For people who are living with disability, including various forms of chronic diseases and chronic pain, daily tasks like lifting a glass of water or taking off clothes can be difficult if not impossible. In Activist Affordances, Arseli Dokumacı draws on ethnographic work with differently disabled people whose ingenuity, labor, and artfulness allow them to achieve these seemingly simple tasks. Dokumacı shows how they use improvisation to imagine and bring into being more habitable worlds through the smallest of actions and the most fleeting of movements---what she calls “activist affordances.” Even as an environment shrinks to a set of constraints rather than opportunities, the improvisatory space of performance opens up to allow disabled people to imagine that same environment otherwise. Dokumacı shows how disabled people’s activist affordances present the potential for a more liveable and accessible world for all of us.Arseli Dokumacı draws on ethnographic work with differently disabled people whose ingenuity, labor, and artfulness allows them to achieve seemingly daily tasks like lifting a glass of water or taking clothes off.Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  1
Part I. Shrinkage
1. Affordance Encounters Disability  31
2. Chronic Pain, Chronic Disease  55
3. The Habitus of Ableism  71
4. Planetary Shrinkage  87
Part II. Performance
5. A Theory of Activist Affordances  99
6. An Archive of Activist Affordances  119
7. Always in-the-Making 191
8. People as Affordances  205
9. Disability Repertoires  227
10. Speculations for a Shrinking Planet  237
Notes  253
Bibliography  293
Index  311Arseli Dokumacı is Canada Research Chair in Critical Disability Studies and Media Technologies and Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University.