Cofounder And Director Of The Disability Rights Education And Defense Fund Movement Strategist

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Family and childhood in Louisville, KY; contracting polio, 1955, and rehabilitation at Georgia Warm Springs Polio Foundation; University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, 1962-1966; work for civil rights, anti-Vietnam war 1960s-1970s; job counselor, University of California, Berkeley Physically Disabled Students' Program; growth of Center for Independent Living: Disability Law Resource Center; Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Section 504: demonstrations in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., regulations, training, amendments; Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF): foundation, direction, funding, advocating in Washington D.C.; Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), 1990; reflections on disability rights movement leaders Robert Funk, Patrisha Wright, Judith Heumann and others; disability access to buildings, transportation, employment.

Compelling first-person accounts of the struggle to secure equal rights for Americans with disabilities

A history of design that is often overlooked—until we need it Have you ever hit the big blue button to activate automatic doors? Have you ever used an ergonomic kitchen tool? Have you ever used curb cuts to roll a stroller across an intersection? If you have, then you’ve benefited from accessible design—design for people with physical, sensory, and cognitive disabilities. These ubiquitous touchstones of modern life were once anything but. Disability advocates fought tirelessly to ensure that the needs of people with disabilities became a standard part of public design thinking. That fight took many forms worldwide, but in the United States it became a civil rights issue; activists used design to make an argument about the place of people with disabilities in public life. In the aftermath of World War II, with injured veterans returning home and the polio epidemic reaching the Oval Office, the needs of people with disabilities came forcibly into the public eye as they never had before. The US became the first country to enact federal accessibility laws, beginning with the Architectural Barriers Act in 1968 and continuing through the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, bringing about a wholesale rethinking of our built environment. This progression wasn’t straightforward or easy. Early legislation and design efforts were often haphazard or poorly implemented, with decidedly mixed results. Political resistance to accommodating the needs of people with disabilities was strong; so, too, was resistance among architectural and industrial designers, for whom accessible design wasn’t “real” design. Bess Williamson provides an extraordinary look at everyday design, marrying accessibility with aesthetic, to provide an insight into a world in which we are all active participants, but often passive onlookers. Richly detailed, with stories of politics and innovation, Williamson’s Accessible America takes us through this important history, showing how American ideas of individualism and rights came to shape the material world, often with unexpected consequences.

Drawing from a diverse range of interdisciplinary voices, this book explores how spaces of care shape our affective, material, and social forms, from the most intimate scale of the body to our planetary commons. Typical definitions of care center around the maintenance of a livable life, encompassing everything from shelter and welfare to health and safety. Architecture plays a fundamental role in these definitions, inscribed in institutional archetypes such as the home, the hospital, the school, and the nursery. However, these spaces often structure modes of care that prescribe gender roles, bodily norms, and labor practices. How can architecture instead engage with an expanded definition of care that questions such roles and norms, producing more hybrid entanglements between our bodies, our collective lives, and our environments? Chapters in this book explore issues ranging from disabled domesticities and nursing, unbuilding whiteness in the built environment, practices and pedagogies of environmental care, and the solidarity networks within ‘The Cloud’. Case studies include Floating University Berlin, commoning initiatives by the Black Panther party, and hospitals for the United Mine Workers of America, among many other sites and scales of care. Exploring architecture through the lenses of gender studies, labor theory, environmental justice, and the medical humanities, this book will engage students and academics from a wide range of disciplines.

The book shines light on the problem of judgment, particularly in the realm of architectural "technics" and the codes that regulate it. The struggle to define "sustainability," and thus judge architecture through such lenses, is but one dimension of the contemporary problem of judgment. By providing the reader with an inherently interdisciplinary study of a particular discipline—architecture, it brings to the topic lenses that challenge the too frequently unexamined assumptions of the discipline. By situating architecture within a broader cultural field and using case studies to dissect the issues discussed, the book emphasizes that it is not simply a matter of designing better, more efficient, or more stringent codes to guide place-making, but a matter of reconstructing the boundaries of the systems to be coded. The authors are winners of the EDRA Place-Research Award 2014 for their work on the Green Alley Demonstration Project used in the book.

Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader takes a groundbreaking approach to exploring the interconnections between disability, architecture and cities. The contributions come from architecture, geography, anthropology, health studies, English language and literature, rhetoric and composition, art history, disability studies and disability arts and cover personal, theoretical and innovative ideas and work. Richer approaches to disability – beyond regulation and design guidance – remain fragmented and difficult to find for architectural and built environment students, educators and professionals. By bringing together in one place some seminal texts and projects, as well as newly commissioned writings, readers can engage with disability in unexpected and exciting ways that can vibrantly inform their understandings of architecture and urban design. Most crucially, Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader opens up not just disability but also ability – dis/ability – as a means of refusing the normalisation of only particular kinds of bodies in the design of built space. It reveals how our everyday social attitudes and practices about people, objects and spaces can be better understood through the lens of disability, and it suggests how thinking differently about dis/ability can enable innovative and new kinds of critical and creative architectural and urban design education and practice.

The records document the leadership of the organization in the course of its struggle to bring comprehensive civil rights to the disabled community. The bulk of the documentation concerns legislative lobbying and community mobilization through public education and grassroots efforts.

“All too often,” wrote disabled architect Ronald Mace, “designers don’t take the needs of disabled and elderly people into account.” Building Access investigates twentieth-century strategies for designing the world with disability in mind. Commonly understood in terms of curb cuts, automatic doors, Braille signs, and flexible kitchens, Universal Design purported to create a built environment for everyone, not only the average citizen. But who counts as “everyone,” Aimi Hamraie asks, and how can designers know? Blending technoscience studies and design history with critical disability, race, and feminist theories, Building Access interrogates the historical, cultural, and theoretical contexts for these questions, offering a groundbreaking critical history of Universal Design. Hamraie reveals that the twentieth-century shift from “design for the average” to “design for all” took place through liberal political, economic, and scientific structures concerned with defining the disabled user and designing in its name. Tracing the co-evolution of accessible design for disabled veterans, a radical disability maker movement, disability rights law, and strategies for diversifying the architecture profession, Hamraie shows that Universal Design was not just an approach to creating new products or spaces, but also a sustained, understated activist movement challenging dominant understandings of disability in architecture, medicine, and society. Illustrated with a wealth of rare archival materials, Building Access brings together scientific, social, and political histories in what is not only the pioneering critical account of Universal Design but also a deep engagement with the politics of knowing, making, and belonging in twentieth-century United States.