Great Lakes ADA Center Blog
Disability Culture Approaches to Party Planning
Blog submitted by guest Margaret Fink, Director of Disability Cultural Center, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Published December 20, 2023.
Ain’t No Party Like a Disability Culture Party (Cuz a Disability Culture Party Stops If You Need It To)
As the year comes to a close, our calendars are filling up with family gatherings, work parties, and holiday celebrations. I hope you’ll join me, for this post, in noticing how dominant culture shapes our everyday event experiences. How can these events be re-tooled and transformed, if we lean on the wisdom, creativity, and experimentality of disability culture?
Dominant Culture vs. Disability Culture
When I first started working at UIC’s Disability Cultural Center, feedback about our events taught me something important. People have commented over and over that it was unfamiliar—and awesome—to attend an event that uses lamp lighting and has captions projected on the wall; to be invited to move around in the space as they need to; to observe and try out disability culture habits like saying our names before making a comment; or, for folks with certain dietary needs, to have snacks that they could actually eat.
We must start with the insight that our standard templates for events are not neutral. They are nondisabled cultural modes, and they’re typically built around assumptions that people can or should engage or think in specific ways. Templates for events can be helpful because they create shared expectations, but they can also come with unspoken rules or default set-ups that don’t work for some of us.
The magic of disability culture spaces often comes from less familiar rituals geared towards meeting everyone’s needs, and how these spaces interrupt and defamiliarize “business as usual.” Having specific accessibility measures in place is certainly a part of this, but more so, the mindset around disability culture comes from practices that implicitly and explicitly “hack” standard ways of operating so that more of us can belong. It invites people into participating in that effort, co-creating a sense of possibility and a feeling of ease in having our access needs met, of being anticipated and welcome.
Party Planning with a Disability Culture Mindset
So, what can a disability culture mindset bring to parties? It can be helpful to start with our “typical” party templates and then defamiliarize them so we can think through who is included and who isn’t. How do parties typically go, and what are some of the unspoken understandings or expectations? If we think about how to make space for as many people as possible, what other practices and configurations can we dream up?
Let’s imagine a holiday party at work, assuming for this thought experiment that we’re hosting the party in a physically accessible space equipped with accessible bathrooms, a familiar space that people know how to find. These are baseline considerations for picking a spot and sharing information!
The Invitation
In a typical holiday party, invitations go out over email with the date, time, and location. The invitation might say that there will be refreshments, all in a cute winter-themed flyer. Invitees will be asked to RSVP.
In a disability culture holiday party, the invitation is accessible—the cute flyer is accompanied by a text version and an image description. The invitation also includes a sense of what to expect—any “program,” however informal, and activities. Just as important as time/day/place, the invitation has information on accessibility, including dietary needs that will be accommodated. It includes COVID safety information for sick and immunocompromised folks, or a mechanism for building consensus around measures people will take. Attendees might be invited to dress comfortably (“come as you are”) and bring kids or friends. It includes a clear, inviting way to make any access needs known (a question on the RSVP form, or a point of contact).
Refreshments and Set Up
In a typical holiday party, refreshments are arranged on a self-serve buffet at the edge of the room (cheeses and crackers, veggies and dip, sweets like cookies, and hot drinks or punch). The space is cleared out, music is playing, and the space is adorned with festive decorations.
In a disability culture holiday party, refreshments are chosen with the dietary needs of our guests in mind (based on past events or information from the RSVP form), with options for people who eat vegan and gluten-free. Labels clearly mark these options, and the packaging is kept and tucked away for people to consult if needed. The hosts have information for people who eat halal or keep kosher, even if that is “unknown.” When refreshments are set up, the hosts make sure that everything can be reached by someone who’s seated. Someone is designated to hang out by the food as an extra set of hands, or to describe what’s available. The party is adorned with festive decorations, and seating is scattered throughout so that people can sit down; at least some of the seating also has a table for people who can’t or don't want to juggle a plate and a drink. Music is playing, softly enough that it doesn’t compete with conversation; there might be some visual of what song is playing.
Socializing
In a typical holiday party, people stand around and chat with one another while enjoying food. The host might make an impromptu toast or say a few words of gratitude and appreciation for their guests.
In a disability culture holiday party, our modes of being in community can get really experimental. Mingling can be a delight for some of us, but for others, it can drain our social batteries, it can be too unstructured, it can be hard to follow what’s being said, or it can be overstimulating. How do we offer multiple ways for people to be present?
- Have things to do while visiting (e.g. a puzzle, games like Uno, a self-guided quiz game with lesser-known facts about other guests, a collective reflection project).
- Scatter conversation starters around the space (e.g. how you’ve de-stressed recently, most famous person you’ve met, something interesting about your hometown).
- Have ways to communicate how you’d like to interact, like communication badges.
- Have space set aside for quiet and decompression as well as separate spots for conversation in a less hectic area.
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Have virtual and asynchronous ways to connect with the party:
- People can take turns live-tweeting reports on X, formerly Twitter, in the comments of an Instagram post, or a Facebook event page.
- Hosts can set up a Google doc where people can write greetings or respond to prompts./li>
- Offer a Zoom-in option for any more focused parts of the program, like announcements, greetings from the hosts, and a couple of icebreaker or reflection check-ins.
- If it’s best for your community, go totally virtual and make it fun! Encourage goofy video filters, use breakout rooms, and lean on the huge amounts of pandemic wisdom about building community online. The Critical Design Lab’s Remote Access Parties, for example, involved folks dancing together from their living rooms to a DJ set and screen-shared, audio described art installations.
Creating “Access Intimacy”
A lot of what disability culture events do differently is that they create a willingness to meet needs. This responsiveness is much more important than striving for perfection, since our variation as people means we won’t always know ahead of time what is needed, and also because access often works best when it’s co-created. Disability justice writer Mia Mingus has connected what she calls “access intimacy” to this interdependent mindset, rather than to perfect execution:
There is a good feeling after and while you are experiencing access intimacy. It is a freeing, light, loving feeling. It brings the people who are a part of it closer; it builds and deepens connection. Sometimes access intimacy doesn’t even mean that everything is 100% accessible. Sometimes it looks like both of you trying to create access as hard as you can with no avail in an ableist world. […] It has looked like relationships where I always feel like I can say what my access needs are, no matter what. Or I can say that I don’t know them, and that’s ok too. […] It has looked like people investing in remembering my access needs and checking in with me if there are going to be situations that might be inaccessible or hard disability-body-wise. It has looked like crip-made access. It has looked like crip solidarity.
I’d like to share a personal party story: two friends hosted a swap meet one summer, where we were all invited to bring belongings we didn’t want anymore and take anything that others had brought. The hosts made lemonade and baked goods and set them up on some TV dinner tables. We gathered outside in their backyard because a number of us are COVID-cautious. To get into the back yard, we entered through a side door in the alley and there were two steps down. I don’t fully remember if there was a make-shift ramp and it just didn’t feel stable, or if it was an overlooked access measure. But I do remember how the party responded when a chair-user friend arrived and couldn’t enter: the hosts left, hopping in their car to grab a sturdier ramp from a ramp-share organization, and in the meantime we left the stuff in the backyard and moved the party to the alleyway to continue meeting each other and visiting.
I can’t speak to how their friend experienced the party, but this response felt like peak disability culture to me. It felt similar to what I feel when I go to an event where people are knitting or laying on the floor. It felt related to my own experiences as a deaf person at hearing parties (which mostly really stink in terms of communication access), when my friend Anna discreetly leans forward or back like a see-saw to make sure my sightlines are open for lipreading. It’s responsive more than perfect. If I had to name one “secret sauce” that disability culture brings to a party, it’s that interdependence and that willingness to interrupt typical templates to meet one another’s needs.
