I am preparing a book manuscript tentatively titled Beyond Accommodation: Sharing Responsibility for Access.

Since its bipartisan adoption in 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has been widely recognized as a momentous turning point in U. S. disability history. Modeled after previous civil rights legislation, the ADA expressly prohibits discrimination based on disability and guarantees equal opportunities for disabled people. To comply with non-discrimination requirements, public and private entities are legally required to provide reasonable accommodations to disabled people unless doing so would generate undue hardship. By treating accessibility as a federal requirement, the law seeks to redress the forms of social exclusion historically experienced by disabled people.

In July of 2020, the ADA celebrated its 30th anniversary amid a global pandemic that has disproportionately killed disabled people and is described by many as one of the greatest mass disabling events in recent history. Several news media outlets covered this landmark celebration and politicians released statements reaffirming the law’s importance.

Disabled people’s perspectives on the ADA’s ongoing legacy often do not mirror this political praise and fanfare. While many agree we should celebrate the achievements of the disability rights movement, disabled people’s everyday experiences are a reminder of just how many barriers to accessibility persist across all spheres of society. Indeed, in the more than thirty years since the law’s adoption, there is much that has not improved.

Much hope has been placed in the ADA’s ability to overturn decades of exclusion and guarantee full and equal access for disabled people. In truth, however, the ADA promises—and often fails to deliver—only a bare minimum of access in society. Although it is praised as a symbol of opportunity, the law just as often masks discrimination and perpetuates inequality.

The contradiction between ambitious promises of inclusion and everyday practices of exclusion captures the state of access now and serves as the impetus for this project. Framing access as a key philosophical concept and question for our times, I expose problems with dominant approaches to accessibility in contemporary society and identify the invisible costs and burdens they impose on disabled people. Achieving meaningful access at a societal level requires that we move beyond a narrow focus on accommodations and transform existing practices of responsibility around access to recognize access as a shared responsibility for disabled and non disabled people.

Publications

• (manuscript in progress) "Accessibility Theory." w/ Natalie Hardy. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Disability Studies

• (manuscript in progress)“Learning to Notice Inaccessibility: Privileged Irresponsibility, Ableism, and Embodied Habits of Ignorance”

• (2023) “Disability, Access, and The Promise of Inclusion: Returning to Phenomenological Language through a Phenomenological Lens.” In The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability: Radical Resistances and Intersectional Imaginings. Edited by Shelley Tremain. London: Bloomsbury.

• (2021) "The Problems of Access: A Crip Rejoinder via the Phenomenology of Belonging." Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 8(2): 318-337

I am working alongside Carolyn McLeod's research team at Western University as part of a project titled "Institutional Distrust and Injustice."

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed concerning levels of distrust in medical and public health institutions. Experts suggest that restoring the public’s trust in these institutions is key to ensuring successful healthcare delivery and reducing widely documented health inequities across populations. Amidst this discourse, however, an important point is too often lost: trust is ineffective without trustworthiness. Placing one’s trust in untrustworthy persons or institutions is imprudent. We must aim to trust the trustworthy and distrust the untrustworthy.

For members of socially marginalized groups, conditions of oppression and structural injustice raise the stakes of trust. Reports indicate that members of socially marginalized groups (e.g., Black people, Indigenous people, queer and trans people, and disabled people) are especially distrustful of public institutions. Yet distrust is only rational in the face of institutional failures to reliably serve and protect members of these groups. Indeed, the popular claim that we need more trust is misleading. Instead of generalized trust, I argue we need institutions we can trust.

In my work, I approach this problem by shifting the locus of concern away from group and individual attitudes of distrust and toward those institutions whose responsibility it is to be stewards of the public good. Institutions that wish to demonstrate their trustworthiness must take responsibility for past violations of trust. However, this alone is not enough. Because discrete violations of trust occur against background conditions of injustice, I argue that these conditions must also be addressed. Institutions must take responsibility for their structural positioning within unjust social systems that produce harm. Institutional trustworthiness must be established through reparative and constructive efforts that consider how conditions of injustice intersect with relations of trust.

Publications:

• (2024) "Building Institutional Trustworthiness in Times of Crisis and Beyond: Lessons from Disability Scholarship and Activism." In Disability Justice in Public Health Emergencies, edited by Joel Michael Reynolds and Mercer Gary. London: Routledge.

• (forthcoming) "Fear and Trust Under Conditions of Oppression." In The Moral Psychology of Fear, edited by Ami Harbin. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

• (2023) "We Need Trustworthy Institutions: Some Lessons from Discriminatory Triage Policies During Covid-19." Blog of the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, click to access here.