“I am used to being extremely patient because I’m forced to be”: the affective politics of accommodation for disabled archivists
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Archives—repositories that store, organize, and give access to historical materials—produce a constellation of affects for both the people who use them and work within them. This article, drawing on data collected through semi-structured interviews with 12 disabled archivists in Canada and the United States, focuses on how disabled archival workers experience, manage, and perform emotions while navigating work-related access and accommodation in archival institutions. The ineffectiveness of traditional systems of individual accommodation—which sometimes forced them to disclose their access needs or, alternatively, feel pressured into denying their own needs—produced complex emotional responses among participants. Many spoke about the emotional toll of requesting accommodations, while others described their exhaustion and refusal to engage with such processes. Yet, participants highlighted how collective (rather than individual) approaches to access transformed the affective experience of access towards ease and empowerment. Centering this affective reality for many disabled archivists, this research echoes the growing body of research and theory around access labor, while also adding focus on the affective debt of archival access that occurs through accommodations processes—both an internal indebtedness, where one “borrows against” their patience and energy to survive, and an external indebtedness, where one is required to “pay” in gratitude, vulnerability, and being nice in order to be deserving of accommodation. We draw attention to how the very people who facilitate access to historical documents are also navigating their own access—performing additional forms of labor to manage inaccessible, precarious, or hostile work while also imagining access otherwise.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".