COVID-19 and the Disinheritance of an Ableist World

Abstract

Dr Johnathan Flowers is a Professorial Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at American University. His current research focuses on developing an affective theory of experience, identity, and personhood through bridging American Pragmatism, Japanese Aesthetics, and Phenomenology. Flowers’s work also explores how identities are lived affectively through technology and society, with a specific emphasis on race, gender, and disability. ABSTRACT This paper will resituate the presumed accessibility gains that have emerged in the wake of COVID-19 not as gains for disabled people, but rather as the products of a world that is prepared for some people and some bodies and not for other people and other bodies. I will show that a more productive approach to understanding the sudden possibility of impossible accommodations would be accomplished by drawing upon Sara Ahmed’s treatment of the inheritance of a world, inheritance that places some objects within one’s reach while denying one access to other objects. On this view, ableism, as an organizing force in the world, serves to determine what bodies can and cannot do by virtue of the way that it “prepares” the world for some bodies and not for other bodies. As I will argue, the previous impossibility of the current widespread accommodations in academia and society broadly was due to the inheritance of an ableist world. designed to be inherited by some people and their bodies and not by other people and their bodies. the and points of encounter between but and and space navigate our tends to offer fits to majority bodies and create misfits with forms of embodiment, such as people with