Organizing for Accessibility & Mutual Aid

A participatory workshop with our current exhibiting curator Carmen Papalia
Tuesday, November 17th  3-5 pm

In this growing landscape of non-option institutional support services, those with diverse and complex needs are routinely disempowered by the systems that they rely upon in order to maintain their basic health and well being. This deeply-rooted oppression plays out through schools, hospitals, cultural institutions, policing organizations and through the various arms of government, making ones effort to claim agency a strategic, high-stakes intervention. However, what if ones access was defined by an open, collective process, would the systems that we rely upon become accessible to multiple publics as needs change and as institutional entities evolve? What would the tenets of an open model for access be?

On Tuesday, November 17, 2015, artist Carmen Papalia will facilitate a participatory workshop on the topic of organizing for accessibility and mutual aid. Sharing a selection of his related writings and socially-engaged research, Papalia will lead participants in defining their access needs and preferences as a means of laying the groundwork for self-organized communities of care—a necessary first step toward realizing accessibility as an open cultural practice through which we can claim the support that will empower us to thrive.