Stretching Our Stories 2022
This iteration of Thing from the Future was prepared for the School of Disability Studies’ Social Justice Week 2021 event, Designing Accessible Futures. This event was conceived by faculty members Eliza Chandler and Esther Ignagni and prepared and presented with Hanna Edwards, Tali Cherniawsky, Lisa East, Thai Hunte, and Caitlyn Rose. It is now being adapted for the Toronto Metropolitan University arm of Stretching Our Stories, a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant led by Dr. Carla Rice.
In the troubled times over the pandemic, deepening climate crisis, renewed movements of anti-Black racism, deepening austerity regimes storytellers are stretching their powerful, crucial artmaking into the ephemeral, non-innocent realm of online story-making as they face disproportionate effects of global and local unrest. In this context—precariously called “the new normal”—-based research must support storytelling communities in developing appropriate and critical methodologies in a digitally divided world experienced differently by marginalized groups, particularly disabled people. Crucially, these communities’ emergent methodologies resist apolitical calls for online inclusion. Instead, their collaborative work online revitalizes fields of relations, knowledges, and practices that have long resisted the socio-economic power differences now amplified by current crises. In addition to “stretching our stories,” then, the other meaning of SOS—calling for help, marking an urgent crisis—speaks to the necessity and urgency of finding renewed ways of making and telling our stories through and about troubled times; therefore, the overarching question in this project is: How can we deepen space for critical, online multimedia story-making as embodied and felt inquiry in ways that enrich our understandings of the affective, social dynamics of vulnerability, isolation, affirmation and resistance for disabled people in unprecedented times? More specifically, how do disabled people’s access their everyday life in world’s that are becoming increasingly digitized?
To respond to these questions, a community-engaged project drawing on critical play, design fiction and co-production approaches has been designed. In the introduction to her book, Critical Play: Radical Game Design (2009), Flanagan writes, “[Critical play] means to create or occupy play environments and activities that represent one or more questions about aspects of human life” (p.6) Participants engage in hypothetical interrogation, experimentation, and subversion; it is a suspension of the social-political, in effort to critically engage the possibilities of accessible futures. These techno-social imaginaries make known the political significance of technological developments. One form of critical play employed in this project is the creation of speculative or future worlds through design fiction techniques.
Design fictions combine elements of science fiction, science fact and critical design. DF involves creating a ‘near-future’ technological prototype (it could exist, but it does not), which acts as ‘the protagonist’ in a series of fictional stories. DFs allow us to ‘suspend disbelief about change’ (Sterling, 2012). As such, design fictions act as a provocation and create ‘discursive space’ in which to raise questions, explore legal, ethical and social debate and generate critical insights about techno-social dilemmas (Sterling, 2012; Lindley & Coulton 2016; Blythe 2014; Tsekleves et al 2017).
DF can be an innovative and productive approach to work through bio/techno-social dilemmas with broader publics. It can provide an open and accessible space in which people can talk about their lives, concerns and hopes in a safe(r) setting. The fictitious element brings in issues of conflict, tension, ambiguity and happenstance that in the current discussion might include difficult issues around access and indivisible rights, yet the narrative arc encourages those involved to think through vital forms of resistance, engagement, uptake and an imagining of life in and through difference, a disability futurity.
As a form of storytelling, DF allows people to stretch their speculative aspirations about access in ways that go beyond universal design’s call to make things “better for everyone” (which tend to disappear minoritized perspectives and re-centre the needs/interests of the majoritized; see Hamraie, 2017, p. 19). By rallying feminist technoscience, DF renegotiates concepts of “inclusion,” “access,” and the “new normal” through critical inquiry of what is inclusion, what is access, and what the future can be.
DF offers co-designer participants a process in and platform through which to redefine “the new normal” as it unfolds in ways that resist the neoliberal and colonial structures that led to these troubled times (Braidotti, 2020). DF is a methodological commitment to wayfinding through culturally sensitive research aids with stakeholders (rather than ahead of them) as online research becomes increasingly institutionalized and thereby increasingly critiqued (Boler, 2002; Tuck & Yang, 2018; Jones, 2020). Ultimately, the DF will respond individually and collectively to necessary shifts in methodology: collaborative, interdependent moves online that creatively configure new and pre-existing knowledges while refusing to ignore the oppressive past that brought us to this critical moment (Denzin & Lincoln, 2018).