Websites as Welcome Part 2: Access and Inclusion Champions

Five zines stand upright on a white table, made from sketches, collage, and text, they are colourful. Their titles read : “Access, Disability Futures, Affordance, Conflict, and Cross-species (de)bility”. A person in a maroon shirt sits behind the zines and wears a black mask. A pair of white hands rest in the right-side of the image.
Zines are a creative method our team used to think about access and inclusion.

This FEELed Note was written by Emma Carey, Research Affiliate with the Enhancing Access and Inclusion in Environmental Humanities Research Practice Project, in collaboration with FEEled Lab Director Astrida Neimanis.

Through our access and inclusion project, we searched for best practices on 25 labs’ websites. During this process, it became clear that some labs stood out as “champions” of access and inclusion. I want to tell you more about three of these champions: Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), Access In the Making Lab (AIM), and Critical Design Lab.

The Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), led by Dr. Max Liboiron, is a plastic pollution science research lab. They use feminist, anti-colonial approaches to uphold their values of “humility, equity, and good land relations” (CLEAR, n.d.).

CLEAR (n.d.) is exemplary for using protocols that are in line with their lab values “rather than leading with good intentions” (as they put it). These are step-by-step guides for various situations lab members might encounter, including how to make an apology, how lab meetings are run, how author order for articles is discussed, and how their lab values are chosen.

Protocols can be useful in ensuring everyone shares expectations for how to handle a given situation and how lab values are actioned. CLEAR’s (2021) protocols are available in their Lab Book. I spent a number of hours reading and rereading through the rich material to be found there. Thank you CLEAR for sharing what you’ve learned so generously!

CLEAR uses their website as online documentation for projects, so it’s easy to learn from them. One of my favourite quotes from Max Liboiron (2021) on the difficulty of accessible labs is: “The ethical/justice/inclusion issue isn’t attracting underrepresented students: it’s retaining them by supporting them to flourish on their terms.” It’s a great distillation of why approaches to access need to be about more than accommodations. (And why websites as welcome signals – the focus on this fieldscan – can’t do the work of access and inclusion on their own!)

A hand with a chunky ring holds a green zine page titled “Access”. The official definitions of access are handwritten, with some portions covered over with text cut from magazine. The zine reads, “C1300: A coming on or attack of illness, emotion Linnes, and huge pooles, or such. C1384: low bottomes, fedd with sprynges, feeling access, ‘an axcess of soule’ but onlye recesse of waters.”
Definitions of access leave much to be desired. In this zine, a team member from our access and inclusion project creatively reinterpreted these definitions.

The next champion is Access In the Making Lab (AIM), led by Dr. Arseli Dokumaci. AIM (n.d.) is an “anti-colonial, anti-ableist, feminist research Lab focused on issues of access, disability, environment and care”. Their website also includes many protocols, developed based on inspiration from CLEAR’s work. Importantly, they also have a protocol on “Accessible Website Design” (AIM, 2022b) that details some of the nitty-gritty details of margins, fonts, colours, and alt-text.

As a disability justice lab, AIM’s (2022a) approach to access is to engage with it “creatively, critically, and curiously, rather than legally, institutionally, and retroactively” (p.7). One of my biggest learnings from Arseli comes from how she writes of access as joy. We have also strived to incorporate this in our project! Thinking and making access can be community-building, inspiring, and fun.

A hand holds a pink zine page. On the page is a sketch of a hand holding a paper coffee cup with the text “Affordance: ‘An action possibility shared by the reciprocal properties of the organism + the environment’. Arseli Dokumaci, 2023.”
Arseli’s (2020; 2023) concept of affordances was generative to our team’s thinking on access as a process.

The third champion is Critical Design Lab (n.d.a), an arts and design collaborative “centered in disability culture and crip techno-science”. It is led by Dr. Aimi Hamraie, a disabled designer and design researcher. Their website has a great variety of available protocols and in-depth blog posts that describe the work and values of Critical Design Lab.

One post discusses Black Lives Matter. This is not just a statement of solidarity, but a description of tangible anti-racist commitments the lab makes. One of my favourite commitments is “we affirm the value of human life over property … questions of who lives and dies from COVID-19 reflect hierarchies of valued life that were designed by slavery, colonialism, and eugenics […] that find manifestation in ableist calculations of productive and valued life” (Critical Design Lab, 2020). This commitment is inspiring, as it it brings together history, theory, and practice, as well as the mundane but vital business of everyday protocols for lab life. Critical Design Lab also specifically calls in universities as sites of stolen Indigenous Lands.

For the fourth time, I’ll mention protocols, which indicates how important I found them to be! Critical Design Lab (n.d.b) has protocols on how they make their podcast, on leading remote dance parties, on slowing academic time, on teaching during COVID, and on accessibility mapping. Overall, their protocols tend to feature how they conduct their projects rather than the day-to-day running of the lab.

A pink zine page has hand-written and collaged words from a magazine. It reads “Everything needs to change. But instead … SHOPPING, MARKETS. What did it take to get here? is the person wrong? Is the space wrong? AFFORDANCE shrunk? limited?”. Affordance is circled in red.
Built-spaces impact people’s (in)ability to access a place

Thank you to all three of our champion labs for putting so much time and effort into your websites! We (the FEELed Lab Access and Inclusion Team) have learned so much from them and can’t thank you enough.

And a closing note from Astrida: Reading over and editing this fantastic two-part blog series on “Websites as Welcome” by Emma now, at the conclusion of our own project, reminds me how much we have been inspired by the practice of others, adopting and adapting many of the insights we have gleaned. It also reminds me how much work we have to do on our own website! This includes sharing some of the practices and protocols that are implicit in our work now, but should be made more explicit. What more can we share, as a sign of welcome to others? Please send us your suggestions!

References

Access In the Making Lab [AIM]. (n.d.). What AIM is/is not. https://accessinthemaking.ca/what/

—. (2022a). Accessible website design. https://accessinthemaking.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/AIM-Accessible-website-1.pdf

—. (2022b). Access in the Making (AIM) Lab Manifesto. https://accessinthemaking.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/AIM-Manifesto_March2024.pdf

Dokumaci, A. (2023). Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds. Duke University Press.

—. (2020). People as Affordances: Building Disability Worlds through Care Intimacy. Current Anthropology, 61(S21), S97–S108. https://doi.org/10.1086/705783

Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research [CLEAR]. (n.d). About. https://civiclaboratory.nl/

—. (2021). CLEAR Lab Book: A living manual of our values, guidelines, and protocols. Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. https://civiclaboratory.nl/clear-lab-book/

Critical Design Lab. (n.d.a). Critical Design Lab is a multi-disciplinary arts and design collaborative. https://www.criticaldesignlab.com/

—. (n.d.b). Critical Design Lab Protocol Index. https://www.criticaldesignlab.com/protocols

—. (2020, June 2). Critical Design Lab Statement on Design Commitments to Abolishing White Supremacy. https://www.criticaldesignlab.com/blog/anti-racist-critical-design

Liboiron, M. (2021, December 30). Starting CLEAR, maintaining CLEAR. CLEAR. https://civiclaboratory.nl/2021/12/30/starting-clear-maintaining-clear/

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