Activist affordances: How disabled people improvise more accessible worlds By ArseliDokumacı. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. 336 pp.

In Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Accessible Worlds, Arseli Dokumacı places disability at the center of affordance theory, along with chronic illness, pain, and disease. The concept of affordances, originally developed by ecological psychologist James Gibson, refers to “possibilities of action whose actualization depends upon the complementarity between the organism and its environment” (p. 35). Affordances are neither “out there” in the world nor located in the “eye of the beholder”; they emerge through interrelations. Dokumacı builds this fiercely interdisciplinary text around a critical limitation of affordance theory: it takes for granted the ease with which affordances get actualized. Activist affordances recognize and affirm “the micro, ephemeral, and performative acts/arts of world-making with which disabled people must literally make up, and at the same time, make up for, whatever affordances fail to readily materialize in their environments and their remoteness to perception” (p. 104). Dokumacı’s concept of shrinkage is key here. Shrinkage captures how disability diminishes affordances over time and in ways specific to potentially dissimilar conditions of impairment. Critically, however, shrinkage also sparks the creativity and improvisation that define activist affordances as such. Each instance of shrinkage “may require its own politics” (p. 69), an argument with theoretical and practical implications. Taking readers on an autoethnographically grounded, multisited journey through Turkey (Denizli, Istanbul), the US (Florida), Canada (Montreal), Denmark (Copenhagen), and the UK (London, North Wales), Dokumacı concentrates on the activist affordances forged by people living with rheumatoid arthritis. This focus emerges from their own lived experience and because people with rheumatoid arthritis are “nonparadigmatic people with disability” (p. 12). In popular imagination, in disability studies, and in activist circles, rheumatoid arthritis is not typically linked to disability, and some of Dokumacı’s interlocutors either decline to claim disability as an identity or do not have access to its framing as such. These tensions allow Dokumacı to employ “disability studies as methodology” (Minich, 2016). Rather than focus on what disability is or is not, or who is or is not disabled (debates that often rely on political, economic, and cultural conditions germane to Global North metropoles), disability (studies) as methodology instead concentrates on how claim about “normal,” and inequities governed through regimes of normality, impact marginalized groups. In part 1, “Shrinkage,” Dokumacı builds the theoretical scaffolding for an ecological approach to disability. It begins with a conceptual overview of relevant disability studies concepts and then introduces two core frictions: (1) between affordance theory and disability; (2) between disability and the shifting nature of impairment. Chapter 2 exposes “the ableism of affordance theory” (p. 59), which takes for granted an unmarked body, and retheorizes pain and disease in terms of shrinking or radically reconstituted affordances. Chapter 3 reorients understandings of ableism away from attitudes, ideas, or stereotypes toward the body. Using the experience of Jerome, a research interlocutor, in navigating the Montreal subway as a blind person, Dokumacı shows how emerging barriers reflect neither an inadequate transportation system, which is relatively accessible, nor indifference from fellow travelers, who can be quite mindful. The ebbs and flows of rush hour, however, change the affordances of the station and the crowd; brilliantly redeploying habitus, Dokumacı excavates ableism as normative embodied praxis. In chapter 4, Dokumacı situates shrinkage as part of ongoing “efforts to trouble (re: de-essentialize) the category of disability” (p. 88) and challenges disability studies’ reliance on a colonialist binary of human/nonhuman. As a condition of planetary crisis, shrinkage could serve as a potential impetus for nondualistic and nonanthropocentric disability solidarities. In part 2, “Performance,” Dokumacı delves into what follows from shrinkage (p. 100). Dialoguing with Elaine Scarry's work on pain as making and unmaking worlds, Dokumacı positions activist affordances as “afford-dances” (p. 111). The ephemerality of the dance in no way makes it less real or potentially radical. In chapter 6, Dokumacı combines photography, dialogue, and narrative to provide an intimate archive of activist affordances, which range from “how to wear a shirt” to “how to cook (or not)” to “how to stand up from a squat toilet.” Chapter 7 contemplates how activist affordances are made and remade through performance (p. 201). While normative affordances fix and calcify narrow use pathways, activist affordances “make matter give birth, laying bare its potential to afford otherwise” (p. 202). This generativity reflects the ethics of performance at the heart of activist affordances. In chapter 8, Dokumacı moves beyond a focus on individuals to examine how relationships enable—or impede—activist affordances. Chapter 9 reconsiders the temporality and materiality of activist affordances as culminating in disability repertoires, adapting this concept from performance studies scholar Diana Taylor (2003). Juxtaposing disability's shrinkage of the environment with its explosion of time (“crip time,” as articulated by disability studies scholar Alison Kafer [2013, p. 27]), repertoires enable the imprints of activist affordances to persist, make disabled life livable, and communicate this livability to others (p. 228). The conclusion transitions again from a micro to macro lens. Given the current state of planetary shrinkage, Dokumacı urges readers to heed the lessons of activist affordances as a blueprint for surviving—and perhaps thriving—our increasingly fragile future. The capaciousness of Activist Affordances will appeal to students and scholars interested in disability, chronic illness, pain, performance, visual ethnography, and autoethnography; it is also well suited for interdisciplinary audiences and courses. The book's division in two, and its generous use of section headings, make the length more manageable and student friendly. Dokumacı attends to questions of global North/South inequalities with needed nuance, grappling with the locatedness of categories like “crip” and even “disability.” Some readers, however, may want more ethnographic context and historical specificity to follow how the book's arguments traverse dramatically different environments and constraints. And while chapter 8 offers an important departure by focusing on relationships as affordances, students of kinship and gender may want further discussion of how affordances unfold—or don't—through webs of intimate conflict and hierarchy. These observations speak to Dokumacı’s generative, thought-provoking text, and it will be exciting to follow how readers “make up, make real, and make do with” this book's innovative contributions.

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