The Curb-Cut Effect (SSIR)

The curb-cut effect

The curb-cut effect illustrates how when we design to benefit disadvantaged or vulnerable groups we end up helping society as a whole. Angela Glover Blackwell explains how campaigning by students with disabilities in Berkeley in the early 1970s led to adding curb cuts to the Berkeley sidewalks to make access easier for those in wheelchairs. Yet it wasn't just people in wheelchairs that it helped. Curb cuts also made life easier for people pushing children in strollers, people using trolleys for deliveries, people pulling a suitcase, those wheeling bikes or on skateboards, and it also helps save lives by guiding people to cross at safe locations. Another example is adding closed captioning to TV that helps anyone watch in a noisy bar, a waiting room, or watching an airline safety video. Or a classic example of universal design in the OXO Good Grips range originally made to be comfortable for holding a peeler even if you have arthritis. It's also a useful analogy for "how laws and programs designed to benefit vulnerable groups, such as the disabled or people of color, often end up benefiting all," (PolicyLink) whether that be increasing broadband access, improving public transport or taking cuts out of curbs. Here's a short, fun video of Gary Karp explaining the curb-cut effect. Thanks to my patron Quintin Balsdon for sharing it with me.

Curb cut effect

The curb cut effect is the phenomenon of disability-friendly features being used and appreciated by a larger group than the people they were designed for. The phenomenon is named for curb cuts – miniature ramps comprising parts of sidewalk – which were first made for wheelchair access in particular places, but were also welcomed by people pushing strollers, carts or luggage. Curb cuts are now ubiquitous and no longer widely recognized as a disability-accessibility feature. Another example is hearing people using television closed captioning.

Investing in Enterprises That Work for Everyone (SSIR)

Impact investors can support a more just economy by prioritizing alternative ownership enterprises that shift power away from shareholders to workers, the community, and the planet. <meta property=

Fairness is what the powerful ‘can get away with’ study shows

The willingness of those in power to act fairly depends on how easily others can collectively push back against unfair treatment

Crip Technoscience Manifesto

As disabled people engaged in disability community, activism, and scholarship, our collective experiences and histories have taught us that we are effective agents of world building and dismantling toward more socially just relations.The grounds for social justice and world remaking, however, are frictioned;technologies, architectures, and infrastructures are often designed and implemented without committing to disability as a difference that matters. This manifesto calls attention to the powerful, messy, non-innocent, contradictory, and nevertheless crucial work of what we name as “crip technoscience,” practices of critique, alteration, and reinvention of our material-discursive world. Disabled people are experts and designers of everyday life. But we also harness technoscience for political action, refusing to comply with demands to cure, fix, or eliminate disability. Attentive to the intersectional workings of power and privilege, we agitate against independence and productivity as requirements for existence. Instead, we center technoscientific activism and critical design practices that foster disability justice.

The social model of disability: thirty years on

This year marks exactly 30 years since I published a book introducing the social model of disability onto an unsuspecting world and yet, despite the impact this model has had, all we now seem to do...

The social model of disability: thirty years on

This year marks exactly 30 years since I published a book introducing the social model of disability onto an unsuspecting world and yet, despite the impact this model has had, all we now seem to do...

Local Digital Spaces Are Essential Civic Infrastructure (SSIR)

With traditional community spaces underfunded and neglected, investing in the health of our online gathering places has become essential. <meta property=

Substrates via Accessibility

The social model of disability holds that disability is produced by environments, not by bodies — that when software fails to accommodate a person’s needs, the environment is disabling them. We argue that the dominant organization of computing produces such interaction mismatches structurally: the commodity form of software requires a standardized consumer, and everyone whose needs diverge from this imagined subject is disabled by the software environment. The substrates research community has identified properties — disclosure, composability, malleability — that would address this, but the commodity form actively selects against these properties because they dissolve the boundaries on which exchange value depends. This raises a question: how can infrastructure organized against the grain of commodity logic be made durable? We find a precedent in accessibility infrastructure — sustained not by patronage but by the organized counter-power of disability rights movements. Through Allio, a system for cross-application augmentation built on accessibility APIs, we illustrate both what this foundation makes possible and where its limits lie. We argue that the accessibility case reframes the substrates programme’s central challenge as political-economic: the question of who sustains substrate infrastructure, and through what social mechanisms, is as important as the question of what properties it should have.

Social Model of Disability | The Paper Pilot

The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology

Unconditional cash transfers reduce homelessness

Homelessness is an economic and social crisis. In a cluster-randomized controlled trial, we address a core cause of homelessness—lack of money—by providing a one-time unconditional cash transfer of CAD$7,500 to each of 50 individuals experiencing homelessness, with another 65 as controls in Vancouver, BC. Exploratory analyses showed that over 1 y, cash recipients spent fewer days homeless, increased savings and spending with no increase in temptation goods spending, and generated societal net savings of $777 per recipient via reduced time in shelters. Additional experiments revealed public mistrust toward the ability of homeless individuals to manage money and demonstrated interventions to increase public support for a cash transfer policy using counter-stereotypical or utilitarian messaging. Together, this research offers a new approach to address homelessness and provides insights into homelessness reduction policies.

Social rules - Recurse Center

The RC social rules help create a friendly, intellectual environment where you can spend your energy on programming.

Alienation, Idealization, and Modeling

Models allow us to expose, explore, and excavate our assumptions. This is especially true for the sorts of assumptions that concern scholars of marginalization and resistance, who aim to show how ...

Q&A: The Myth of "Radicalization" | American Civil Liberties Union

>What’s wrong with radicalization? >What's at Stake? > What's The Proper Role For Law Enforcement? > What's The Bottom Line? WHAT'S WRONG WITH “RADICALIZATION”? The word “radicalization” is commonly used in public and policy discourse, but what people mean by it varies and there’s no single agreed-upon definition. The problem is that government policies and programs are based on a theory of “radicalization” that assumes a process through which people turn to violence because of radical or extreme beliefs. This theory is unscientific and discredited — and government programs based on it result in monitoring or suppression of First Amendment-protected beliefs and ideas. For example, this dangerous radicalization theory is being applied to American Muslim communities, most recently in the form of “countering violent extremism ” programs. According to this theory, the adoption or expression of “extreme” or “radical” religious ideas or practices places individuals on a path toward terrorism or violence, and there are observable “indicators” that can identify those who are “vulnerable” to “radicalization.” This is false. The ACLU has repeatedly provided statements to Congress — in 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012 — to explain the factual and methodological flaws in reports that promote this radicalization theory. Our allies have also written reports debunking the theory. As we and others have explained, despite years of study and experience in the United States and elsewhere, researchers have not identified criteria or behavioral indicators that can be used to reliably predict who will commit an act of terrorism or political violence. Simply put, religious beliefs and practices do not correlate with a propensity toward violence. Instead, the freedom to engage in these activities goes to the core of what it means to be an American. Cloaking American Muslims — or any other belief communities — with suspicion puts at risk the freedom of religion, gives the appearance of official endorsement of one set of religious beliefs over another, and threatens to chill free association and free speech. WHAT'S AT STAKE? The radicalization myth threatens the fundamental freedoms of American Muslims and all Americans. Government efforts to inquire whether American Muslims — or anyone else — holds “radical” or “extreme” beliefs, however those are defined, stigmatize entire communities and promote a climate of fear and self-censorship. Our values are undermined when people forsake religious exercise, political discussions, and intellectual debate to avoid being branded as extreme or at risk of “radicalization.” Probing people’s thoughts and beliefs also engenders distrust of the government and undermines the relationship between communities and law enforcement. For example, it can cripple government efforts to demonstrate to Muslims at home and abroad that the United States seeks to live up to its ideals in its equal treatment of all Americans, including Muslims, and is not engaged in a “war against Islam.” More broadly, our nation’s founders recognized that radical beliefs that challenge social and political orthodoxies are valuable and necessary for a vibrant society and democracy. That is why First Amendment, which protects the freedoms of belief, religion, speech, and association, occupies a special place in our history and in the Constitution. Unfortunately, though, government suspicion of beliefs and unsupported theories of “radicalization” are nothing new, and our nation’s history shows they are often used to target minorities or those who dissent. For example, during World War I, Congress banned anti-war speech and the FBI conducted investigations of Americans’ political beliefs to identify purported radicals and opponents. Erroneous theories of eugenics supported racist immigration policies and Jim Crow anti-miscegenation laws for decades. Misguided “red” scares and racism drove abominable policies like blacklists, McCarthyism, and Japanese internment. And the FBI infamously spied on civil rights movement leaders in the name of national security during the J. Edgar Hoover era. WHAT'S THE PROPER ROLE FOR LAW ENFORCEMENT? The protections built into the Constitution help ensure that law enforcement officers focus their investigative resources where there is evidence of wrongdoing or criminal activity. The police can conduct an investigation when they have reasonable suspicion to believe that a crime has been, or is being, committed. But the standard for initiating or widening an investigation must be rigorous enough to focus security resources on criminal activity and prevent abuse. One form of such abuse occurs when officers investigate or monitor people based on their religious beliefs or practices. Former Attorney General Eric Holder rightly stated that “law enforcement has an obligation to ensure that members of every religious community enjoy the ability to worship and to practice their faith in peace, free from intimidation, violence or suspicion. That is the right of all Americans. And it must be a reality for every citizen. In this nation, our many faiths, origins, and appearances must bind us together, not break us apart.” Too often, though, law enforcement and intelligence have targeted religious, racial, ethnic, or national origin communities for monitoring and suspicion. In the case of American Muslims, “countering violent extremism” initiatives may task communities with reporting to law enforcement about individuals’ radical or extreme beliefs. Although warning law enforcement of threats is indeed a shared civic and social responsibility, it would be illegal, unfair, and impractical for law enforcement officials to require any religious or belief community to prove its loyalty to this country by monitoring or “informing” on its members. To the contrary, American Muslims, like the rest of this country's citizens, have the right to protest illegal, overzealous or abusive government security measures and to vigorously exercise, and encourage others to exercise, rights guaranteed in the Constitution. Some in American Muslim communities have also expressed legitimate concerns about whether those who volunteer information to law enforcement will find themselves threatened with legal jeopardy. Individuals should speak to lawyers before talking to law enforcement — and know that refusing to talk to law enforcement without a lawyer is a constitutional right. WHAT'S THE BOTTOM LINE? The government’s “radicalization” theory has become a euphemism for religious and ideological profiling. It leads to discrimination and stigmatization, and is fundamentally un-American. Casting suspicion on American faith or belief communities is wrong and does nothing to make us safer.