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Is society reachable for all?

NEW PROJECT investigates promises of accessibility for persons with disabilities. Associate Professor David Wästerfors has together with Kristofer Hansson at the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences and Hanna Egard at Malmö University, Faculty of Health and Society, received a research grant from FORTE for a project on Accessibility and its Resistance. Everyday deviations from spatial and social practicability for persons with disabilities.

Today’s society harbors a range of promises of accessibility. Buildings and rooms should be adapted; public service, leisure activities and information are supposed to be reachable for all. Governments, the EU and UN strongly defend progressive disability politics. Still researchers and citizens point out negligence, exceptions and complications. Barriers and stigmatizations are reproduced daily, often quite subtly. This project aims at explaining everyday processes that underpin social and cultural inertia in the societal work for accessibility. The researchers want to specify and clarify recurrent situations at which spatial and social accessibility turns crucial, and analyze how norms of accessibility are neutralized in these situations.

How are exceptions, deviations and anomalies formulated, motivated and reproduced in relation to today’s accessibility norms?

David Wästerfors personal page.