CONCLUSIONHeroes and Protagonists of Russian Crip Futures

Inaccess Stories, Global Access Friction, Metonyms and National Narratives

As the notion of access moves through networks of global connection, it is refracted through dimensions of meaning in local contexts. In Petrozavodsk in the 2010s, standards of access (and expectations about meeting those standards) traveled across national, linguistic, and cultural borders. Moving in global friction means that the meaning of access might encounter a mismatch that is both incommensurable and generative. As we have seen, accessible design appears in advocacy work and complaints based in disability expertise; as a symbol of modernity in state discourses; and as a symbol of infrastructural failure mobilized as part of broader political critique.

Accessible design as a concept, initially imagined as a material modality by which to accommodate difference and facilitate political and social inclusion, cannot avoid cooptation. Like all technologies, accessible design is morally neutral. The imagined moral good of accessible design is subject to the complexity of human biases, markets, and incentives that may foil implementation. In fact, its symbolic address can be fetishized and coopted by capital and can be mobilized as national metonym by ablenationalism. The disability studies scholar Robert McRuer writes: “Contemporary capitalism no longer deploys a logic of ‘totalizing normality’; instead, neoliberal capitalism focuses on and markets constant change, flexibility, ‘difference,’ and, indeed, freakiness. Put differently, neoliberal capitalism arguably embraces the freaky or abnormal, domesticating or taming it as it sells it back to us (2014, 188).

Thus, I argue that accessible design in Russia can be repackaged and sold to the population in new ways. As in Michele Friedner's (2015) consideration of deaf inclusion in India, accessible design in Russia becomes an object of value, manipulated by corporations and marketers to sell products. For example, in the fall of 2012, while I was conducting fieldwork Russia, a friend who worked at a local branch of Sberbank, the oldest and largest bank in Russia, told me offhandedly that he had heard that the corporate higher-ups at work were in the process of retrofitting design elements at Sberbank branches to make the ATM vestibules and lobbies “accessible for the disabled.” By the following spring, small tile ramps appeared where there used to be a step at some Sberbank branches around the city. Then, in December 2016, the bank staged a holiday season press event to launch newly updated ATM technology, billed as fully accessible to people with disabilities. Although the event claimed to promote access for disabled people, no disabled people were pictured in the launch event coverage. Instead, the bank's CEO German Gref demonstrated the ATM interface himself. Apparently nondisabled, Gref donned a suit designed to “simulate” disability. Such so-called empahthy suits are comprised of a vest, goggles, and other elements to limit the wearer's vision, hearing, and other senses. These suits are manufactured and sold to train medical personnel to feel empathy for aging and disabled patients.¹ Gref's performance, however, did not seem to promote empathy for the experience of disability, but instead, seemed designed to harness value produced through the association of accessibility with modernity and ease. Gref, on behalf of Sberbank, was engaging in accessible design appropriation, or cripwashing.

In this way, disability access images, material objects, and vocabularies move into Russian daily life is through the generative power of cripwashing, mobilized to produce ablenationalist sentiment. This recognition is striking, given the widely discussed homophobic political rhetoric and legislation that has unfolded in the Russian Federation since the early 2010s, which has led to an understanding of Russia as resistant to homonationalism. Yet ablenationalism, in the examples of the second kind of inaccess story described throughout this text, garner significant cultural caché. That is, we might consider whether without pinkwashing as a means of distracting from or creating displays of nationalist affective harmony through pretenses of inclusion, cripwashing remains available and becomes a dynamic by which the Russian state generates good feeling for neoliberal citizens. Ablenationalism works as an alternative to homonationalism—an (often empty) emblem of teleological social progress.

The inaccess stories told and reposted on Instagram of the wheelchair on the ledge, the images of bad ramps, and the journalist's attention to wheelchair access at the theater may ignore disability expertise. Yet, by pointing to the empty gesture of Russian cripwashing, they effectively work to unveil the hypocrisy of Russian neoliberal politics of “inclusion.” Meanwhile, the actual convenience of disabled Russian citizens remains largely unaddressed, while symbols of accessible design adorn post offices and town halls, locations where emblems of inclusion are likely to inspire nationalist pride in the country's advancing development.

The alleged acceptance and tolerance for disabled people's access needs symbolized by images of accessible design in Russian public space did produce some social recognition for some of my more socially accomplished interlocutors, for example, Rudak and Anya received various forms of recognition for their professional and creative accomplishments. But at the same time, Putin's reconsolidation of social services disrupted a generation of disability expertise in the non-profit sector, and disabled people became subject to new forms of social exclusion as shifting political ground depoliticized and dismantled their claims for rights and political agency, in favor of discourses of rehabilitation that individualize, pathologize, and imagine disability as a totalizing identity, leaving ableism and social stigma uninterrogated.

Reading Russian ablenationalism in this way demonstrates the importance of thinking with disability theory for global critique. Homonationalism and queer theory have arrived in the Euroamerican academy and are widely understood as an important lens by which to understand social dynamics in general; however, disability theory has too often been understood to be a conceptual lens that applies to theorizing only the “exceptional” experiences of disabled people. I join others in arguing that disability theory, by attending to and theorizing the work that the categories of disability and accessible design do in the service of complex global systems of neoliberal capital and colonial nationalism. Global disability studies, therefore, is not only a consideration of disabled experiences transnationally, but a tool in the toolkit of critiques of global capitalism that seek to theorize complex workings of power. In this text, I have attempted to offer an example of disability anthropology in which disability theory offers an essential contribution to critical studies of contemporary geopolitics and lifeworlds that advance social theory.

To think ethnographically about disability and access in Petrozavodsk in the twenty-first century requires thinking about global friction and the ways that inclusion or access take on particular vernacular meanings in a specific time and place. This ethnography did not start out as an ethnography of globalization, or an ethnography of spatial relationships or infrastructure. It began with simple questions about social and political participation and about the meaning of the word invalid in contemporary Russia. Yet, arriving in Petrozavodsk and raising these questions, I was part of a much bigger flow of ideas about rights, knowledge, participation, and justice that has moved from the United States into post-Soviet worlds. In this book, I have worked to document how these ideas are taken up and take on meaning in vernacular vocabularies and lifeworlds in ways that would be unpredictable and difficult to parse from a Euroamerican point of view. Accessible design cannot be disentangled from the political imaginaries that infrastructure and design propose.

Western discourse has frequently described democracy or political participation as inaccessible in a Russian context. By aligning their critique with this context, Russian dissidents mobilize images of inaccessible disability access, insufficient infrastructure, and the absence of good passage to demonstrate the ways in which the Russian state ignores and dismisses the quotidian needs of its citizens. The absence of blagoustroistvo (well-appointed construction) for these purveyors of inaccess stories without disability expertise is metonymic of an attempt to curtail the political agency of the Russian people through persistent inconvenience that dissuade political consciousness. Like the production of temporal inconvenience in socialist Romania, wherein the necessity of constantly waiting in line came to be understood as a way to stymy dissent, as theorized by Katherine Verdery, disrepair and slow renovation of public infrastructure in Russia appears to citizens as an intentional inconvenience that hinders the capacity for consciousness to develop and social movements to organize and emerge. Registering public complaint about infrastructural failure through the circulation of images of bad ramps, Russian citizens demonstrate that they understand this failure to be paramount to political repression. The familiar narrative that reminds others that happy endings exist elsewhere, in Hollywood, but not in Russia, is mobilized: the image of a man in a wheelchair on a ledge, unable to go anywhere, resonates with the nondisabled citizens as a metaphor for the absence of viable avenues for political action.

Although disability studies asks us to be wary of the mobilization of metaphor and tropes about disability in service of other topics, Russian resistance to autocracy holds no such allegiance. Inaccess stories about bad ramps circulate in global access friction as evidence that something, something profoundly public and essential, needs to be fixed.

In this way, global access friction describes a contemporary transnational conjecture in which accessible design circulates in local vernaculars and proliferates without interrupting ableist hegemony. Disabled people struggle to create islands of access, even as accessible design as a concept and rhetorical tool become available as a commonplace idea that conjures “are we there yet?” sentiments from nondisabled subjects. Even while my disabled interlocutors drew on endemic Russophone vocabularies to describe experiences of access intimacy and frustrations of inaccess, inaccess stories without disability expertise circulated, and captured the attention of Russophone counterpublics, who in turn reposted and reproduced images of inaccessible accessibility elements as a political complaint distinct from the disability advocacy movements. Returning to the example of our journalist, and his political critique communicated through the failure of accessibility renovations to provide meaningful access, I suggest that his attention to the inaccessibility of the built environment was both about the specificity of injustice faced by disabled people and also about the failure of infrastructure in general. His performance of inaccess, thereby, underscored the ways in which the discourse of disability access moves in friction as a term with different—but generative—stakes for different political actors.

Sergei observed that narratives end in a variety of ways. When I reflect on his commentary about happy endings, I’m struck by the ambivalence with which he imagined his future. In several instances, he struggled to imagine what his future might hold other than more of the same: playing music and watching movies in his room, helping his parents, and taking on piecemeal graphic design work. After growing up in the first post-Soviet generation, subject to the shifting political ground of the post-Soviet period, it was hard to know what kind of story he was living in. In our interviews, he was actively seeking clues about what kinds of futures and subjectivities might be possible. The political topography remained uncertain and was continuously shifting throughout the research and writing of this book. The terms on which access and inclusion could be discussed depended on geopolitical changes beyond Sergei's control. As he told me, he tried to live life in the moment, suspending concrete plans.

What Can Be Done?

So, what now? What do disability studies scholars and disability advocates do with the knowledge that this powerful tool—accessible design—has been coopted and circulated in ablenationalist displays? Or with the realization that accessible design presumes a tenuous kind of liberal democratic governance and that the implementation of accessible design relies on neoliberal global capitalist extraction to create patchwork access?

Invariably, ethnography as a research method sets out to raise and complicate questions. In this book I have tried to make a case for disability anthropology as a tool for advancing a robust global disability studies as a conversation that attends not only to what ought to be but also to what actually is in the world. What other kinds of inaccess stories circulate? What other endemic lexicons of access are simmering below the surface of the polished global vocabulary of barrier-free design? In what ways might these lexicons be liberatory, and in what ways might they be limiting? What kinds of metonymic meanings does accessible design, traveling in global friction, take on in other locations and linguistic repertoires? What happens when ramps are present but wheelchair-users are not? What happens when wheelchairs are present, but wheelchair-users are not? What kinds of disability experience and expertise are obfuscated by the fixation on accessible design that creates material infrastructure? What possibilities for political critique in repressive autocracy does metonymic communication offer? What can crip strategies for sustaining subjugated access vernaculars, and political potentialities therein, reveal?

I ask these questions not to suggest that disability studies situated in the global North/West should advance knowledge by extracting knowledge practices from elsewhere, but to encourage the expansion of a global disability studies that locates conversations about the political topography of disability as social difference beyond and outside of the Euromerican context. Just as global feminist scholarship has demanded that advocacy unfolds on manifold incommensurable terms, recognizing that the location of hegemonic capital in the institutions of the global North/West does not mean that those so empowered deserve epistemic primacy. Rather, following the queer feminist tradition, imagining a global disability studies means moving the center.

During my fieldwork and writing, the center has in fact moved in Euroamerican disability studies as a field. The disability justice movement in the United States and Canada has indelibly shifted the conversation about advocacy and scholarship. Disability Justice activists raised a profound critique of a rights-based disability advocacy paradigm that grew out of spaces and communities that called on legal structures to work for disabled people against ableism. Instead, the disability justice paradigm argues that legal rights benefit only the most privileged, and centers on the modes of survival created by poor, queer, and racialized disabled folks, in recognition that the settler-colonial neoliberal state is premised on their disenfranchisement through intersecting systems of oppression (Sins Invalid 2015). In tandem, a growing consideration of debility troubles the category of disability itself, resituating disability as a privileged identity based on access to social service and medical care, and a Euroamerican paradigm. Thinking in allyship with disability justice, and building on Jasbir Puar's work in this vein, we might ask what kinds of debility are not only ignored by accessible design but also perpetrated by the same regimes that create ablenationalist displays?

During my years of work on this project, disability studies in Russia (located in sociological gender studies or medical sociology) first seemed to find new strength, but then suffered setbacks, especially in terms of opportunities to be in conversation with global colleagues. Putin's reconsolidation of power limited the capacity of disability studies scholars in Russia to collaborate with foreign colleagues and funders, the global pandemic reduced travel and thus crosspollination of ideas, and the Euroamerican response to Russia's aggression in Ukraine further limited the ways that Russian scholars and activists could participate in global conversation or receive international attention (given a political climate in anglophone Europe and North America that is reticent to elevate the “Russian”). The opposition to Russian imperialism in Euroamerican scholarly conversations may lend more space in anglophone disability studies to Eastern European and Central Asian post-Soviet voices. Meanwhile, scholars working in the North American academy have made tremendous advances in history and cultural studies of disability in Slavic studies, including the formal establishment of a disability studies interest group in the Association for Slavic Eastern European and Eurasian Studies for the first time in 2022, new scholarly projects in Eastern Europe, and a new generation of graduate students who enter their advanced studies more familiar with disability studies paradigms than was typical in previous eras. Yet, as this book goes to press, new anti-DEIA rhetoric alleged cost-cutting measures from the 2025 Trump administration threaten the capacity for academic freedom to study, present, and publish on topics related to gender, race, sexuality, and disability.

Reflecting on this shifting terrain, it is clear that this book captures an ethnographic moment that was, in retrospect, fleeting: a period between the end of the immediate post-Soviet transition and the rise of a new era of geopolitical animosity marked by the 2022 invasion of Ukraine (foretold by the 2014 annexation of Crimea), followed by the destabilization of US foreign policy in Trump's second presidency. The fieldwork that I conducted in 2012 as a foreigner with a US passport in Russia would be impossible to carry out in 2025 as this book goes to press.

As I write this conclusion, disability advocacy communities in Russia continue to claim space in public discourse, to host film festivals, and to promote inclusive sports. At the same time, soldiers and civilians are disabled, displaced, and debilitated in the war in Ukraine and Russia. What new access frictions will arise as this new geopolitical catastrophe unfolds? How will the politics of disability politics shift yet again, dislodging new generative mismatches that propel different epistemological constellations of disability expertise?

Sergei's observations about film endings have stayed with me over the many years it has taken me to write this book. The question of what it means to be a main character in Russian or US movies (hero or geroi) suggests to me a consideration of the political imaginaries that scaffold the stories we tell about our experiences and the stories we consume about our societies. Sergei's musings seem tied to the capacity of a protagonist to take charge of their own fate, to claim a place in the tides of history. Throughout this book, I have sought to attend to stories and vernaculars of disability expertise in which disabled Russian adults play the role of protagonists, and to tell a story about disability access in global context while resisting dominant teleologies. However, irrespective of the extent to which I have managed to achieve these ambitions, in the process, I have come to the realization that the vernacular meanings of access remain available for cooptation and will continue to be coopted, circulating further afield on the friction of slanted and metonymic meanings, traveling beyond the control of the original bearers of access expertise, rasping in the turmoil of geopolitical change.