| Summary: | "Drawing on two visual ethnographies conducted in Turkey and Quebec, as well as autoethnographic materials, Activist Affordances unveils how disabled people imagine and bring into being more habitable worlds in the most micro of actions and the most fleeting of movements that Arseli Dokumaci calls "activist affordances". The book is full of visual sequences documenting these activist affordances: buttoning a shirt, peeling a potato, or prostrating for Namaz. Dokumaci argues that these improvised spaces of performance can enable survival in the least likely of circumstances by allowing their creators to make do with what they have. The social model of disability proposes that the built environment itself is what disables people: if we add curb cuts, corrective lenses, ramps, elevators, and ASL interpretation, access improves and people are no longer disabled. Yet this model is at odds with the experiences of those living with chronic diseases like chronic pain, depression, fatigue, and cancer, who experience what Arseli Dokumacı calls "shrinkage": a narrowing relation of body and environment that results in constraints, failures, and losses. Activist Affordances rethinks disability as the constriction of an existing set of affordances, or action possibilities, for a given body or bodies"--
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