How do you lift a glass of water to your mouth when your fingers and shoulders are impaired and inflamed? How do you put on your clothes or take them off, when your entire body is in pain? What do you do to cross streets when traffic ‘lights’ are not adapted to your needs as a blind pedestrian? In this talk, I argue that it takes an immense amount of ingenuity, labour and artfulness to get these seemingly simple daily tasks done, when the body/mind in question is sick, impaired, in pain, debilitated, mad or otherwise disabled. Drawing on two visual ethnographic projects conducted in Turkey and Quebec, as well as autoethnographic materials, I demonstrate how disabled people imagine and bring into being more habitable worlds in the most fleeting of movements and the most ordinary of everyday actions that I call “activist affordances”. 

If affordances refer to possibilities for action emerging from body-environment mutuality (Gibson 1979), I propose that we can think of disability as “shrinking” of the environment and so too of its existing affordances. Shrinkage might be evident for a person in a wheelchair facing a flight of stairs. But shrinkage happens in other less evident situations or at scales invisible to human perception.

It may be that a diabetic person can no longer benefit from the affordances of certain type of food. It may be that a person is in such pain or so depressed that she is not able to get out of bed. It may be that a pandemic hits and populations have to “quarantine” and go into “lock-downs” for months. While the causes of shrinkage vary, the space for action shrinks and the environment affords fewer possibilities of action regardless of cause, and I introduce the concept of “shrinkage” to name precisely this common ground and foster coalitions between disability and variegated states of living that may or may not be recognized as disability.

Shrinkage as constraint provides the ground for the theory of activist affordances. Because, as I will demonstrate by making analogies between the creative space of aesthetic performance and the performance of everyday life lived with disability, it is precisely under conditions of shrinkage, that “something else” of activist affordances happens. When the environment narrows down in its offerings, and when its materiality turns into a set of constraints rather than opportunities, the space of performance opens up and allows us to “make” that same environment afford otherwise. Drawing on my participants’ videotaped descriptions, I demonstrate how disabled people may dance the affordances of accessible worlds in their physical absence, and live disabled lives as “good” lives within a shrinking world of possibilities.

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