Access Vernaculars: Disability and Accessible Design in Contemporary Russia

Access Vernaculars explores moments when accessible design fails. Observing how both disabled and nondisabled people in Russia recognize and point out poorly executed accessible design in built environments, ethnographer Cassandra Hartblay traces how disabled people in one Russian city narrate experiences of pervasive inaccess, and interprets popular images of failed accessibility as critiques of the Russian state and ablenationalism. In the process, Hartblay asks how disability advocacy movements proceed when ablenationalism co-opts accessibility and calls for a critical global disability studies that pushes back against Euro-American hegemony.

Through the stories disabled people tell about access and inaccess, this book examines local terminology used by those with mobility impairments to describe the built environment--a unique lexicon combining translated terms from global disability advocacy with Russophone words inherited from generations of political advocacy. These ethnographic accounts demonstrate the ways vocabularies of disability access spread in friction, taking on dynamic and unexpected meanings in transnational sociopolitical contexts. Access Vernaculars presents a global perspective on the intersection of critical disability studies and sociocultural anthropology.

Cassandra Hartblay is Associate Professor in the Department of Health & Society at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and graduate faculty in Anthropology and Centre for European and Eurasian Studies. She is author of I Was Never Alone.