%0 Journal Article
%T Technologies of friendship: Accessibility politics in the ¡®how to¡¯ mode
%A Tom¨¢s S¨¢nchez Criado
%J The Sociological Review
%@ 1467-954X
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/0038026119830914
%X This text is an ethnographic account of a singular, Barcelona-based activist endeavour called En torno a la silla (ETS): a do-it-yourself and open design and making collective engaging in a very peculiar form of accessibility politics beyond a ¡®disability rights¡¯ framework. In it, I entangle intimately with ETS¡¯s relational interventions, in the form of making and documentation processes. What animates me is a political engagement with the practice of ¡®re-description¡¯, paying attention to the singularity of what relational vocabularies and practices bring to the fore. In describing the context of its appearance, as well as several of the collective¡¯s endeavours, I address ETS¡¯s relational register. Rather than being a clear-cut activist group with the aim of materialising the ¡®inclusion¡¯ of ¡®disabled people¡¯ through ¡®technical aids¡¯, ETS engaged in producing what they called ¡®technologies of friendship¡¯: frail and careful material explorations opening up interstitial relational spaces of ¡®mutual access¡¯ between bodily diverse people. Through circulating tutorials, poetic accounts, digitally and in workshops and presentations, ETS¡¯s technologies of friendship became also ways of addressing how relations can be materialised and reflexively described, making available in its wake ways to re-enact them. Thus it produced an inspiring ¡®how to¡¯ accessibility politics: a material-political concern with the speculative opening up and materialisation of conditions for the very happening of relations, relating at the hinges of unrelatability
%K accessibility
%K bodily diversity
%K friendship
%K re-description
%K relations
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0038026119830914