Defining Access Forward

by Elizabeth McLain, PhD

(posted by Ashley Shew, but she’s not the author)

Over the last five years, I’ve been fortunate to experience a shift in my research from analytical and archival work towards applied projects rooted in my experience as a disabled and neurodivergent person in community with others. I can’t thank Ashley Shew enough for dreaming up DisCoTec and inviting me to join her in the Mellon Foundation grant that gave me the opportunity to grow as a disability studies scholar. This support has been essential for growing and sustaining transdisciplinary teams that tackle the immediate problems of disability exclusion and isolation through music, other arts, and gaming.

In Open the Gates Gaming, the Disabled Artist Residencies, industry collaborations, and the Reco(r)ding CripTech project that predates DisCoTec, I keep returning to the question of how do we do this work of access. Gradually, a set of principles and values emerged, which I began referring to as “Access Forward.” Last week, my collaborators Daragh Byrne and Veronica Stanich asked me if I was citing a specific context when I used “Access Forward” in a draft Accessibility statement I co-authored with Luke Kudryashov for the CripTech archive. That’s when it dawned on me that the time has come to begin codifying, triangulating, and/or defining “Access Forward”.

Access Forward is an approach to doing work that centers the disabled experience. It’s a way of moving, and especially moving together, as we undertake the important tasks towards a better future and our wild disability dreams. Whether an industry collaboration for an event space, design principles for tools that empower more people to join the party, methodology for scholarship about disabled artists, or how we treat each other while collaborating, Access Forward is defined by a specific set of values. Although it will no doubt evolve as I learn and grow, I’d like to share some pillars that help me hold on to my values in the most chaotic and stressful moments of “doing the work.”

1.     Access, not Accommodation—and not just disability

Accommodations as a process or approach is neither sustainable nor liberatory. Access Forward is not interested in treating obstacles to inclusion as a problem of individual bodyminds, nor should it require extraordinary effort after-the-fact like curb cuts. My stomach sinks every time someone praises the “curb cut effect,” in which creating accessibility for disabled people produces access for all. I cringe to think of how often I’ve said it, and how often I still do in order to get our community what we need.

Shouldn’t it be enough that disabled people need to be included? Do we really have to point out that others will *also* benefit for society/organizations to believe that it’s worth the investment?

And where are all of those people who benefit from the “curb cut effect” the next time the disability community is fighting for basic access?

As Mia Mingus points out, “Access for the sake of access is not necessarily liberatory, but access for the sake of connection, justice, community, love and liberation is” (2017). The Access Forward approach is the “concrete resistance” Mingus argues for.

Disabled people will not be fully included in society until we understand access as about more than “just disability.” Race, gender, class, so many other aspects of our identities impact how we experience exclusion, and they cannot be ignored if we want to realize a fully inclusive world. As Talila A. Lewis points out, “You do not need to be disabled to experience ableism” (2022).

Access Forward work learns from disability justice principles, including intersectionality, collective access, and collective liberation. As Audre Lorde taught us, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single issue lives” (1982, “Learning from the 60s”), and Access Forward work should strive towards cross-movement collaborations that empower us to support the whole individual. Practically speaking, this can manifest as prioritizing open-access tools, partnering with organizations that focus on racial justice, or considering the experience of using an adaptive or accessible format.

Luke Kudryashov and I have worked on the idea of cultural accessibility (although I think I was more of an emotional support person / the one more comfortable with public speaking; I credit the actual ideas here to Luke!). Does asking for an accessible character sheet feel empowering, or does it feel like entering the back door of a building alone, past the smelly dumpsters and through the entrance designed for trash, not people? Does the branding for the event require someone to self-identify as disabled, despite that not being a viable option for someone surviving 2026 America with too many other stigmatized identities? Or have they even had access to education around disability identity or disability community to begin that journey?

2.     Failing Forward

Access Forward is aspirational. We’re not there yet. However, we cannot use this as an excuse for failing people, nor can we use it as a reason not to try.

The hidden word is one that is uncomfortable: Access (Failing) Forward. To make progress, we must simultaneously hold the mission of inclusion and the reality of our limitations. Recognizing all that we don’t know, we move forward together. When we stumble, we’re identifying the obstacle, catching each other, naming the failure point, and documenting it. By moving together, Access Forward also means we are there to catch each other and support each other through the failures.

3.     Inclusion is the North Star

In Access Forward work, every decision we make is evaluated first on whether or not it advances the work of inclusion. Does this bring disabled people closer to accessing the work, being fully included, and being affirmed as radically, and wholly, human?

4.     Leadership is collaborative care work

How we do Access Forward work matters.

It’s not enough to have the goals in mind, and it’s not even enough to have a disabled-led team. Ultimately, the exercise of articulating values for this thing I’m calling “Access Forward” is to establish accountability and transparency for myself and for anyone else who wants to move together with me.

Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba dedicate a chapter of Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Careto this issue of leadership. In Chapter 7: Don’t Pedestal Organizers, they write: “Good organizers do not want ‘fans.’ They want committed and thoughtful co-strugglers. An organizer who wants your allegiance rather than your solidarity and co-investment in struggle is not someone whose leadership you should trust” (131). They also wisely point out that turning a person into a symbol is a form of dehumanization that is harmful to them and to the movement, which cannot rely on fallible individuals (130).

I learn more every day—through experience, intentional study, and mentorship—how to do the complex work of leading. I’m also quite aware that I’m a better leader than a manager. Sometimes this makes me want to invest in development management skills, but the Access Forward approach should pair growth with interdependence.

I do NOT need to be everything or know everything if I am in this work with others. We all have complex strengths and needs, and together we are better.

Every time a project stalls and willing co-laborers are unable to contribute, I see that has a failure point. My teams should include duplication of competencies, trust, horizontal leadership structures, and plans for Crip Time (Samuels 2017, Kafer 2013, and so many others). Disabled-led means we need to move criply. My team should be able to go on without me, at least for a while.

Access Forward also means we need to take care of each other and allow ourselves to receive care in return (that’s the hard part for me!). I don’t know how to express the immense privilege it is to be in community with people like Ashley Shew, Christopher Campo-Bowen, Caitlin Martinkus, Scott Hanenberg, Gustavo Araoz, and others who have let me try, fail, fall apart, get back up (or be dragged back up), and hopefully make progress towards learning how to lead with vulnerability. Creating an environment that is Access Forward requires that the team’s work among themselves is also Access Forward. We presume best intent and competence, and we give each other grace. The private world of our collaborations is the best predictor for the final realized shape of the worlds we build together.

5.     Hope that a better future is possible—and the responsibility that we take on to work together now to build it.

Audre Lorde again says it better:

You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other.  I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same.  What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.

If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed only against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough.  In order to be whole, we must recognize the despair oppression plants within each of us – that thin persistent voice that says our efforts are useless, it will never change, so why bother, accept it.  And we must fight that inserted piece of self-destruction that lives and flourishes like a poison inside of us, unexamined until it makes us turn upon ourselves in each other.  But we can put our finger down upon that loathing buried deep within each one of us and see who it encourages us to despise, and we can lessen its potency by the knowledge of our real connectedness, arcing across our differences. (1982)

There is so much more that needs to be said, but for now, thank you for reading and thinking with me about what “Access Forward” means. Please reply here, email me at emclain@vt.edu, reach out on socials, say hi in person, challenge me, question me, and help me build the better world that is just on the other side of our wildest crip dreams.

At the end of the day, it is you who makes me believe it is not just possible, but inevitable—as long as we continue moving forward together.