Against the Protocols of the Civilised Body: Three Programs with Access Lab & Library
Across May and June 2026 Access Lab & Library (ALL) will lead a series of gatherings that foreground experimental access practice and theory. With opportunities for online, hybrid and in-person participation, this series will support deep engagement with contemporary disability thinking in the context of contemporary arts and museum practices.
I. Online Reading Group
Beyond compliance level accommodations, access thinking signals a mode of relationality and a critical field of practice in contemporary art. Over three sessions, this reading group introduces key texts and concepts on the themes of opening access, writing together, and access-infused conversation.
Date/time: Wednesday 20th May, 3rd June, 17th June 2026, 10am-12pm (AEST)
Opening access ...
Date/time: Wednesday 20th May 2026, 10am-12pm (AEST)
What we will be discussing
Informed by Carmen Papalia's concept of 'Open Access', we will think together about what it might mean for access to be approached as temporary, collectively-held space. How might access needs, desires, and responsibilities shift with place, with seasons, with community? How might access needs and desires, whether constant or fluctuating, be expressed amongst a community? How might access needs and desires be approached in practice as a collective responsibility — and as a collective creative opportunity?
This week's reading
- (Essay) ‘For a new accessibility’ by Carmen Papalia, in Contemporary Art and Disability Studies, edited by Alice Wexler, and John Derby, Taylor & Francis Group (2019)
Or, if you have more energy:
- Read the above, and watch or listen to this article about Andy Slater’s TikTok request for descriptions of the 2023 Montgomery dock fight – and one of the many rich and creative responses he received
Or, if you have less energy:
- Consider the following quotes from this week's reading:
(p 36) "In the museum...my options for engaging with works on display as a non-visual learner have typically been limited to listening to verbal descriptions or indiscriminately touching sculptural reproductions and texture samples. These options are most often produced by sighted designers according to false stereotypes of blind or visually impaired users, offering alternatives to the viewing experience that don’t reflect the original intentions of artists and that are not considered to be relevant outside of the marginal space of access programs. In these situations, I have never been asked what my preferences are, and the consequences of the decisions that are made on my behalf never have been acknowledged or discussed. Whether they were provided by the colleges that I attended or the airlines that I used, access accommodations have followed similar guidelines and most often have made me feel isolated from my peers and frustrated by the prescriptive nature of the services offered. This was the landscape of support services that I was familiar with, and it seemed to be this way everywhere. I knew that by conceptualizing what a new approach to accessibility might be, I would direct my effort far from this terrible formula for anticipating needs and toward a practice that could radically transform accessibility into something that wouldn’t further marginalize those who practice it."
(p 37) "Whether or not a space is accessible depends on so many things, the most important of which is the condition of the social space. And how might we assess the condition of the social environment when so many of the current strategies for ensuring accessibility center on limiting physical barriers? I figured that a paradigm that promotes social accessibility would likely have the interests of everyone who is disabled by a set of social and cultural conditions in mind, not just the interests of the disability community. It would depend on the collective politics of a space and whether it is being held to a set of tenets that promote a welcoming atmosphere in which those who feel inclined to enter may hold agency and thrive. It would account for the disabling conditions informed by histories of oppression, marginalization, and trauma by creating opportunities for acts of transformative justice."
(p 38) "Open Access relies on those present, what their needs are and how they can find support with each other and in their communities. It is a perpetual negotiation of trust between those who practice support as a mutual exchange. Open Access is radically different than a policy that temporarily removes a barrier to participation for a group with definitive needs. It acknowledges that everyone carries a body of local knowledge and is an expert in their own right. Open access is the root system of embodied learning. It cultivates trust among those involved and enables each member to self-identify and occupy a point of orientation that centers complex embodiment. Open Access disrupts the disabling conditions that limit one’s agency and potential to thrive. It reimagines normalcy as a continuum of embodiments, identities, realities and learning styles, and operates under the tenet that interdependence is central to a radical restructuring of power. Open Access is a temporary, collectively held space where participants can find comfort in disclosing their needs and preferences with one another. It is a responsive support network that adapts as needs and available resources change."
Or, if you have no energy:
Rest in a place where you can feel a soft breeze or other airflow.
Does your sense of this place change over the minutes or hours you are resting?
How might this place change over seasons?
Does your capacity to participate ebb and flow over time?
Writing together: Access-led (de)scripting
Date/time: Wednesday 3rd June 2026, 10am-12pm (AEST)
What we will be discussing
How can access suggest different strategies of writing and collective authorship? How do we give language to sensory experiences, and how might we think about describing sounds, movements and images? In this session, we’ll discuss and challenge assumptions about accessible writing and reading — for and by whom? Together, we will try a diversity of methods for sensory descriptions and inter-sensory translation, and discuss how these might be employed in making and presenting art in galleries, museums and beyond.
This week's readings
- (Essay) ‘Chronic Illness, Slowness, and the Time of Writing’ by Mel Chen, in Crip Authorship: Disability as Method, edited by Rebecca Sanchez. New York, USA: New York University Press, 2023
- (Captioned video) ‘Inventions in sound’ (28:24) by Raymond Antrobus and Eleanor McDowall, Third Coast International Audio Festival and Falling Tree Productions, 2023
Or, if you have more energy:
- Read both of the above with: ‘Crip Making’ by Aimi Hamraie, in Crip Authorship: Disability as Method, edited by Rebecca Sanchez. New York, USA: New York University Press, 2023
Or, if you have less energy:
- Consider the following quotes:
(Mel Chen 2023, p35, also in ‘Manifesting manifestos’ by Alison Kafer 2023, Crip Authorship, p 186) “I want to be with you. If you can’t go, then I don’t want to go. If we are traveling together, sharing political space together, building political family together, then I want to be with you. I want us to be together.” Can we imagine this way of being as a mode of crip authorship? And how might such being make space for more expansive, capacious approaches to collaboration? We learned to wait on each other — for the migraine to lift, the fatigue to ease, the energy to return — as we wrote the introduction to Crip Genealogies together (with Eunjung Kim and Julie Avril Minich), in spite of our training to do other wise. Inspired by those experiences, we invite an explicit turning toward collaboration and acknowledge the fundamentally collaborative nature of thinking in making that collaboration known. From this perspective, cripping authorship might mean cripping single authorship, even as we recognize that it must not be a cloak indictment: that in fact, single authoring may necessarily be someone else’s best and only crip mode. But when single authorship is a proprietary accumulation of intellectual property that should have been shared (which, we note, goes hand in hand with intersectional theft), then it could be seen as “ripping off.” Instead, we wonder what possibilities are made by messing with this formula, with unknown risks, erotics, and consequences: “cripping off.” While the risks lean toward precarious positions vis-à- vis the academy, we commit to making more and more places where cripping off is imaginable and recognized."
(Mel Chen 2023, p35) "My first book, Animacies, has been described as a theoretical text. It has also been described as a difficult text, perhaps for some impenetrable. But I think back to the sense, while writing it, that it was all I could do... It was written in the brain fogginess of my most marked period of immersive illness, and came about in part by an act of desperation— not just to keep my academic job, where I nevertheless found some kind of fit (the equation wasn’t publish or perish so much as publish while perishing, or perishing for publishing!) — but also to let in the sensemaking of the sensory, cognitive, and emotional elsewhere where I lived... At a basic level, the phrases that came out were the only way for me to imagine. They came out as I did — evasive to the command, reluctant to the mastery of the word, always at a side reach, equivalent in some coarse way to my inability to experience a direct gaze without great risk. “It was all I could do.” But I also knew the resultant text would be “difficult,” and I felt shame. After all, I was committed to some form of disability studies and had the sense that “accessibility” was something to strive for..."
(Mel Chen 2023, p36) "Eventually, a member of the disability studies circles I was part of, and a friend connected to a publisher, approached me and quite generously welcomed me to pursue another publication, but this time rendering Animacies in the most accessible language possible. This was someone who, at least at that time, advocated for “plain language” scholarship, the idea being that there existed some form of common language that could be called plain, presumably also maximally shared by virtue of some lowest common denominator. It’s not my place to scoff at this, perhaps, because I see where it comes from, and I write as someone who is highly trained, has credentials, is at ease in many academic languages, and, despite childhood troubles with reading, writing, and hearing, is given the “model minority” benefit of the doubt as an East Asian American person writing puzzlingly rather than being punished for it. But I do have some distress at “plain language” nevertheless, the first reason being that the plain language expected is a truly, honestly, still- colonizing language called English, with coercive grammaticalities that I wrote about in Animacies... Plain language, to me, with its commonest goal, is kin to clarity, which has been weaponized against so many even as it has assisted others.. While many, including me at times, have felt great relief when clarity was needed at a given moment, others have been traumatized by its demand... Standardized language — too clearly the source of plain language, even if they are not the same — has killed living languages, small and large, in cities, suburbs, and plains, at borders, minoritized or assaulted by colonization and domination. Indeed, “accessibility,” which disability studies scholars all too deeply understand to be a vexed wish, has too easily conspired with an unthought universal standard. Asserting the dominance of plain language (not what my colleague was doing at that moment, which was simply a sweet invitation) in access contexts, in the name of access, is a lot more racialized and nationalistic than the modest image of its presentation. As my dear and, for the purposes of this text, anonymous disability studies colleague wrote me the other night: To hell with accessible writing."
Or, if you have no energy:
Rest comfortably. Think of a word that describes how you feel.
Where are you? Are people moving around, or is it quiet where you are? Think of a word that describes what you notice.
If you wish, think of more words, flowing back and forth between how you feel and what you notice.
Let the words wash over and through you. If no words come to mind, just rest.
Access-infused conversation...
Date/time: Wednesday 17th June 2026, 10am-12pm (AEST)What we will be discussing
How do we encounter each other through access, and how could these encounters expand and extend our experiences with artworks and with one another in ways that wouldn’t otherwise be possible? In the final session of our reading group, we’ll unpack some of the cultural biases and hesitations about what we disclose and how. We’ll lever open possibilities for access as a catalyst for conversation — during encounters with artworks, or as a means of archiving sensory memories of artworks.
This week's readings
- ‘Bringing a Closing to Disclosing the Clothing’ by Jack Bernard, in Braille Monitor, January 2022
- Watch a short video documentation (11:43) of Miyuki Tanaka’s 2017 audiodescriptive dance development at Kanagawa Arts Theatre
Or, if you have more energy:
- (Essay) ‘The Subject at Hand’ by Georgina Kleege in social research
- (Essay) ‘Ascending/Descending Sonic Shadows Prologue and Tactile Reading Notes’ by Fayen d’Evie and Lizzie Boon, in Art Writing in Crisis, 2021
Or, if you have less energy:
- ‘Experiencing art through touch instead of sight’ (4:41) by David Eulitt, in Kansas City Star
Or, if you have no energy:
- Watch or listen to this short clip from an interview with Rebecca Bracewell: clip (0:55)
II. In-person workshop, Thursday 25th June 2026
Taking place in-person at UQ’s St Lucia campus, this intensive workshop will build on the themes of the reading group sessions. (Prior participation in the reading group is recommended, but not required.)
We’ll explore how a temporary, access-infused collective can be formed; how we can share and negotiate our access needs and desires; and how we might map embodied knowledges and creative practices. We’ll play through improvisational, conversational, critical, poetic and disruptive image description and captioning exercises, seeking to unravel the ways that artworks can be described and redescribed.
Our work together will culminate in a script and staging directions for a live, hybrid publication and performance — a review of an unseen exhibition — that experiments with possibilities for inter-sensorial translations.
III. Performance, Saturday 27th June 2026
This one-off live performance with Access Lab & Library shares the creative outcomes of a day-long workshop which brings participants together as a temporary, access-focussed collective to explore and experiment with the possibilities of intersensorial translation.
This free performance will take place at the Dr Mary Mahoney AO Amphitheatre at UQ Lakes. Following the performance there will be free food and drink. More information about what to expect on the day is available as a social story.