Doctoral Dissertation Research: Designing Access for Disabled People. Negotiating Barrier-Free Environments

Disability affects large swaths of the global population but is variably defined and operationalized, affecting a broad range of issues, from identity, to accommodation, access, and equity. This doctoral dissertation project leverages unique natural experiments in cities that are both retrospectively and prospectively designing barrier-free spaces to understand how variation in the experience and understanding of disability impact the implementation of accessible spaces as they are rolled out in different contexts. Contributing to urban studies, anthropology, and disability studies, the investigators provide new materials to consider the effects of prospective and retrospective design on inclusion and access. This project supports a graduate student’s training and shares its findings broadly with academic and non-academic audiences and stakeholders. This research project uses a comparative lens to inform how different stakeholders interpret, understand, and enact access. In two cities promoting barrier-free environments, the investigators use a variety of synthetic ethnographic and archival methods to engage three related questions: (1) Whose expertise determines how barrier-free is defined and implemented? (2) How do people with heterogeneous disabilities engage with barrier-free environments? (3) How do regional politics impact the valuation of expertise and variable experiences of barrier-free environments? By understanding access from a comparative perspective, this project will help to inform cutting-edge issues in scientific disability studies, urban planning, political anthropology while informing key debates on identity and inclusion. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.