4 Break Rank

Kelly. When we seek to hold an accessible event at an inaccessible venue, we must often make creative, corrective adjustments to our environment. Back in March 2019, when I was invited to speak at Anne’s institution as part of the University of Toronto’s Disability Studies Speaker Series, the event organizers showed up to find that the button used to open the accessible door at the main entrance of the building was broken (Figure 11). I was there to speak about crip technoscience, engaging stories of how disabled people hack, tinker, and otherwise make the world more accessible and hospitable for disabled people through politicized technoscience, design, and DIY intervention and disruption. Crip technoscience, in turn, builds disability community, culture, and kin. Recognizing that the broken door, as disabled kin, could not simply be fixed in the few short hours before the talk, we worked with this alteration to maintain our shared space—people guiding people, people holding open doors. This labor, this care, this form of collectivizing the risk and anticipating, rather than abandoning, those who may come, facilitated the sharing of space among people who sustain each other, nurturing and growing a community that seeks to sustain many in return.

This is an example of the social and political relationships of disabled kin. As Ruha Benjamin (2018, 64) states: “Reorienting ourselves toward kinship not as a precursor but as an effect of social struggle denaturalizes what kinfulness means and how to enact it.” Making disabled kin helps us attend to the relations that sustain us and our interdependency. While accessibility is so often framed as a technical practice—a door-opening button that either functions or fails to enable access—interdependency reminds us that the very possibility of an accessible door depends on an expansive set of relations. From planning, designing, sourcing, building, connecting, maintaining, repairing, and more, it is not the technical object that enables access, it is the interdependent social relations that hold it all together, that hold us all together. Like disability, accessibility is a relation we enact—involving infrastructure, technology, culture, humans, and the more-than-human. It is a relation to which we must tend, one that requires both care and consent. The cost of creating, of maintaining, of expanding, of ensuring, of building access, this is the cost of undoing ableism, the cost of acknowledging our interdependency, the cost of leaving no one or no thing behind. Making disabled kin reminds us that none of us can do it alone or can do it all. In illuminating our interdependent relations, making disabled kin helps us understand, act on, and be accountable for the ways we can facilitate or abandon each other’s flourishing and helps us parse out where and how breakdowns happen. Access is made in the making, in moving together. Interdependent relations sustain us, and making disabled kin renders explicit the social relations that are required to facilitate the electric door-opening button as much as the social relations needed for people to hold open the door. Making disabled kin stays with the trouble of access in the making, cultivating our attention to interdependency as a site of intervention and world-building.

A few years later, I was again reminded of the stakes of making disabled kin when I confronted a different broken door-opening button at my own university building entrance (Figure 12). I typically come and go from my office at work by the entrance closest to the garbage dumpsters and recycling and compost bins. It is a designated stop in the archaic city paratransit system that I begrudgingly use to get to and from work in the winter when the lack of consistent city plowing makes it impossible to reliably use my scooter to navigate the snow- and ice-covered sidewalks. Many paratransit drivers are familiar with the location, reducing the likelihood that the driver will endlessly circle the university campus, confusedly unable to locate me. The city designates this stop in their paratransit booking system as the “door behind the garbage bins at Carleton University,” and the entrance is about as glamorous as this label makes it out to be. Throughout much of 2022–2023, the access button at this entrance hung precariously by a single wire, detached from its wall-mounted metal box, which remained securely bolted in place. I reported its broken status many times to Facilities Management. Eventually it would get fixed, only to be knocked loose again and again, left clanking in the wind against the brick wall. Despite its off-the-wall status, the wire held its current. It also held the various parts of the mechanism together enough so that I could get it to open the door by pressing the metal circle against its backing.

I thought about this button many times over the year, hanging by a wire, and, with some care, continuing to work in its own broken way. It was an especially challenging year as friends and colleagues were debilitated by long Covid, as Israel intensified its genocide of Palestinians, and as the university paid a private security and “risk solutions” firm to surveil striking contract instructors and teaching assistants, only to then request faculty surrender our office phones in an austere bid to save the institution money. I felt an affinity with the dangling button as disabled kin, revealing our struggle to hang on by a wire as risk and access are individualized, as our interdependent relations become strained through a lack of adequate care; the university was not attending to the maintenance and repair of the door-opening button just as it was not preserving good relations with its employees or taking responsibility for its complicity in spreading Covid and supporting genocide or accounting for its own unjust expenditures when implementing financial austerity within its academic departments and programs. The dangling button, hanging on by a wire, still up for collaboration, grounds the making of disabled kin from where we are, with what we have, in an imperfect collective struggle against abandonment and broken-by-design structures, systems, and practices.

Even though the button has long since been repaired and firmly resecured against the brick wall, it continues to remind me in my comings and goings that capacitation is never ours alone but dependent on our fragile, vulnerable, and tenuous connections to one another and with the objects and environs we rely on. These are connections of interdependence that can be strengthened through practices of care, access-making, and abolition. Capacitation, just like debilitation, is grounded in a set of power relations that we can break, repair, maintain. Some of these relations are more sedimented than others, and we cannot always choose when, where, how, and with whom we make disabled kin, or if we are up for collaborating in the struggle. Abandonment and broken-by-design conditions saturate the atmosphere around so many of us, making it difficult to effectively maneuver. Some of these tensions were further highlighted for me as I sought to pass through two other doorways during the summer of 2024.

While attending a conference in Amsterdam in July 2024, I put an entire transit line out of service when the ramp extending out of the streetcar jammed on the poorly designed platform blocking the streetcar door from being able to properly close after I had boarded. Everyone aboard not only this streetcar but every other streetcar held up on the tracks behind it needed to find another way to get where they were going. While it was a moment of collective disability—the streetcar disabled, the mobility of the other transit riders hindered by the disabled streetcar, my mobility disabled by the lack of a functional ramp to now disembark from the disabled streetcar—it was difficult to meaningfully make kin and collectivize this situation. I felt the affective frustration of the passengers as they disembarked, their heavy sighs, pursed lips, and other expressions of exasperation lingering behind with me in the streetcar. I could recognize that our collective disability was caused not by my need for the ramp but by the broken-by-design structure that had designated this as an accessible transit stop even though, as I came to learn that day, the platform would render the train inoperable by causing the door and ramp to jam. Yet my inability to speak Dutch coupled with my transient relation to this city and its potential kin constrained any meaningful intervention in the unfolding of these relations. After a fashion, the transit worker, my attendant, and I were able to sufficiently problem-solve my descent off the streetcar and back onto the platform. As my attendant and I went about finding another route to where I was going and the transit worker was left to deal with the aftermath of the disabled streetcar, I felt at a loss for what else to do, how else to make this into something other than just me breaking down a system that appeared to be working so seamlessly for everyone else around me.

This so-called accessible platform was the closest streetcar stop to the conference venue, and the next closest stop was under construction. As it was my first time in Amsterdam, I did not know the terrain very well. I did not have disabled friends in the city, and the conference itself heavily promoted the ease of getting around by bicycle. I thought a lot about how to collaboratively make access and collectivize risk as I headed back to the same platform the next day to see if something else could emerge. As my attendant and I waited on the platform with a friend and colleague from Toronto, a series of streetcars came and left without us; each driver refused to even attempt to deploy the ramp in case it caused the streetcar to go out of service. Maybe they had heard what happened the day before, maybe they had been stuck on the tracks behind the disabled streetcar. In any case, it was rush hour and the drivers wanted to stay on time. When asking what we were supposed to do since this was an officially designated accessible streetcar stop, driver after driver simply shrugged as they closed their doors and drove away. I willed a sinkhole to open up and devour me, my scooter, and the entire streetcar system, but already the train had pulled away. I braced myself for the worst as an Amsterdammer approached me with a stern look on her face. Surprising me, she simply commented that no one in this city thinks any problems are their own responsibility and that I needed to make it a collective responsibility; I appreciated this invitation to not just recognize or find myself among disabled kin but to actively make disabled kin. Galvanized by this invitation, my comrades stood in the doorway of the next streetcar that arrived to disable its ability to drive away without me. A fierce antiabandonment negotiation was had with the driver, demanding that he work with us to find a way to make this accessible stop live up to its designation. Eventually, he proposed driving the train up the tracks, slightly past the platform, to pick me up where the platform sloped down to meet the road. After some creative and precarious maneuvering, this tactic got me onboard and I high-fived my comrades as we chugged along the tracks toward the city center. I was glad we found a way to make a broken-by-design system work so I and my fellow passengers could get where we needed to go. But this was an exhausting solution that could not be sustained day in and day out. After that day, I did not go back to that transit stop, instead finding other routes and ways to get around that were inconvenient but not as difficult as confronting the cruel optimism of trying to make that accessible stop live up to its designation. And, a few days later, I left the city altogether.

I had also felt exhausted by the effort required to make access earlier in the summer of 2024, when trying to get through the doors of Chicago’s elevated “L” train. I had planned my stay in the city in relation to accessible stops marked on the L train map. When I showed up, however, I discovered that a portable ramp is frequently needed to board and disembark the L trains because, at many stops, not only is the platform significantly lower than the height of the train doors but there is also often a significant gap between the train and the platform. While this was also the case in Amsterdam, often the ramp is included on the train itself to be deployed by the driver. Not so in Chicago. Instead, to access this gap-filling, stair-overcoming ramp, a request must be made to the transit worker in the ticket booth of the station, who then needs to close their booth, go down to the platform, and retrieve the ramp from a large, locked box. Once the train arrives, they must set up the ramp and then lock it away again before returning to their booth. The worker driving the train then needs to connect with the transit worker at the disembarking station so that they are ready to deploy the ramp when the train arrives. While this people-powered form of access means that the ramp never puts the train out of service like happened in Amsterdam, it does heavily rely on the ability of the transit system to maintain its workforce to power this approach to access and for everyone involved to be able to communicate with each other. I showed up at many L train stations to find no worker present in the ticket booth or any indication of when or if there would be someone there. When there was someone there, they often only begrudgingly and very leisurely freed the ramp from its locked box. I could never accurately predict how long it would take to mobilize this sequence of events, and it was clearly as much of a hassle for the workers as it was for me. All the time, labor, and emotional management required to orchestrate this making of access felt heightened against the peculiar appearance of the ramp itself, painted as it was in bright yellow with the international symbol of access stenciled in blue along with the words “WELCOME ABOARD.” Against this cheery yellow, many of the workers visibly displayed signs of debilitation and disability—knee or wrist braces, a limping gait, difficulty maneuvering the heavy ramp in and out of the locked box or up and down off the ground. In the media, Chicago transit workers express that they are exploited and experience burnout, trauma, hazardous conditions, and mismanagement. Over the past several years, working conditions have intensified and overtime has become increasingly common, with some employees working fifty to eighty hours a week without adequate break times to make up for a shortage of workers (Saleh 2023). Wheeling through the doors of the Chicago L train requires people power, but the current working conditions of transit workers constrain the ability for people power to produce a reliable form of access. Instead, making access may contribute to the debilitation and disablement of the transit workers themselves. Rolling to dinner in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood alongside a longtime wheelchair-using friend, she laughs knowingly when I mention finding no one in the ticket booth and waiting a very long time to access the ramp. “How do you get anywhere on a schedule?” I ask, noting the L train station just around the corner from her apartment. “I drive,” she responds. “Of course,” she quickly adds, “this is not an option for all disabled people.”

The people-powered access that sustained our community at the University of Toronto, the dangling button in Ottawa, still up for careful collaboration. The Amsterdammer expressing the need to make an individualized problem collective, the ramps constrained by working conditions and locked boxes. These are not stories of overcoming breakage but stories of finding and forging disabled kin amid the broken in order to attend to our interdependent relations and collectivize risk and access-making. We want the door buttons to work, for the accessible transit stops to live up to their designation, for the ramps to be freed, but these are not just technical solutions to be solved by science, engineering, or design. It inevitably requires our interdependence, our labor and care, our willingness to engage access as a relational making, and our working together to abolish systems, structures, and practices that individualize, abandon, and are broken by design. Forging disabled kin helps us to name, witness, and cultivate solidarity, strengthen our interdependent ties, and creatively collectivize ways to mitigate risk, harm, and abandonment. Even when we don’t succeed, naming, witnessing, and attempts at solidarity can help us leave and amass evidence of what we are up against and the concrete social and material infrastructure and resources needed to support our collective survival.