Aimi Hamraie
Biographic Data
| ID | 806085 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Aimi Hamraie |
| GIVEN NAMES | Aimi |
| FAMILY NAME | Hamraie |
| SIGNATURE | HAMRAIE A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Vanderbilt University |
| ORCID | 0009-0001-6255-7168 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 35 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Modeling the Livable City: Urban Ableism Across Borders
The concept of livability is treated as a universal public good, and many cities seek to model those ranked high on livability indexes. In the global livability imaginary, however, certain design features (notably active transportation infrastructures) are prioritized, with livable cities being those designed for bicycling and walking rather than automobiles. This article extends feminist infrastructure theorist Susan Leigh Star's query, "cui bon…
From Hidden Geographies to “Lived, Possible, and Imaginative Geographies”: Making a Just City, for Whom and Where
Continuing from a well-received The Professional Geographer Focus section on hidden geographies published in 2023, this sequel invites authors to contribute further to the theme, focusing on hidden geographies in cities. This opening article begins by laying out the context, including recent theoretical turns, a call to shift attention to what makes a just city, contestations of the concept of (social) justice, and calls for inclusive theorizatio…
Remote Access: Crip Nightlife, Artistry, and Technoscience
Since 2020, Kevin Gotkin has spearheaded disability nightlife events for the virtual Remote Access series for the Critical Design Lab, a multidisciplinary and multi-institution arts and design collaborative. Aimi Hamraie directs the Critical Design Lab and coined the term crip technoscience. Hamraie interviews Gotkin about the genesis of this disability arts and culture party and how it has evolved into an ongoing experiment in critical access-ma…
Remote Access: A Crip Nightlife Party
Remote Access is a disability nightlife event informed by disability history, technology, and artistry. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, a collective of disabled artists and designers created an event to showcase how disabled people often participate in social life from our homes and beds. This contribution offers a living archive of the party and its evolution, as the planners created protocols for collective access through methodologies s…
Crip Pandemic Conversation: Textures, Tools, and Recipes
'Crip Pandemic Conversation: Textures, Tools, and Recipes,' brings together experts whose scholarship, curation, organizing and artistic work centers crip insights and creativity to reflect on the work that 'Crip Pandemic Life: A Tapestry' undertakes. Margaret Fink, Aimi Hamraie, Mimi Khúc, and Sandie Yi each discuss how the pandemic impacted their work, and they join section co-editors Alyson Patsavas and Theodora Danylevich in discussing the ta…
(Ir)resistible Stairs: Public Health, Desiring Practices, and Material-Symbolic Ableism
Irresistible staircases are material symbols for the “new public health.” Popularized by sustainability standards and health-centered approaches to architecture and urbanism, they intend to motivate health-centered behaviors. This paper uses critical disability theory to analyze built forms, visual and textual narratives, and works of art, showing that the irresistible staircase aims to both produce desires for health and quell resistance. It tra…
Bess Williamson and Elizabeth Guffey, Making Disability Modern: Design Histories
How does disability remake the world? In the field of disability studies, historians often address the role of social norms and institutions in shaping perceptions of the healthy or normal body. More recent work in this field by scholars such as Mara Mills, Sara Hendren, Jaipreet Virdi, Elizabeth Guffey, Bess Williamson and myself focuses on the inverse: how disabled bodies shape social environments, laws and built forms. In particular, the last …
Alterlivability
This article responds to two diverging notions of “livability”: the normative New Urbanist imaginary of livable cities, where the urban good life manifests in neoliberal consumer cultures, green gentrification, and inaccessible infrastructures, and the feminist and disability concept of livable worlds, such as those in which nonnormate life thrives. Whereas the former ought to broaden its notion of “lives worth living,” the latter would benefit f…
Crip Technoscience Manifesto
As disabled people engaged in disability community, activism, and scholarship, our collective experiences and histories have taught us that we are effective agents of world building and dismantling toward more socially just relations.The grounds for social justice and world remaking, however, are frictioned;technologies, architectures, and infrastructures are often designed and implemented without committing to disability as a difference that mat…
Mapping Access: Digital Humanities, Disability Justice, and Sociospatial Practice
New digital projects use geographic information systems (GIS) and crowdsourcing applications to gather data about the accessibility of public spaces for disabled people. While these projects offer useful tools, their approach to technology and disability is often depoliticized. Compliance-based maps take disability for granted as medical impairment and do not consider mapping as a humanistic and activist practice. This essay draws on digital huma…
Universal Design and the Problem of “Post-Disability” Ideology
Although Universal Design gains popularity as a common sense strategy for crafting built environments for all users, accessibility for disabled people remains a marginal area of inquiry within design practice and theory. This article argues that the tension between accessibility and Universal Design stems from inadequate critical and historical attention to the concept of disability as it relates to discourses of “good design.” This article draws…
Historical Epistemology as Disability Studies Methodology: From the Models Framework to Foucault’s Archaeology of Cure
In this article, I argue for historical epistemology as a methodology for critical disability studies (DS) by examining Foucault’s archaeology of cure in History of Madness. Although the moral, medical, and social models of disability frame disability history as an advancement upon moral and medical authority and a replacement of it by sociopolitical knowledge, I argue that the more comprehensive frame in which these models circulate—the “models …
Cripping Feminist Technoscience
In feminist technoscience studies (FTS), the term technoscience conveys that scientific knowledge and technological worlds are active constructions of entangled material, social, and historical agents. Feminist analyses of assisted reproduction, environmental harm, digital media, and cyborg bodies constitute some of the work of FTS, a close sibling of the new materialisms and post-positivist feminist philosophies of science. Technoscience is also…
Designing Collective Access: A Feminist Disability Theory of Universal Design
Universal Design (UD) is a movement to produce built environments that are accessible to a broad range of human variation. Though UD is often taken for granted as synonymous with the best, most inclusive, forms of disability access, the values, methodologies, and epistemologies that underlie UD require closer scrutiny. This paper uses feminist and disability theories of architecture and geography in order to complicate the concepts of "universal"…
Universal Design as a Rehabilitation Strategy: Design for the Ages , by Jon Sanford; Universal Design: Creating Inclusive Environments , by Edward Steinfeld and Jordana Maisel
(2013). Universal Design as a Rehabilitation Strategy: Design for the Ages, by Jon Sanford; Universal Design: Creating Inclusive Environments, by Edward Steinfeld and Jordana Maisel. Design and Culture: Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 268-271
Mapping Access: Digital Humanities, Disability Justice, and Sociospatial Practice
New digital projects use geographic information systems (GIS) and crowdsourcing applications to gather data about the accessibility of public spaces for disabled people. While these projects offer useful tools, their approach to technology and disability is often depoliticized. Compliance-based maps take disability for granted as medical impairment and do not consider mapping as a humanistic and activist practice. This essay draws on digital huma…
Cripping Feminist Technoscience
In feminist technoscience studies (FTS), the term technoscience conveys that scientific knowledge and technological worlds are active constructions of entangled material, social, and historical agents. Feminist analyses of assisted reproduction, environmental harm, digital media, and cyborg bodies constitute some of the work of FTS, a close sibling of the new materialisms and post-positivist feminist philosophies of science. Technoscience is also…
Universal Design and the Problem of “Post-Disability” Ideology
Although Universal Design gains popularity as a common sense strategy for crafting built environments for all users, accessibility for disabled people remains a marginal area of inquiry within design practice and theory. This article argues that the tension between accessibility and Universal Design stems from inadequate critical and historical attention to the concept of disability as it relates to discourses of “good design.” This article draws…
Historical Epistemology as Disability Studies Methodology: From the Models Framework to Foucault’s Archaeology of Cure
In this article, I argue for historical epistemology as a methodology for critical disability studies (DS) by examining Foucault’s archaeology of cure in History of Madness. Although the moral, medical, and social models of disability frame disability history as an advancement upon moral and medical authority and a replacement of it by sociopolitical knowledge, I argue that the more comprehensive frame in which these models circulate—the “models …
Designing Collective Access: A Feminist Disability Theory of Universal Design
Universal Design (UD) is a movement to produce built environments that are accessible to a broad range of human variation. Though UD is often taken for granted as synonymous with the best, most inclusive, forms of disability access, the values, methodologies, and epistemologies that underlie UD require closer scrutiny. This paper uses feminist and disability theories of architecture and geography in order to complicate the concepts of "universal"…
Universal Design as a Rehabilitation Strategy: Design for the Ages , by Jon Sanford; Universal Design: Creating Inclusive Environments , by Edward Steinfeld and Jordana Maisel
(2013). Universal Design as a Rehabilitation Strategy: Design for the Ages, by Jon Sanford; Universal Design: Creating Inclusive Environments, by Edward Steinfeld and Jordana Maisel. Design and Culture: Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 268-271
Cripping Feminist Technoscience
In feminist technoscience studies (FTS), the term technoscience conveys that scientific knowledge and technological worlds are active constructions of entangled material, social, and historical agents. Feminist analyses of assisted reproduction, environmental harm, digital media, and cyborg bodies constitute some of the work of FTS, a close sibling of the new materialisms and post-positivist feminist philosophies of science. Technoscience is also…
Historical Epistemology as Disability Studies Methodology: From the Models Framework to Foucault’s Archaeology of Cure
In this article, I argue for historical epistemology as a methodology for critical disability studies (DS) by examining Foucault’s archaeology of cure in History of Madness. Although the moral, medical, and social models of disability frame disability history as an advancement upon moral and medical authority and a replacement of it by sociopolitical knowledge, I argue that the more comprehensive frame in which these models circulate—the “models …
Universal Design and the Problem of “Post-Disability” Ideology
Although Universal Design gains popularity as a common sense strategy for crafting built environments for all users, accessibility for disabled people remains a marginal area of inquiry within design practice and theory. This article argues that the tension between accessibility and Universal Design stems from inadequate critical and historical attention to the concept of disability as it relates to discourses of “good design.” This article draws…
Mapping Access: Digital Humanities, Disability Justice, and Sociospatial Practice
New digital projects use geographic information systems (GIS) and crowdsourcing applications to gather data about the accessibility of public spaces for disabled people. While these projects offer useful tools, their approach to technology and disability is often depoliticized. Compliance-based maps take disability for granted as medical impairment and do not consider mapping as a humanistic and activist practice. This essay draws on digital huma…
Crip Technoscience Manifesto
As disabled people engaged in disability community, activism, and scholarship, our collective experiences and histories have taught us that we are effective agents of world building and dismantling toward more socially just relations.The grounds for social justice and world remaking, however, are frictioned;technologies, architectures, and infrastructures are often designed and implemented without committing to disability as a difference that mat…
Alterlivability
This article responds to two diverging notions of “livability”: the normative New Urbanist imaginary of livable cities, where the urban good life manifests in neoliberal consumer cultures, green gentrification, and inaccessible infrastructures, and the feminist and disability concept of livable worlds, such as those in which nonnormate life thrives. Whereas the former ought to broaden its notion of “lives worth living,” the latter would benefit f…
Crip Pandemic Conversation: Textures, Tools, and Recipes
'Crip Pandemic Conversation: Textures, Tools, and Recipes,' brings together experts whose scholarship, curation, organizing and artistic work centers crip insights and creativity to reflect on the work that 'Crip Pandemic Life: A Tapestry' undertakes. Margaret Fink, Aimi Hamraie, Mimi Khúc, and Sandie Yi each discuss how the pandemic impacted their work, and they join section co-editors Alyson Patsavas and Theodora Danylevich in discussing the ta…
(Ir)resistible Stairs: Public Health, Desiring Practices, and Material-Symbolic Ableism
Irresistible staircases are material symbols for the “new public health.” Popularized by sustainability standards and health-centered approaches to architecture and urbanism, they intend to motivate health-centered behaviors. This paper uses critical disability theory to analyze built forms, visual and textual narratives, and works of art, showing that the irresistible staircase aims to both produce desires for health and quell resistance. It tra…
Bess Williamson and Elizabeth Guffey, Making Disability Modern: Design Histories
How does disability remake the world? In the field of disability studies, historians often address the role of social norms and institutions in shaping perceptions of the healthy or normal body. More recent work in this field by scholars such as Mara Mills, Sara Hendren, Jaipreet Virdi, Elizabeth Guffey, Bess Williamson and myself focuses on the inverse: how disabled bodies shape social environments, laws and built forms. In particular, the last …
Remote Access: A Crip Nightlife Party
Remote Access is a disability nightlife event informed by disability history, technology, and artistry. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, a collective of disabled artists and designers created an event to showcase how disabled people often participate in social life from our homes and beds. This contribution offers a living archive of the party and its evolution, as the planners created protocols for collective access through methodologies s…
Remote Access: Crip Nightlife, Artistry, and Technoscience
Since 2020, Kevin Gotkin has spearheaded disability nightlife events for the virtual Remote Access series for the Critical Design Lab, a multidisciplinary and multi-institution arts and design collaborative. Aimi Hamraie directs the Critical Design Lab and coined the term crip technoscience. Hamraie interviews Gotkin about the genesis of this disability arts and culture party and how it has evolved into an ongoing experiment in critical access-ma…
Modeling the Livable City: Urban Ableism Across Borders
The concept of livability is treated as a universal public good, and many cities seek to model those ranked high on livability indexes. In the global livability imaginary, however, certain design features (notably active transportation infrastructures) are prioritized, with livable cities being those designed for bicycling and walking rather than automobiles. This article extends feminist infrastructure theorist Susan Leigh Star's query, "cui bon…
From Hidden Geographies to “Lived, Possible, and Imaginative Geographies”: Making a Just City, for Whom and Where
Continuing from a well-received The Professional Geographer Focus section on hidden geographies published in 2023, this sequel invites authors to contribute further to the theme, focusing on hidden geographies in cities. This opening article begins by laying out the context, including recent theoretical turns, a call to shift attention to what makes a just city, contestations of the concept of (social) justice, and calls for inclusive theorizatio…
Sociology (14 works) · Political science (9 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Art (6 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Visual arts (5 works) · Narrative (4 works) · Universal design (4 works) · World Wide Web (4 works)