Reimagining Access: Editorial Introduction

Abstract

This editorial introduction was conceived and discussed jointly: Pooja Rangan wrote the section “Attacking Access,” Domenico Napolitano wrote “From Mainstream Accessibility to Reimagining Access,” and Annalisa Pellino, who also served as managing editor for the entire volume, wrote “Misfit Film and Media” and “Summary.” We have written in three voices and parts to allow readers multiple points of access or egress. This approach has allowed us to embrace the access affordances of the academic tradition of parsing out and separately evaluating individual instances of editorial labor. Multiplicity of form, as contributor Pavitra Sundar acknowledges, is an important principle of accessibility; rendering information in diverse formats makes it accessible for people who may have varied and incompatible access needs (intra: 105-118). In that spirit, we have each compiled comments below that present the interventions of the special issue from our distinct institutional and geopolitical positionalities—which also reflects through the use of both American and British English—and vantages onto the field: following Pooja Rangan’s overview of recent disability justice-informed critiques of technosolutionist discourses of access, Domenico Napolitano reviews the implications of disability media studies for Universal Design and surveys the state of the field in Italy, and Annalisa Pellino frames the volume’s interventions around “access aesthetics”  within the scope of film phenomenology, culminating in a detailed summary of the contributions.