INTRODUCTION

Disability and Disability Anthropology

Disability, in anthropological terms, is a culturally contingent category that becomes meaningful through social worlds. A category must be understood as a set of ideas embedded in culture and history: Categories are how we understand the world as humans, and therefore, categories are cultural. The category of disability in one language may not match the category of disability in another language or, indeed, over time in the same place. Myriad social disagreements and legal battles emerge from the very question of what constitutes a disability in a given time and place, and what kinds of entitlements a disability ought to bestow. National and international taskforces work to create and revise legal definitions of disability, in the process nuancing who “counts” as disabled and who does not (Kohrman 2005; Washington Group on Disability Statistics 2017). This late-modern social practice of “making up” definitions works to establish firm boundaries between categories or kinds of people: normal and abnormal; able-bodied and mobility-impaired (terminology changes quickly every few decades); disabled and nondisabled; sighted, vision-impaired, and blind; deaf, hard-of-hearing, and hearing. Disability as a category is quite often bound up in sorting through definitions (Hacking 1986; Titchkosky 2011, 59). That is, whether some particular bodily or mental state fits into a legal, medical, or social policy's definition of disability is an enduring cultural concern of modernity. The question of whether or not a given person is “disabled” in cultural terms is in flux. The boundaries of these categories are complicated by the variations in vocabulary and sociomedical history across languages. The boundaries that these definitions create also vary across cultural and political settings and over time, and they are frequently contested and remade by the very people they seek to define.

The process of creating and revising legal definitions of disability to nuance who “counts” as disabled and who does not is a time-consuming and ongoing project that is never finished. Like other global identity categories that become meaningful for governance, human rights, and justice, the complexity of creating transculturally relevant metrics for capturing rates of disability in different global populations lay bare the fuzziness of the category (Adams 2016; Merry 2016). The UN committee tasked with defining disability for internationally standardized questionnaires, originally intended as a short taskforce group to convene for a couple of years, has now been meeting regularly for more than twenty years (Washington Group on Disability Statistics 2017). This social practice of defining the category of disability is undertaken at the national level in every nation that seeks to proffer a disability pension, a standard element of the modernist welfare state. Inevitably, some people who self-identify or are characterized by others as belonging to a category of disability in social life do not “count” as disabled according to complex legal definitions (Kohrman 2005). That is, the question of how disability is defined in a given time and place suggests as much or more about the cultural world as it does about the body that is ostensibly being described.

Furthermore, disability is not just a bodily state or an “identity” in the rote sense. Such a view objectifies the body, when in fact, we know that bodies are not just objects but also are our selves as sensing beings (Overboe 2016, 23); we live in bodyminds, in that our self-perception relies on the very apparatus (our senses) doing the perceiving. Moreover, cognitive difference, then, creates a set of problems for a discipline like anthropology that is premised on a shared social world. As Michele Friedner (2018) observes, the world as perceived is not stable between interlocutors or ethnographers, but rather is contingent on diverse embodied sensory experiences. Observations are filtered by sensorium cast with neurodiversity, pain, uncertain mobility, and varied auditory and visual perception. So, how then, should we study disability anthropologically, if it is at once a changing, manifold cultural category and complicated as a sensory experience of the world?

Thinking about how the concept of disability develops as a meaningful cultural category requires a particular approach to understanding what disability is as well as a model for thinking about how disability appears in the world. Categories come to live social lives of their own and are shaped through social practice by the people who claim these categories as part of their social identity. As Ian Hacking has argued, definitions and categories “make up” the existence of differences and of kinds of people, and, in turn, the bearers of these identities “make up” what it means to belong to these categories. As the sociologist Tanya Titchkosky writes, “It is in culture, in the midst of others, that disability is made; in this way, we are never alone in our bodies” (2011, 59). That is, we can only know the category of disability through comparison and through relationships among people, society, and the environment, a perspective on disability that Alison Kafer (2003) calls a relational model. A relational model of disability builds on the foundations of the social model of disability, which rejects the medical approach to disability that locates disability-as-difference as pathology belonging to an individual body. Instead, according to this model, bodies may have various impairments, but the disabling effects of the impairment actually come from elements of the social world (e.g., stigma and the built environment). Considering critiques that the social model is too reliant on the idea that impairments are not disabling and fails to fully capture intersectional considerations, disability studies scholars have sought other ways to frame a model of disability. Anthropologists tend to be wary of models of thought, given that it can be difficult to transpose static models across the diversity of human cultural relations and sociopolitical and economic ways of living. Instead, we might examine what work a particular category is doing in a given cultural setting.

I argue that disability anthropology is a specific scholarly conversation. In my formulation, disability anthropology has several characteristics. First, it overlaps with but is not limited to the questions that medical anthropology asks about how health, illness, and disability—and culturally located medical responses are shot through with socially and historically specific politics and power. Second, it is in conversation with the interdisciplinary field of disability studies (sometimes called critical disability studies) in terms of citational praxis, scholarly exchange, and changing political horizons. A defining characteristic of this discourse is a concern with understanding and undoing ableism, the historically and culturally constructed system of oppression that privileges nondisabled people and perspectives. Third, disability anthropology centers disability expertise as both an object of study and as an essential element of research praxis. One goal for disability anthropology is to understand disability expertise ethnographically as the specific knowledge about particular domains of embodied social life that come from lived experience of disability or proximity to disability. Some kinds of disability expertise may be thought of as shared knowledge passed down through disability culture. The project of naming and cataloging disability expertise is important for disability anthropology for two reasons: First, the ableism inherent in medical practice and charity models of disability have often denied the expertise of disabled people and have discursively constructed disabled people as passive recipients of care and pity, rather than as agentive creators and political actors. Second, anthropology has often implicitly excluded disabled people from ethnography studies, by focusing on cultural norms or on average members of a given society, or simply by following the ableist assumption that disabled people are socially marginalized—at the edges rather than the centers of social networks.

Within disability studies as an interdisciplinary field, anthropologists and sociologists work in conversation with historians, literature scholars, cultural studies scholars, activists, and others. Disability anthropology is well-suited to produce global ethnographic accounts that trace disability, ableism, and access as they function in different cultural contexts around the world (Ginsburg and Rapp 2013; Ingstad and Whyte 2007; Friedner 2015, 2022; Nakamura 2006, 2013; Phillips 2011; Mol 2002; Stiker 1990. This approach contributes to interdisciplinary conversations in transnational disability studies and US studies (e.g., Mitchell and Snyder 2019; McRuer 2018; Kim 2011, 2014, 2017; Erevelles 2011; Hunt-Kennedy 2020) and likewise offers critiques of the normative frame of Euroamerican disability studies pioneered by Black disability studies and disability justice advocates (Puar 2017; Schalk 2018, 2022; Bell 2017; Berne 2020) and anthropologists (Ralph 2014). Where disability as a category of difference has gained a certain primacy in some political movements, scholars and activists have called for more attention to the ways in which debility, injury, and sickness are the product of historical systems of oppression, colonialism, and imperialist violence. The ethnographic approach revolves around the project of working to center the voices of interlocutors, and thereby, the subjectivity of diverse disabled people.

More specifically, a disability studies perspective, here taken up as a manner of doing disability anthropology, suggests looking “back at society” from the point of view of people with disabilities (Linton 2005) and considering what it is about society that could be altered to create a better fit for disabled people. Rather than follow the bodies of disabled people as objects of research, the project of disability studies is instead to follow the ways in which ableism, or multiple ableism, works to produce disability as a category of exclusion, separate from a dominant “norm.” As such, I understand disability as a marker of ableism: a category that comes into being and becomes useful, apparent, or unavoidable in certain situations in which the latent social system of ableism is made apparent. As Titchkosky (2011) argues, we can learn much by considering when disability appears. That is, scholars have demonstrated that disability is a category of the modern welfare state; therefore, its invocation is inherently political and it serves as a modality by which people claiming disability call for social benefits as a political class. The use of disability as a concept may also be implemented as a tool to justify and implement segregation and social exclusion by designating some bodyminds as “too much”—that is, to assert that a bodymind ought to be designated as disabled is to produce the characteristics of that person as somehow in excess of the norms of social inclusion.

Just as feminist studies have investigated patriarchy, disability studies scholars have often sought to study ableism. Where feminist studies encountered the limits of the universal in terms of the myriad, incommensurable ways to be “woman” globally and to configure iterations of patriarchy, the very category of disability has been unstable over time and across cultural contexts, and ableism, when considered globally, is better described as ableisms. This is especially evident when we compare the variegation of words for disability and disability diagnoses.

Vernaculars of Access

The concept of disability access has emerged in multiple social contexts. It is a technical-legal concept defined in laws, codes, and standards. Underlying the content of those standards are the folk concepts developed collectively by activists in disability advocacy movements who describe how disabled people move, communicate, and thereby participate socially and politically. These frameworks are informed by and contest medicalized concepts of rehabilitation technology as well as by ideological principles of citizenship and political participation. In this way, “access” is a concept borne of the twentieth-century modern national state, which specifically links public infrastructure with the rights of citizenship. The codified normative concept of access is continuously enacted and interpreted by disabled people and activists in daily life. The word access thus circulates—separated from the fuller phrases accessible design—as a shorthand for technosocial infrastructures of justice. So-called disability access may then dovetail, oppose, or be conflated with other kinds of access. By this, I do not mean to detract from the important work of negotiating the ways in which access needs are shaped by multiple intersectional identities (e.g., Hamraie 2020). Instead, I want to observe the way that—perhaps as an artifact of the strategic essentialism of the disability rights movement in North America—a distinct definition of access (of or pertaining to the social and political participation of disabled people, especially in relation to movement through space and the design of digital or physical infrastructures or consumer products)—emerged. Because the civil and human rights logic of “access” in (neo)liberal democracy requires that disabled people be identified as a protected class (or minority group), this identity must be artificially flattened into a classifiable (frictionless) entity, thereby belying internal diversity. As a result of this classification effort, however, to proceed as a legal category, disability is discursively separated from other identities (e.g., race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, language) even though this discursive separation does not reflect the lived experience of intersectional identity. Similarly, and this is the point I am getting at, disability access has thus emerged in contemporary North American English a rhetorical category that seems to be separate from other valences of justice. It had to be defined as such so that it could be legally codified in the particular legal systems of the United States and Canada. In considering disability access cross-culturally, however, the utility of distinguishing disability access from other valences of justice—material, economic, religious, and so on—may or may not be a rhetorically useful strategy. Disability access, as such, may not appear as a distinct endemic conceptual classification, or, it may appear as a translated phrase connoting a variation on the Euroamerican concept that moves in friction. In sum, vernacular descriptions of justice for disabled people may or may not align with the Euroamerican conceptual domain and political rhetorics.

To trace the knowledge practices of access in Russia, in this book, I follow fellow anthropologist Arseli Dokumaci's question (2018, no page), “How can we think of access, not as a monolithic entity but as a multitude of meanings and valances that may not always neatly cohere?” That is, to approach an ethnographic understanding of access, I pay attention to how access and its synonyms and attributes appeared in Russian daily life and how they emerged in my conversations and interviews with both disabled and nondisabled interlocutors. I hold in the frame the fact that this Russophone access (dostupnost’) exists in a global friction, following Tsing's (2005) meaning, as a word that is a container for a multiplicity of meanings that do not necessarily align, and whose differences may actually propel the concept into wider use.

I argue that an ethnographic examination of disability access or accessible design must attend not only to normative definitions and their genealogies but also to vernaculars of access. By vernaculars of access, I mean the myriad ways that culturally situated actors interpret, make sense of, and deploy the idea of access and the material objects of accessible design.

So what is the normative Euroamerican notion of access? Clarifying this will be necessary to distinguish how this concept moves in global friction, creating un/productive mismatches with other vernaculars of access. In daily life, the idea of disability access is typically glossed with simplistic symbols (e.g., a white figure in a wheelchair on a blue background; a handrail; a curb painted a particular color), but accessibility as a concept is a complex and evolving category. The meaning of access may vary from one user to another, across translations, or between contexts. Access is many things. It is the inclusion of minority or stigmatized groups in social and political life. It an unhindered physical and material movement through space. It is a relational concept of interactions between complex networks of heterogeneous actors. These core ideas of disability access build on precepts developed through disabled people's advocacy and activism in design and architecture and extend into political advocacy and the dynamics of sensory and social life.

As has been widely observed, the access needs of one person may not match and may impede the access needs of another. Rather than pursue a final, universal idea of access, critical access studies sets out to challenge the notion that access is a “self-evident good,” instead investigating the politics of how “access-knowledge” comes into being (Hamraie 2017, 13). Instead, this critical crip approach seeks to understand access as a knowledge practice. Centering knowledge practice in the definition of access is an easy method for “asking who is served or empowered by such knowledge” (Hickman and Serlin 2018, 135). In Western Europe and North America, an “access industry” (Imrie 1996, 97) of for-profit business organizations has emerged to capitalize on the need for accessibility expertise and material infrastructure. As the idea of accessible design circulates globally, so too does the commodification of disability expertise. I argue that as access objects and knowledge become commodified and, like other commodities, travel through global supply chains, they create problems of uneven distribution; mismatches between production, distribution, and consumer desires; and friction. For example, access knowledge may be simplified and extracted to circulate in the form of checklists or objects, decontextualized from the activist cultures of care that created them. Commodified accessibility objects circulate independent of access knowledge.⁹ This has led to inaccess stories like the ones that Galya and Nina in which an access ramp leads to a store with aisles too narrow to accommodate a wheelchair user. But a simple critique of this type of inaccess story as an instance of “bad access” misses the nuance of the culturally specific bricoleur practices, and the ways in which friction and mismatch may actually be generative, raising the profile of accessible design as a concept, commodity, and practice.

Attending to vernaculars of access, I contend, offers an important way to trace how these specific mismatches allow the concept of accessible design to travel in friction. I use the word vernacular in conversation with a tradition of ethnographic attention to vernacular architecture, which can be understood as architectural designs and structures created by laypeople working in specific local contexts outside of formal architectural expertise and practice. To be clear, vernacular (as a metaphor from vernacular language extended to material structures) does not mean non-Euroamerican, and it does not refer to some lesser rung on a civilizational teleology. Indeed, there are architectural schools and design expertise in locations cast by global hegemony as South/East. Instead, my use of vernacular refers to bricoleur manners of working, reworking, tinkering, and adapting: interpreting and making-do with what is available using the ingenuity of lived experience rather than formal training. I use the word vernacular to highlight the fact that I am not interested in, for example, the establishment of institutional rubrics for conferring accolades of expertise about disability access in Russia. Instead, I want to trace the ways that people with lived experience talk about access, literally, vernacular in the sense of common discourse. Attending to vernaculars of access ethnographically brings to the surface the situated knowledge and disability expertise—as well as the national, public, and mediated discourses about access—that may be missed by more prescriptive efforts that focus on defining access as normative and universal.

I consider the specific ways in which Russians in Petrozavodsk talked about access during my fieldwork from 2010 to 2016 to argue that access is both a metaphor and a literal expression of agency and of social worth or neededness. I argue that for adults with disabilities in Petrozavodsk, access is described as a state of affairs that is peaceful (spokoino) and comfortable or convenient (udobno). For my interlocutors as well as for a broader Russophone constituency (a primarily nondisabled public) access denoted an idealized normal (normal’no) and the imagined not bad (neplokho) that is at once an aphorism of sarcastic perseverance and a refusal to accept the livability of the status quo. Underpinning these iterations is a core concern with the livability of what the disability activists who created the British social model of disability called the built environment and what early Soviet avant-garde designers understood in Marxist terms as the material conditions of daily life. Like many complaints about infrastructure, complaints about (in)access as a result of the configuration and maintenance of physical objects in the world are deeply tied to how citizens understand the responsibility of the state to provide the minimum conditions necessary to lead a normal daily life.

This approach to accessibility requires setting aside the transnational definition of disability access, as laid out, for instance, in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD), as one modality among many. The UN CRPD's history suggests that its creation is a testament to diversity global advocacy, and its subsequent reach and derivation make this document a significant nodal point of friction between multiple global localities. I resist the common mode of understanding disability access in terms of checklists or minimum standards, although these checklists and minimum standards certainly make up one domain of access as a knowledge practice. Instead, I think of access, and encourage readers of this book to also think of access, as “an interpretative relation between bodies” (Titchkosky 2011, 3).

Anthropology Of Design: Technologies of Productivity and Ontological Pluralism

Studying vernaculars of access requires considering not only infrastructures and designs as they circulate in the world but also how to approach the domain of access as a social practice. Thinking about design anthropologically, we can observe that design, like access, refers to many things, including a set of practices or a particular process of concerted creation. To design an object, system, or process is to elaborate on a model for how something might work in the world, particularly in relation to human action. A doorknob, a staircase, a keyboard, or the interface in which you are reading this book (whether a book or a screen) is a designed object. Design, then, is both a sociocultural practice, and a “relational configuration between people, spaces, and things” (Murphy 2015, 32). The conceit of design—as opposed to art on the one hand and construction on the other—is that, as a discipline, design considers both form and function to optimize relations that its output creates in the world.¹⁰ Design, in seeking to make the world better, Keith Murphy argues, always connotes an imagined good. To think with design, Arturo Escobar (2018) tells us, is to think with the question of how the world might be otherwise. Accessible design, then, as an idea, is a utopian hope for a different kind of relationship between disability and the world.

There are many ways of approaching the concept of design, and many modes of doing anthropology, and thus several intersections of critical praxis that may be understood in relation to design anthropology (Murphy and Wilf 2021). Perhaps most relevant to the present work, conceptualizing the anthropology of design as a subfield of ethnographic investigation opens the possibilities for understanding design as a field of human practice. Thinking of design as such “provides an ideal ground both to document the processes by which certain ‘designed’ objects are transformed into ‘culture’, and to refine the conceptual apparatus required for understanding how such processes function more generally” (Murphy 2015, 217). Defining design thus leads to the quandary of which kinds of human activities might fall into this category of design, to attend to how the boundaries of design expertise are established and enforced, and to determine how some designs or designers are thus rendered good, and others, bad (Murphy 2015, 2021).

This anthropological approach to design necessarily begins from a reckoning with the perceptions about the concept of design garnered through daily life. As global consumers, many of us think of design as an attribute of goods that we consider for purchase, or, if we pause to give it a bit more thought, as a kind of process that leads to the particular designed elements of our favorite devices and things. We are aware that certain brands produce their value through an attention to design—from Apple electronics to Nike sneakers—by which we understand this “attention” to be a concerted consideration of both the materials used to construct the item and the way that these materials are formed into a functional object. In this respect, at least, the colloquial use of design (and even designer fashion) shares a core element with the kernel of design logics taught to aspiring professionals in design school: that good design is a balance between form and function. At the same time, twenty-first-century consumer products often tend to suggest that even though all products are in fact designed (i.e., their shape, materials, and the plan by which they are made and manufactured was considered and detailed by someone with an intention for the execution to create a particular object or outcome or process), the design labor that goes into many of these products is obfuscated, and good design is equated with luxury, wealth, and value. Because good designs work better than bad designs, we might also agree that to have the financial capacity to access luxury designed objects also suggests a kind of ease and convenience that comes with both the disposability of the broken and the means to support maintenance work. In some contexts, a given form comes to carry a semantic meaning derived from its original function, even where the form no longer serves this purpose: the prestige conveyed by false columns on a building's façade, for example.

As we encounter objects in the world, we may or may not think of them as crafted, and as such, we may or may not imagine that human intention is present behind the form and fabric of their existence. Yet all cultural objects are designed, and all tools used by humans are cultural objects. In this sense, we must also differentiate between vernacular design and professional design. Vernacular design is the work of the layperson reorganizing the quotidian world (have you considered the order of the books on your bookshelf, designed a cataloging system; or purchased and installed a hook to hang a piece of artwork or to hang your bag or coat or bathrobe?). That is, vernacular design is all of the making and rearranging that we do with only our standard cultural training, but without thought for the expert training. Professional design is the work of a professional, usually in the sense that one has been trained into a particular practice of expertise and hired to do design work. In this way, professional design is tied to the concept of creating value—both for the design and for a client whose product or company will benefit. This distinction of vernacular and professional relies on cultural logics of expertise that may be contested.

The anthropology of design as an area of scholarly investigation dovetails with recent disciplinary conversations about infrastructure. Sociocultural anthropologists argue that tracing infrastructure ethnographically reveals that public elements of the built environment constitute a material iteration of the (modern) nation-state (and thereby modernity). Popular attitudes about infrastructure create a discursive arena in which to consider, critique, and assert complaints about a modern state's responsibilities to its citizens (Larkin 2013). Hand in hand with an anthropology of bureaucracy, the attention to infrastructure and the administrative processes by which it is made, maintained, and neglected make up an important domain of everyday political practice in early twenty-first-century human societies. In the context of the liberal democratic nation-states that make up the hegemonic global North/West, bureaucratic infrastructures have come to be understood, through the concerted lobbying efforts of disability activists and resulting legal measures, as a valence of sociopolitical inclusion and exclusion.¹¹ Moreover, accessible infrastructures are defined by the United Nations as a human right that nation-states ought to provide for their citizens. In this geopolitical context, infrastructural failure both literally results in and may be discursively mobilized metaphorically to represent sociopolitical exclusion of disabled citizens, and, by extension, a failure of the modern nation-state's liberal democratic contract.

Central to all of these ideas, however, is the observation that to design is a fundamentally human practice. To design something is to bring the materials into the world of human cultural logics by finding and refining its value to be or do, to appear and distinguish, or to create effects and provoke responses. All of these effects rely on the symbolic world of culture; without shared meanings, design cannot be valued, and without value, one design cannot be distinguished from another. At the same time, this property of valuing good design means that some designs may be more valued by one constituency than by another. The aims of what an object, building, place, space, tool, or virtual interface ought to do (and how) may be valued differently.

In an altogether different approach to considering the politics of design anthropologically, Escobar (2018) argues that we might consider liberatory political thought as an opportunity to design the world differently, not only in the sense of different leaders or forms of government, but ontologically differently, in the sense of what it means to be together in a world. That is, the ontological terms of reality are defined by the categories we think with, which shape the kinds of political futures that we can imagine. Escobar asks: How might we redesign our sociopolitical taxonomies to decolonize the future and live differently? Which ontological worlds are understood to be real and belonging to the present (rather than orientalized and belonging to the past)? Escobar argues for a world of multiple ontologies and for provincializing the Euroamerican worldview's grasp on ontological possibilities. Escobar's concept of ontological design speaks to this book's consideration of global access friction. Global friction arises in the mismatch between cultural ontologies linked by systems of exchange in global capitalism. Thus, an interrogation of ontological design following Escobar might lead us to ask which ontological ways of being together are understood as “accessible design” by capital, and which are cast aside as antimodern (i.e., belonging to the past)? What political possibilities for disability inclusion do these hegemonic ontological designs foreclose? And what other liberatory political possibilities might emerge by provincializing Northern/Western cultural ontologies that imagine liberal modernity (and its concept of rights-based inclusion) as the only viable path to the sociopolitical liberation for disabled people?

As a fundamentally human practice, design can also be understood to serve human interests, but, which interests? Design for whom? Whose bodies and lives are supported or excluded? How do the assumptions built into the physical world preclude or limit the participation of some bodies? In the “Crip Technoscience Manifesto,” Hamraie and Fritsch write, “Disabled people are experts and designers of everyday life. But we also harness technoscience for political action, refusing to comply with demands to cure, fix, or eliminate disability” (2019, 2). This is part of the authors’ “anti-assimilationist position that disability is a desirable part of the world” (2019, 2).

Although many disability studies texts have imagined communism as a liberatory alternative to capitalism, in which ableism is so potently manifested in relation to expectations of productivity and labor that marginalize those disabled people deemed less productive, I argue that the productivist and nationalist logics of design were prevalent (if different) in both Soviet and liberal democratic twentieth-century modernity (Hartblay 2014). Scholars of North American disability history show that design is a paradigm of modernity deeply tied to production and productivity and to the capacity of the human body to contribute to economic output (Serlin 2015; Hamraie 2017). In the mid-twentieth century, nations (as economic units) harnessed the labor power of their citizens and demonstrated their economic prowess on the world stage through innovations in design that improved productivity (Murphy 2015). In some examples, these innovations in productivity sought to harness the “lost” labor power of people with particular physical impairments. That is, the ways in which design, as a technology of productivity, did not necessarily leave out disabled people, but in fact sought to recognize and harness the labor power of the disabled citizen. Ironically, in spite of the many differences between the Western capitalist and Soviet ideological modes of considering work and the citizen, the thrust of technological advance was profoundly shared. Indeed, exhibitions of advances in the design of domestic consumer objects became a display of soft power (Murphy 2015, 28). In some social democratic nations, government investment in the design of consumer objects in the mid-twentieth century became as an arena for the advancement of social welfare more generally, in that good design might create more productive, more hygienic spaces, and, therefore, citizens. Murphy (2015, 39–41) argues that the politics of design in twentieth-century Sweden were tied up in complex attributions of agency that imagined some designs as being more or less democratic and socially equitable than others. At the same time, Soviet constructivist design imagined domestic design as an arena for the implementation of communist ideals; constructivist thinkers argued that aesthetics are influenced by and create political consciousness (Romberg 2018).

Today, post-Soviet Russia has been cast by the West as a failed project of modernity. Throughout this book, I argue that discursive evidence for this Russian failure of modernity is sometimes expressed through representations of design failures. Global media hegemony reproduces this perspective, building on generations of European depictions of Russia as backward and antimodern. Moreover, considering the specter of design as a symbolic expression of development and modernity, contemporary Russian design logics produce a logic of twenty-first-century assimilation that is familiar across global contexts. Thinking of Russia not in the former Cold War lens, but through the neocolonial lens of development economics, we can place 2010s Russia in its alphabet row among the BRICs: Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Although the evidence in this book focuses on Russia, I suggest that images of failed design circulate as a critique of national governments capacity for development, for example, stories of the unjust and poorly implemented Brazilian Olympic Village. In this reading, we consider the role of design as display—that is, a way of presenting a desired progress toward development (Irani 2019).

Accessible design—from the iconic white-on-blue icon to the shapes and aesthetic markers (e.g., ramps and handrails) characteristic of accessible design—comes to stand for the look of modernity. That is, the parti, or aesthetic characteristics, of accessible design announce particular political assumptions or aspirations. Murphy offers the concept of cultural geometry to describe the way that sociopolitical ideas come to be associated with the particular aesthetic characteristics of a school of design practice. The aesthetic characteristics that make up a cultural geometry are the expression of aesthetic preferences that index ideological claims about the relationship between form and function; particular kinds of lines (curved or straight), angles (sharp or rounded), and material finishes convey particular political leanings. Like the transnational futurism of international airport design, elements of accessible design taken together when clean, well-executed, and well-maintained communicate desirable mobility, imagined individualism, prosperity, and a kind of global professionalism. That is, accessible design as a cultural geometry becomes a container onto which ideas about a normal modern future are projected. Likewise, states mobilize urban infrastructure as a vernacular for the expression of sociopolitical values, economic power, and geopolitical prowess. Throughout this book, I argue that in Russia in the 2010s, the cultural geometry of globally recognizable accessible design features in the built environment carried a symbolic association with an array of ideas about a modern, democratic, middle-class European public sphere.

Global Access Friction: Provincializing Accessible Design

In the chapter opening, I introduced the concept of global access friction, in which the idea of disability access as a design practice and associated objects moves “in friction” across global cultural contexts. In common parlance, when something is said to be “in friction” it means that something is difficult, hindered, or likely to encounter challenges.

Anthropologists mean something specific when we use the word friction. Tsing proposed that we may think of friction metaphorically, as a productive force that occurs and produces heat or complexity. Things and ideas, Tsing argues, do not flow freely from one context to another. Tsing suggests that rather than think of cultural differences or the mismatches in the ways that given objects or ideas are passed from one cultural sphere to another as an impediment or imperfection, it may be useful to think as these mismatches and tensions of interpretation or meaning as productive friction. Or rather, where conventional wisdom reads mismatches or misunderstandings as troublesome, Tsing takes a more neutral perspective: The friction generated by the mismatch may be useful. This is one of the many ways that contemporary ethnographers talk about conflicting ontologies (e.g., Ries 2009; Mol 2002). One way to read Tsing is to understand friction as a critical intervention into popular narratives about capitalism and globalization, in which objects, concepts, and values are imagined to “flow” from a Euroamerican “center” to “all corners of the globe,” suggesting unhindered movement into otherwise-empty landscapes and localities. Instead, she argues, the ways that supposed universals like prosperity, knowledge, and freedom move between localities is rife with points of traction, tension, and heterogeneous confluence—friction. With this concept of friction, Tsing crafts a possible solution to the problem of how to “do an ethnography of global connections” (2005, xi) in a time when anthropology can no longer imagine temporally and culturally bounded cultures. Historically, ethnography was characterized by an attention to small communities and to the local and specific, but Tsing takes this concern with the specific and moves it forward into a locale threaded with global connections. To do so, Tsing proposes “to focus on zones of awkward engagement, where words mean something different across a divide even as people agree to speak” (2005, xi).

Friction, in Tsing's usage, is a metaphor drawn from the science of physics: Although friction is colloquially understood as difficulty or resistance, in physics, friction is also a productive and necessary force in understanding how objects move in the world. Many things we take for granted, like tires gaining traction to propel a vehicle forward on a road, rely on the force of friction; when the vehicle hits a patch of ice, a low-friction surface, the wheels spin without traction. In this way, when we think of how the idea of accessible design circulates, we can consider that it may be propelled not only by alignment but also by mismatch.

Things that circulate:

1. bodies

2. minds

3. words

4. ideas

5. images

6. materials

7. toxicities

8. remedies

9. therapies

10. expertise

11. support/protection

12. stories

13. design styles

14. discursive formations

15. political logics

Thinking of friction as useful or generative also helps us to understand how to find meaning and create value in moments of mismatch and failure. The stories that circulate about disability access globally move in friction; the importance and meaning of one story may be very different to different stakeholders. Images and stories of inaccess circulate. Inaccess stories are often stories about friction: some thing or category has traveled in friction, and the roughness that is creating that friction is drawing attention, concentrating affect, and generating narrative.

Circulation is linked to productivity and value. The images that circulate in the example of discursive inaccess stories that opened this chapter are examples of making an inaccess story valuable. As Friedner (2015) has argued, technologies move in ways that produce disability and access industries as valuable to others, including nondisabled people and the nonperson collectors of capital known as corporations. The artist gained something of value—attention on social media—by mobilizing the value of images of accessible design in Russian popular culture. Because global friction in Tsing's usage is another way to talk about cultural hegemony in the context of global capitalism, this term, global access friction, is a useful way to get at the way that capitalist logics of exchange incentivize the movement of accessible design as both a discursive idea and a style of material infrastructure. Indeed, the contrast between the two types of inaccess stories I introduced suggests the layered complexity of designed objects and accessible design and the social relations it indexes.

Other Frictions and Russian Ablenationalism

In contrast to the concept of global friction in anthropology, the term access friction circulates in North American anglophone disability community discourse to describe situations that occur when people have opposing access needs: a blind person sharing space with two deaf people using sign language, for instance, as Jessica Watkin (2022) describes. The term operates as folk theory that describes both moments of disjuncture and that produces generative possibilities for mutual care and creative solutions to do things otherwise. By conceptualizing access friction as at once a problem rooted in mismatch and potentially (although not always) generative, disability community theorists imagine access as a process of intersubjective care that is constantly enacted and negotiated (Watkin 2022), rather than as a property of an object or artifact. Like global friction, access friction starts from mismatch and looks for unanticipated possibility.

Simultaneously, design studies scholars use the concept of design friction to describe “the ways in which tension, conflict, or disagreement” in the design process “allowed for […] prototyping alternative possible futures and questions rather than problem solving for today's challenges” (Forlano and Mathew 2017, 20). In this usage, design refers to the iterative process of making, and friction refers to the way that members of design teams or stakeholders in consensus-building participatory design iterate new ideas by leaning into problems and disagreement as a generative way to develop novel designs (in the case of Unsworth et al., specifically, participatory design for public policy and urban technology). The design anthropologist Laura Forlano and Anijo Mathew (2014) argue that too often collaboration seeks consensus before moving forward. Instead, they suggest, prototyping without consensus allows problems and controversies to be part of the frame of the design brief. Following Chantal Mouffe (2003), Forlano and Mathew suggest that design prototypes need not solve a problem (as the concept of a design problem in design thinking suggests), but instead might raise questions, or serve to draw attention to unresolved dilemmas (2014, 17). Like the concept of access friction in disability arts circles, in this case, the concept of friction draws attention to liberatory opportunities exposed by mismatch.

In identifying global access friction, then, I am calling for attention to how accessible design travels and identifying the need to trace how the concept of accessible design moves in friction in different geographic and cultural contexts repositions. Thus, I examine accessible design not as a universal, but rather as a provincial vernacular design logic borne of a particular historical moment in North American and Western European political life. Another way to phrase this move is as a call to provincialize accessible design. This usage of provincialize (Chakrabarty 2000) refers to a scholarly methodology of subjecting the colonial metropoles mores, practices, and attitudes to the same scrutiny the colonizer uses to view the colonized. Instead of a predestined universal, metropolitan practices are cast as local, specific, and diminutive. This effort does not diminish its real impact on disabled people's lives, or the ingenuity, expertise, and radical political potential that disability rights and disability justice movements respectively have unleashed. Rather, it is a call to attend to the local specificity of disability access thinking, of political rhetoric, and of infrastructures of access.

Global access friction can also be understood in relation to the notions of ablenationalism and cripwashing. Following Jasbir Puar's concept of homonationalism as a conceptual framework that asks “why a nation's status as ‘gay-friendly’ has become desirable in the first place [and] how we are conditioned by and through” this conjecture (2013, 336), thinking with ablenationalism in turn means asking why a nation's status as disability-friendly, or, accessible, has become desirable in the first place. That is, following Puar, ablenationalism is the analytics of power. Mitchell and Snyder theorize ablenationalism in terms of state policies that treat disability “as an exception” in a manner that “valorizes norms of inclusion,” especially in the context of neoliberalism's characteristic “celebration of a more flexible social sphere” that produces good feelings for the cultural normative by offering “evidence of an expanding tolerance” in a manner that fuses nationalist sentiment with evidence of disability inclusion (2015, 13). Where the United States imagines itself to be a “global leader” on disability rights, this expectation easily dovetails with widespread media attention in the North American press to Russian homophobic rhetoric and legal measures unfolding during the 2010s. Thus, an assumption of Russian failure to provide disability access and inclusion follows. Where Russia has persistently doubled down on homophobic policies and rhetoric, developing new ways to instrumentalize political homophobia, with devastating consequences for queer people in Russia (Healey 2018; Kondakov 2022), the very same Russian state has explicitly enacted its own policy of ablenationalism, celebrating disabled athletes and artists, and creating or proposing ostentatious highly visible elements of accessible design. This seeming discrepancy perhaps tells us more about the global hegemony of North American logics of minority rights in conceptualizing disability and LGBTQ politics globally than it does about the Russian state in the 2010s. The project of elaborating the specificity of Russian homonationalism and ablenationalism, however, offers an important frontier for scholarship and advocacy, to which this book offers a minor contribution. I argue that expressions of cripwashing—or perhaps access-washing—are an important valence of global access friction and access vernaculars in Russia, propelling accessible design into the Russian public sphere—even as actually disabled people continue to live in poverty on impossibly small pensions, and elements of accessible design form tiny islands of access in a sea of inaccessible infrastructure.¹²

In the evidence presented in this book, the Russian Federation's move to sign the UN CRPD and systematically enact federally funded programming designed to include disabled people in rehabilitation programs unfolds at the same time the Russian state was erecting Potemkin ramps in government and commercial spaces while leaving home spaces and educational spaces unrenovated. I argue that this represents an ablenationalist slight of hand, whereby the the Russian Federation deployed the symbolic meaning of accessible design to project an image of itself as a nation interested in inclusion and in the rights and well-being of its citizens, while failing to actually provide meaningful inclusion for all but the most assimilated, productive, and upstanding disabled citizens.

Accessible Design in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia

A core argument of this book is that the Euroamerican concept of disability access moves in friction in the region of Russia where this fieldwork was conducted. Tracing how this friction gains traction requires attending to the specificity of historical concepts of the body and the politics of infrastructure in Russia. How do the historical specificity of Soviet political advocacy and complaints about social issues continue to affect the way that the needs of people with disabilities were conceptualized discursively? What vocabularies and vernacular logics of disability access and inclusion continue to influence post-Soviet disability access discourse? To interpret ethnographic evidence in relation to these questions, it is useful to situate the ethnographic and disability history of post-Soviet Russia.

The disability history of Russia is a growing academic area. At present, the existing studies have sought, first, to map in broad strokes the prerevolutionary, revolutionary, prewar, postwar, and late-Soviet periods; second, to address the experiences of particular interest groups based on materials in specific archives, including deaf people and war veterans (e.g., Edele 2008; Galmarini-Kabala 2016; Shaw 2017); and, third, to develop contemporary disability studies in/of Russia in the social sciences (e.g., Phillips 2011; Rasell and Iarskaia-Smirnova 2013; Borodina 2020, 2021, 2023). As this book goes to press, recent historical scholarship seeks to describe a distinctly Soviet socialist disability advocacy practice that has contributed to the constitution of a global disability advocacy movement in the twentieth century (Galmarini-Kabala 2024). One important thread of scholarship has considered representations of the body in Soviet culture (Krylova 2001; Kaganovsky 2008, 2024; Iarskaia-Smirnova and Romanov 2013; Kolarova and Winkler 2021). As an anthropologist, I am reliant on historians to produce secondary source studies of archival material, and my interpretations of these sources support and shape my ethnographic analysis. Sometimes this means working backward to imagine a historiography that does not yet exist. I have sought elsewhere to develop, first, a detailed discussion of the language used to talk about disability in Russia over time (Hartblay 2006); and, second, an account of how the moral concept of productivity has emerged (Hartblay 2014; see also Mladenov 2015, 2018).

While recent work on Soviet Blind and Deaf unions attend to disability advocacy (such as: Galmarini Kabala 2024; Shaw 2017), many scholars suggest that the Soviet Union largely suppressed or avoided politically legitimating widespread disability access discourse related to physical disability. However, scholars agree that injured World War II veterans enjoyed a special moral status that facilitated some public discussion of adaptive design and infrastructure. Additionally, changes to the Soviet legal definition of disability in the 1970s to include childhood disability and disability from birth (previously Soviet disability benefits only referred to adult capacity to work), and anecdotal stories, suggests that advocacy and organizing was taking place. In the 1970s, mobility access activism led by non-veteran disabled citizens emerged, and was suppressed by Soviet authorities as a dissident movement for human rights (Bernstein 2024; Dale 2013; Phillips 2011; Fefelov 1986). Most significant for the purposes of this book, it is necessary to differentiate Soviet disability history from the normative example (in anglophone disability studies) of Euroamerican history of disability access and adaptive design.

Design histories of disability activism in the twentieth-century United States identify individualism and private property as core assumptions underpinning disability access advocacy, these values are in direct contradiction to Soviet collectivism and communist ideals. Soviet disability imaginaries were distinct from their Euroamerican counterparts, as evidenced in representations of disability and public discourse. The logics of citizenship, care, and governance specific to the Soviet state led to both the stigmatizing and repression of the discursive position of disability in official culture (to the extent that a Soviet official once declared to an international audience that there “are no disabled peole in the USSR”! (Phillips 2011)), and therefore to creative activist strategies with disability advocacy vocabularies. At the same time, Soviet design, architecture, and rehabilitation projects created an unusual context in which people with physical and mobility impairments and their family members advocated for themselves. These strategies included campaigns for accessible sports (Iarskaia-Smirnova 2001) and first-floor apartments or accessible cars or working prosthetics for war veterans (Edele 2008; Tchueva 2008; Bernstein 2013, 2015). These strategies can be held in contrast to the deaf-organizing strategies described by Claire Shaw (2017). The categories of disability access and barrier-free environments emerged from Euroamerican twentieth-century activism. Subsequently, these categories were taken up, and developed transnationally, most explicitly in the context of global disability rights as defined by the UN CRPD and related agencies (e.g. United Nations Enable 2004). In this way, local, specific categories developed by social movements in Berkeley, California, and in the United Kingdom, as well as in North Europe, came to stand as universal categories.

In considering disability and access cross-culturally, a persistent source of friction arises from the overlaps and incommensurability between the translation of terms. The Russian word invalidnost’ provides a cogent dictionary translation of the word disability, and indeed, both terms describe a category of the welfare state based on medical-psychiatric expert assessment and compensated through redistribution. The social meanings that adhere to the category, however, are not stable across these cultural locations. This is also true for the word dostupnost’, or access, which like the English term has long been used in a general sense and only recently has been applied to questions of disability and design.

To look for accessible design in the Soviet Union is an anachronism, in that the term and concept did not exist in Russian until the 1990s. Yet, by defining the concept of accessible design as a moral claim about the kind of collective relations that should be possible in relation to disability, we can observe how this moral claim circulated in Soviet culture, ideology, and material design. Even when the concept of accessible design per se did not exist, we can examine how ideologies of design and moral claims about disability and sociopolitical inclusion appear or are occluded.

Attitudes about design in general in contemporary Russia bear some traces of Soviet design ideology. The Soviet Union came into being as a political project of ontological design, seeking to imagine and create a better world, one defined by a vision of socialist utopia that required remaking relations between people, objects, and labor. This led to novel forms of design thinking—for example, the constructivist movement of the 1920s adapted avant-garde philosophy art practice as a way to think about how reshaping the material world by building new structures and exposing the working class to art and culture might reshape the political consciousness of individual workers and thereby the working masses. This movement led to a new awareness of the built environment as part of political life and was aligned with theoretical ideas at the time that imagined society as an organism in homeostasis with its environment (as in Friedrich Engels's extension of biological metaphors to society). This notion of the body-as-formed-through-labor emerged along with the political ideology that glorified labor (e.g., awarding medals of honor to shock workers who exceeded quotas) and a cultural politics that imagined the body as developing and growing as one with the structures their labor constructed (as in a well-known early Soviet poem about a man whose spirit soars and body grows metonymically with the iron beams he forges; cited in von Geldern 1995; see also Golubev 2020). In this way, to restructure the world was to remake the human form of the laborer. This dialectical materialist consideration of the role of the sociomaterial environment in shaping malleable human subjectivities was especially present in Lev Vygotsky's theories of child development (now familiar in Western education and psychology). Perhaps less well-known in the anglophone world was the influence of his theories on the founding of a Soviet discipline known as defectology, which sought to address childhood disability through social and material modalities (Knox and Kozulin 1989). This logic led to a popular Soviet political stance that disability is the result of poor social conditions (and thereby the assertion that there could be no disabled people in the Soviet Union). Stalinist repression beginning in the 1930s suppressed avant-garde art and architecture in favor of a style known as Soviet realism that sought to represent the purported glory of what the Soviet Union might bring about, immortalized in the form of statues of large, strong, robust citizens. Scholars have noted how the Soviet realist–idealized human form produced a representation of near superhuman citizens and erased the many injured, ill, and disabled members of the Soviet population (Iarskaia-Smirnova and Romanov 2013; Kaganovsky 2008). Design ideology in the Soviet Union continued to shift following the end of World War II, when war veterans and the aftermath of war brought debility and impairment into the public eye and popular culture (Dunham 1989; Edele 2008; Phillips 2011). Veteran movements and state projects created new opportunities, such as modern apartments with indoor plumbing and centralized heating, and mobility vehicles Soviet similar to to the small cars distributed to veterans in the United Kingdom and Europe. Unlike Western private enterprise, however, the planning and design for these innovations came from centrally planned social projects. The 1950s and 1960s brought a focus on domestic objects and a new consideration for the convenience of daily life to Soviet design practice. Late-Soviet experiences of scarcity, lack of available choices, and shoddy quality in consumer products undermined citizen trust in centrally planned design and manufacturing.

Anticommunist Western messaging about the Soviet Union imagine the political “ideology” of the USSR as a kind of totalizing, top-down authoritative manner of forcing citizens to think in a particular way; however, the concept of ideology had a different meaning in Soviet Russia, and historians have long argued for attention to the creative ways that Soviet citizens claimed agency and worked within the discursive limits of the Soviet state. The revolutionary socialists who launched the Soviet political experiment thought of ideology in a philosophical sense—that is, in terms of the Marxist understanding of the way that individual political consciousness is formed, in which ideology is dialectically informed by human action in the material world. This historical grounding in Marxist historical materialism informed three generations of social thought in the Soviet Union. The anthropologist Anna Kruglova (2017) argues that the lasting effect of Marxist ways of thinking and describing social phenomenon—not only during the Soviet era but also after—can be understood as everyday Marxism, a kind of casual and colloquial manner in which the secular cosmology of Marxist-Leninist thought remains salient in contemporary Russian conversations and casual discourse. By this, Kruglova does not mean to imply that contemporary Russians are intentionally invoking Marxist frameworks, but rather, that sedimented layers of history that have shaped political subjectivity and approaches to the problems of daily life. In this way, traces of Marxist ideology remain important for understanding how contemporary Russians make sense of the world, and the generational logics of politics and change.