The cover for Access Vernaculars features a painting by artist Andrei Roiter, with text design by Cornell University Press. This is the second time I’ve used an image by Roiter for a book cover. The theatre chairs that appear on the cover of my first book are also from one his works.

For the cover of Access Vernaculars, I spent quite a bit of time searching contemporary artworks by artists originally from Russia and Ukraine. Several works of photography and painting were in the list I sent to the production team at Cornell University Press. One option was the image that appears as an illustration of the “second kind of inaccess story” in the Access Vernaculars Introduction. However, ultimately, I worried that this image, a photo of a person in a wheelchair on a ledge high above the ground, might be misread without the context explaining that it is an intentionally ironic contemporary artwork intended to circulate on social media.

Roiter’s image of a rolling red ramp on a dark green background stuck out to me and my editor for its combination of semi-abstract elements that make for a compelling cover, and it’s thematic conceptual link in the form of a ramp unusable for wheelchair access.

Interestingly, while Roiter’s archive does include paintings of several “disability things” (to use Ott’s turn of phrase), the image that we chose for the book cover is not specifically linked to disability.

Titled “The Red Waves” (1998, oil on canvas, 50x70cm), this piece depicts a ramp that rises, then falls, then rises again, in a series of waves, with little contextual information to place the purpose of such a design, a decontextualization which has the result of suggesting a kind of absurdity, even as the confident, painterly strokes leave no doubt as to what is depicted. In the background, text hovers over the sky of the implied painted landscape. Rendered in brushstrokes in a hue similar to the dark greenish-blue ground, Cyrillic text reads «формы знаков на моё пути из дома».  The text might be translated as “forms of signs on the path from my house,” a phrase that resonated with the poignant observation from my interlocutor, Anya, a powerchair user, who quipped, “I don’t need a ramp at the pharmacy if I can’t get out of my house!”

Of course, I knew that my own interpretation was distinct from Roiter’s original intention. When I wrote to his studio to inquire about usage rights, his assistant shared that The Red Waves is one of the few of his works that Roiter keeps hanging in his own home. He was kind enough to reply to my inquiry about the origin of the image.

The image comes from a snapshot I took of a minigolf course in a park. This painting is an example of my regular practice of defamiliarizing a banal site (or object) in order to see it as an abstract form. This allows me to see potential for other readings and poetic messages. For this piece, “The Red Waves” I associated the form with the dynamics of Russian history, with its high and low points.

– Andrei Roiter, personal communication, July 18, 2025

Reading Roiter’s email, I immediately recognized the rolling red ramp as part of a minigolf course, and appreciated, as he mentioned, the poetry that emerged through defamiliarizing the designed object.

His practice of defamiliarizing speaks to me as an anthropologist invested in the work of making the making the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Perhaps this elemental similarity between his painting practice and ethnography (as well as an affinity for gestural oil paintings) is part of what draws me to Roiter’s work. I’m very glad to feature this one of his images as part of the design of the Access Vernaculars cover.

The #CripRitual, a disability art exhibition co-curated by Critical Design Lab members Aimi Hamraie, Jarah Moesch and I (Cassandra) appeared as a live physical exhibition in two galleries in Toronto, Ontario in the winter-spring of 2022, with a season of accessible virtual events and an online virtual exhibition of the works to complement the exhibit. The exhibition asked artists with disabilities to imagine the ritual practices that sustain crip /disability /sick culture. Read more, including detailed descriptions of all artworks in multi-modal accessible forms, a virtual tour of the artworks installed in the Tangled gallery, and media coverage of the exhibition on the #CripRitual website. The curatorial team plans to keep the website live as an accessible digital humanities resource for teaching disability culture for approximately five years.

July 2, 2021

Emergent Pandemic Strategies among Disabled Adults in Long Term Care

An elegy for one disabled artist’s death from COVID-19 in Russia, as others seek alternatives to institutionalization.

In July 2020, Alexei Dymdymarchenko, Lyosha or Dym-Dym to his friends, an artist whose work I had been following, died of complications from the COVID-19 virus in St. Petersburg, Russia. His death, devastating for his community, is too easily characterized as one death among many stalking adults living in long-term care facilities. The pandemic has accelerated the slow emergency of disability incarceration affecting communities across the world. Anthropologists in Russia studying the question of deinstitutionalization are finding that the pandemic has shifted the possibilities for redesigning social care in postsocialism.

I learned of Dymdymarchenko’s artwork when I wrote to Sasha Ivanov, a curator and art studio manager in St. Petersburg, asking for samples of works by artists with disabilities for a gallery show in Toronto. I was immediately taken with Dymdymarchenko’s works. Untitled, they are typically an amalgam of seemingly random marks on the blank rectangles or European standard printer paper sizes. Ivanov described the work as “somewhere between sound art and performative practice” in a write-up for the international media art festival CYFEST, where the works were exhibited. Dymdymarchenko created each work by taking a bin of pastels (or crayons) and dumping it out over the paper, repeatedly, ceremoniously, as a tactile, gestural, and auditory process. In this way, each paper is a trace left over from a ritual sound performance, evidence of the repeated sound: the rush of small objects falling onto paper on a wooden tabletop. Dymdymarchenko himself was minimally verbal, and Ivanov typically represents him and other artists in the studio to the broader public. The studio itself is a program run by a nonprofit organization and housed in a small annex connected to a residential institution (called an internat in Russian) for adults with neurological and psychiatric disabilities near St. Petersburg.

I reached Ivanov via video chat for an interview about Dymdymarchenko’s passing and the broader impact of the pandemic on the studio community. Ivanov looked down for a moment, gathering his thoughts before describing Dymdymarchenko to me. He was, Ivanov recalled, light and willowy, tall and thin. He didn’t talk or hold conversations, but he had a unique kind of resolve and special focus and creative concentration in the studio that inspired others to consider their own work in new ways. He would sit quietly and turn the crayon bucket over, over and over again, with careful attention. […]

Read the rest of this article on the Anthropology New website.

The University of Toronto Scarborough is emerging as an exciting place to think about disability studies. I’ve been excited to be part of discussions in classrooms and between faculty, and I’m particularly looking forward to a few upcoming events this fall. The dean’s Great Explorations speaker series – a month of public lectures pitched to the broader community – this year highlights exciting disability studies themes, with talks by David Onley, Sean Lee, Anne McGuire, and me. And, the New Frontiers Seminar Series – a set of lectures to speak to faculty across disciplines and bring us together as a community will include a research talk by Dr. Nadine Changfoot of Trent University. These events might just be harbingers of a tipping point to come!