Paper short abstract:

Interactive table installation with print materials, medium-size posters, and projected web exhibition.

Paper long abstract:

Access in the Making (AIM) Lab is an anti-ableist, anti-colonialist, and feminist research lab based in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). Making and doing remains central to AIM’s ethos and activities that engage questions of disability, access, environment, and world-making through ongoing creative experimentation that refuses technosolutionism. We invite participants to engage with AIM Lab's members and diverse projects including: 1) Designing with access – from its physical lab space construction to its logo and website design, AIM is radically rethinking design by positioning access as methodology and core element of the creative progress, rather than a retrofit. 2) Protocols, values, and manifesto – a co-authored series of guiding documents for working together including: our horizontal governance, how to make our events, websites, and communication accessible, etc. 3) Air, River, Sea, Soil: A History of an Exploited Land – an online exhibition produced by AIM where six artists from the SWANA region were paired with AIM members to develop a new mode of audio-description that we call “paired description”. 4) Mobilizing Disability Survival Skills for the Urgencies of the Anthropocene - a series of research-creation projects exploring how disability knowledges can inform the rebuilding of societies amidst rapid environmental decline and the shrinking of habitable worlds. 5) Citational politics - From our “#CiteYourGrannies” stickers to “AIM reads” sessions, we challenge extractivist academic citational trends with a curated citational politic that values multiple knowledges (including those that have historically been undervalued in academia, and those produced outside of it) and modes of knowledge-making that subvert academic ableism.