY, INTERCORPOREALITY, AND THE LABOUR OF ATTENDANT CARE. Critical Disability Discourses, 2. https://doi.org/10.25071/1918-6215.23854
  • PDF: intimate assemblages

• Pathologizing Palestinian Resistance w/ Liat Ben-Moshe and Leah Harris: https://www.deathpanel.net/transcripts/pathologizing-palestine
•  Crip Times with Dustin P Gibson: https://tangledarts.org/whats-on/crip-times-the-dustin-p-gibson-episode/
• Sami Schalk and Jina B. Kim: Integrating Race, Transforming Feminist Disability Studies: https://samischalk.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Schalk-and-Kim_Integrating-Race-Transforming-Feminist-DS_Signs-2020.pdf
  • PDF: integrating race transforming feminist disability studies

• Jurelle Bruce, L. Mad Black Rants in Crip Authorship: Disability as Method. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/193/oa_edited_volume/chapter/4152365/pdf
  • PDF: Mad Black Rants
• Duong, N. Rhizophora: Queering Chemical Kinship in the Agent Orange Diaspora: https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/3194/chapter/7526786/RhizophoraQueering-Chemical-Kinship-in-the-Agent
  • PDF: Rhizophora

Workshop: Working with Access Texts

Free School Events

First Event

Second Event

Group Updates

Disability Justice and Cultural Accessibility

Ableism

Questions to Ask

Where to look for ableism in workplace/organizational policies

Prompts for Commenting on Policies

Sick Day Policy

Alternative Sick Day Policy

Writing Access Statements: What should access statements do?

National Ballet Example

Prompts for Re-writing

Covid-consciousness Statements: What should they do?

Workshop Three: Funding and Covid Consciousness

Honouring Alice Wong

Funding Discussion

Funding Resources - Three Local Funding Opportunities (and one to avoid)

Enabling Accessibility Fund

Toronto Arts Council Grants

Ontario Arts Council – Deaf and Disability Arts Projects & Deaf and Disability Arts: Materials for Visual Artists

Deaf and Disability Arts Projects

• Ontario based disabled and/or Deaf artists and arts professionals
• Ad hoc groups, collectives, and arts orgs mandated to serve and led by artists or arts professionals who are Deaf and/or disabled
  • “The application must demonstrate that the artistic process is led by artists and/or arts professionals who are Deaf and/or have a disability.”

• Applicants may only apply to one category per deadline (was Oct. 15, 2025)
• Grant amount can be less than what was requested

Deaf and Disability Arts: materials for Visual Artists

• Deaf and/or disabled artists working in visual art or craft practices to purchase materials

• (partial grants not awarded – must have 500$ worth of expenses)

• Materials and supplies
• Small tools
• Small scale equipment, software, electronics, and similar materials required to carry out project
• Shipping and delivery costs
•  Childcare and other dependant care fees enabling individuals to take part in the project

Canada Council for the Arts Strategic Funds – Access Support

Covid Consciousness

Learnings from Katie Babcock's Interview

Tips for Masking Policy

• Communicate masking/covid policy clearly on all platforms (ticketing websites, social media)
• Communicate the reason behind it – “describing Covid in the present tense”
• Recognition that not everyone can mask
• Requiring higher quality masks (kn95 and above) when possible for people and noting the reasons why higher quality masks are necessary/important
• Training staff how to talk about covid (see above)
• Offering refunds or transfers for attendees who feel sick
• Discourage people from going into a space if they’re ill
• Announcing masking reminders at the start of an event and at intermission

Cleaning air

• HEPA filters
  • Can be accessed through Clean Air Collective
• Even opening windows
• Offering outdoor spaces for people to unmask and eat and drink rather than indoors
• Co2 monitors
  • (measuring carbon dioxide levels can serve as a proxy for measuring the potential amount of covid in the air)
• Offering mask mandatory shows/events
  • If not every one, picking a certain amount per month
  • Survey audience to understand how many might want to mask

Tips for dealing with push back

• Communicating covid as an “ongoing risk”
• “untimely”/”excess deaths” ongoing
  • note: not just number of deaths but the number of people who are being debilitated, becoming disabled through long Covid – being reminded of this and making people aware of collective responsibility to one another
• Masking as a key safety tool that also protects from other airborne illnesses and pollutants
• Providing education about covid
• communicating masking as part of “access and inclusion”
  • “So we want, we want everyone to be able to access the arts, to be able to have joy. A lot of the community has faced a lot of grief and abandonment over the last, I want to say at least 3 years, or maybe 5, but there's been a ton of that so losing friends, losing family over masking or over choosing safety over relationships.”
• It doesn’t have to be all or nothing
  • Sliding scale of covid safety tools
• Linking masking and covid safety to organizational values
  • Linking to existing values and adding it to mission/vision/values

Expanding on Katie's Suggestions

• Articulating masking as a part of solidarity, love for each other, resistance
  • Considering covid within socio-political context, colonial death-making, neoliberalism
• Considering masking/individual covid measures as a way of protecting people who also cannot mask
  • Consider people who are negatively racialized and cannot risk potential for increased surveillance/policing; people whose access needs conflict with masking, etc – ppl should not have to be exposed just because they individually cannot mask
  • For theatres/events/performances – consider actors, musicians, speakers, who may not be masking during their performance - they should be protected

• Long covid, what covid does to the body, what covid safety measures are proven to be helpful
  • Communicating accessible information about safety measures
  • That are not just relevant to white people, rich people
• Leaving room for the guilt, defensiveness, fear people have about long term illness & masking (being careful about shame and policing of people about masking and their covid measures)
  • As well as making space for anger, grief, fear that debilitated & sick ppl have about not seeing others mask/take covid safety measures

Think of mask mandatory events not purely as a negative/reductory thing

• Maybe this masked event offers people a moment to connect to an access tool they needed but hadn’t seen elsewhere; maybe it offers people a moment to access grief they have around covid or health & neoliberal doom
• Mask mandatory events might seem harsh or stressful to organizers but I think they can actually take a mental load off for the decision making around masking or not masking at an event (for people who don’t regularly mask)
  • Making individual decisions about masking can get caught up with people’s fear of being rejected socially – if everyone is masking and it’s the ‘rule’ I think this can sometimes save people the mental load of deciding if they ‘should’?

If you have a masking policy, have free masks available

• Organizations (and individuals!) can get free masks through Donate a Mask, Mask Blocs
• The cost of masking is really inaccessible & if an org can’t take this cost on, ultimately that’s the govt’s fault, not theirs – but orgs have more access to funding than individuals and should make sure to employ this rather than expecting people to buy masks themselves

And ultimately - Covid policies should be context specific, flexible, creative

Lecture Recording

Watch the recording · Download transcript (PDF)

Live examples

How to use

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  <h3>Lecture Recording</h3>
  <p><a href="#">Watch the recording</a> · <a href="#">Download transcript (PDF)</a></p>
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