My second book, Access Vernaculars: Disability and Design in Contemporary Russia is in production for publication fall 2025 with Cornell University Press. What a road it’s been!
Access Vernaculars observes that both disabled people and nondisabled people in Russia recognize and point out instances of poorly executed accessible design in the built environment. The book argues that the popular interest in images of failed accessibility ramps and other similar features circulating on the Russian internet in the 2010s can be understood as a general critique of the Russian state, pointing out hypocrisy in false façades of access, and practices therefore considered critiques of Russian ablenationalism. At the same time, the text traces how disabled people in one Russian city narrate their own experiences of navigating an environment rife with performative accessibility layered over pervasive inaccess and ableism. Through sustained ethnographic attention to the stories that disabled people tell about experiences of access and inaccess, Access Vernaculars examines local Russophone vocabularies that people with mobility impairments use to describe passage through the built environment. In addition to terms translated from global disability advocacy discourse, disabled interlocutors also used terms inherited from previous generations of Russophone political advocacy, that have been largely ignored as part of the lexicon of disability politics in contemporary Russia. The book calls for a critical global disability studies that contends with a de facto Euro-American hegemony in disability advocacy movements, and attends to the ways that vocabularies of disability access travel in friction, taking on dynamic and unexpected meanings in transnational sociopolitical contexts. Finally, the book asks how disability advocacy movements proceed in the context of ablenationalist cooptation.
