Building Access

Building Access
Author: Aimi Hamraie
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 479
Release: 2017-11-01
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1452955565

“All too often,” wrote disabled architect Ronald Mace, “designers don’t take the needs of disabled and elderly people into account.” Building Access investigates twentieth-century strategies for designing the world with disability in mind. Commonly understood in terms of curb cuts, automatic doors, Braille signs, and flexible kitchens, Universal Design purported to create a built environment for everyone, not only the average citizen. But who counts as “everyone,” Aimi Hamraie asks, and how can designers know? Blending technoscience studies and design history with critical disability, race, and feminist theories, Building Access interrogates the historical, cultural, and theoretical contexts for these questions, offering a groundbreaking critical history of Universal Design. Hamraie reveals that the twentieth-century shift from “design for the average” to “design for all” took place through liberal political, economic, and scientific structures concerned with defining the disabled user and designing in its name. Tracing the co-evolution of accessible design for disabled veterans, a radical disability maker movement, disability rights law, and strategies for diversifying the architecture profession, Hamraie shows that Universal Design was not just an approach to creating new products or spaces, but also a sustained, understated activist movement challenging dominant understandings of disability in architecture, medicine, and society. Illustrated with a wealth of rare archival materials, Building Access brings together scientific, social, and political histories in what is not only the pioneering critical account of Universal Design but also a deep engagement with the politics of knowing, making, and belonging in twentieth-century United States.

Restricted Access

Restricted Access
Author: Elizabeth Ellcessor
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2016-03-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1479867438

How reconsidering digital media and participatory cultures from the standpoint of disability allows for a full understanding of accessibility. While digital media can offer many opportunities for civic and cultural participation, this technology is not equally easy for everyone to use. Hardware, software, and cultural expectations combine to make some technologies an easier fit for some bodies than for others. A YouTube video without closed captions or a social network site that is incompatible with a screen reader can restrict the access of users who are hard of hearing or visually impaired. Often, people with disabilities require accommodation, assistive technologies, or other forms of aid to make digital media accessible—useable—for them. Restricted Access investigates digital media accessibility—the processes by which media is made usable by people with particular needs—and argues for the necessity of conceptualizing access in a way that will enable greater participation in all forms of mediated culture. Drawing on disability and cultural studies, Elizabeth Ellcessor uses an interrogatory framework based around issues of regulation, use, content, form, and experience to examine contemporary digital media. Through interviews with policy makers and accessibility professionals, popular culture and archival materials, and an ethnographic study of internet use by people with disabilities, Ellcessor reveals the assumptions that undergird contemporary technologies and participatory cultures. Restricted Access makes the crucial point that if digital media open up opportunities for individuals to create and participate, but that technology only facilitates the participation of those who are already privileged, then its progressive potential remains unrealized. Engagingly written with powerful examples, Ellcessor demonstrates the importance of alternate uses, marginalized voices, and invisible innovations in the context of disability identities to push us to rethink digital media accessibility.

Reassembling Scholarly Communications

Reassembling Scholarly Communications
Author: Martin Paul Eve
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 473
Release: 2020-10-20
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0262362864

A range of perspectives on the complex political, philosophical, and pragmatic implications of opening research and scholarship through digital technologies. The Open Access Movement proposes to remove price and permission barriers for accessing peer-reviewed research work--to use the power of the internet to duplicate material at an infinitesimal cost-per-copy. In this volume, contributors show that open access does not exist in a technological vacuum; there are complex political, philosophical, and pragmatic implications for opening research through digital technologies. The contributors examine open access across spans of colonial legacies, knowledge frameworks, publics and politics, archives and digital preservation, infrastructures and platforms, and global communities.

Access to Power

Access to Power
Author: Joan M. Nelson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 484
Release: 2017-03-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1400885973

Joan Nelson elucidates the implications of this rapid growth and concomitant poverty for politics. Unlike many scholars who have sought an all-encompassing theory to explain the political behavior of the urban poor, Professor Nelson emphasizes the complex variety in the economic, social, and political circumstances that influence this behavior. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Charles II and the Politics of Access

Charles II and the Politics of Access
Author: Brian Weiser
Publisher: Boydell Press
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2003
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781843830207

Charles II's use of access to his person as a political tool was a feature of his reign. At first he believed this access was an important part of uniting the kingdom, but later he controlled it as a means of manipulation, of both supporters & opponents.

The Politics of Black Empowerment

The Politics of Black Empowerment
Author: James Jennings
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2000-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780814323182

During and after the recent Los Angeles riots, many were asking where the effective leaders of urban black Americans were. Here Jennings (political science, U. of Massachusetts) traces the history of black political activists since the late 1960s, and weighs opinions that blacks are becoming disenchanted with or absorbed into white electoral politics. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Political Economy of State-Business Relations in Europe

The Political Economy of State-Business Relations in Europe
Author: Rainer Eising
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2009-06-02
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1134038968

The book analyses how business interest organizations responded to the challenge of European integration and delivers important insights into major characteristics of EU governance and policy-making.

The Politics of Gay Rights

The Politics of Gay Rights
Author: Craig A. Rimmerman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 490
Release: 2000-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780226719986

The contributors to this volume thoroughly investigate the politics of the gay and lesbian movement, beginning with its political organizations and tactics. The essays also address the strategies and ideology of conservative opposition groups.

The Political Economy: Readings in the Politics and Economics of American Public Policy

The Political Economy: Readings in the Politics and Economics of American Public Policy
Author: Thomas Ferguson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 505
Release: 2021-02-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1315495791

The Political Economy is ideally suited as a supplementary text for courses in American government and politics, policy studies, business-government relations, and economic issues and policy making. It integrates selections from the very finest new and classical works of political and economic analysis, by distinguished scholars, into a comprehensive overview of the American political system.