Access Vernaculars:
Disability and Accessible Design in Contemporary Russia
By Cassandra Hartblay
An ethnographic monograph tracing disability access stories told by disabled people, and by mobilized for alternate political purposes by nondisabled people in 2010s Russia.
Available now from Cornell University Press.
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About the book
Access Vernaculars explores moments when accessible design fails. Observing how both disabled and nondisabled people in Russia recognize and point out poorly executed accessible design in built environments, ethnographer Cassandra Hartblay traces how disabled people in one Russian city narrate experiences of pervasive inaccess, and interprets popular images of failed accessibility as critiques of the Russian state and ablenationalism. In the process, Hartblay asks how disability advocacy movements proceed when ablenationalism co-opts accessibility and calls for a critical global disability studies that pushes back against Euro-American hegemony.
Through the stories disabled people tell about access and inaccess, this book examines local terminology used by those with mobility impairments to describe the built environment—a unique lexicon combining translated terms from global disability advocacy with Russophone words inherited from generations of political advocacy. These ethnographic accounts demonstrate the ways vocabularies of disability access spread in friction, taking on dynamic and unexpected meanings in transnational sociopolitical contexts. Access Vernaculars presents a global perspective on the intersection of critical disability studies and sociocultural anthropology.
Adapted from an oil painting by Andrei Roiter
Praise for the Book
Access Vernaculars is solidly researched and engagingly written. Cassandra Hartblay provides a thought-provoking contribution to critical disability studies, both in general and in the Slavic context.
– Claire Shaw, author of Deaf in the USSR
Cassandra Hartblay deftly moves across scales, spaces, and languages to demonstrate the importance of access vernaculars in specific spaces and times. From the vantage point of Petrozavodsk, a city in Northern Russia, we learn how global frictions around disability access materialize and how both disabled and non-disabled Russians make sense of access failures and institutional failures more broadly. In this eagerly awaited and beautifully ethnographic book, Hartblay insightfully argues that it matters what registers and words are used to talk about access.
– Michele Friedner, University of Chicago
Access Vernaculars is a groundbreaking ethnography of access, disability, and design that pushes the boundaries of global disability studies. Refusing simplistic North-South or able/disabled binaries, Hartblay introduces ‘global access friction’ and ‘inaccess stories’ as incisive analytic tools for understanding the messy, often contradictory ways that accessibility is imagined, implemented, and lived. This is required reading for anyone interested in critical disability studies, design anthropology, and the global politics of infrastructure.
– Jasbir Puar, author of The Right to Maim and Terrorist Assemblages