Doctoral Dissertation Research: Designing Access for Disabled People. Negotiating Barrier-Free Environments

残疾影响着全球大量人口，但其定义和运作方式各不相同，影响着广泛的问题，从身份到住宿、准入和公平。本博士论文项目利用了城市中独特的自然实验，这些实验回顾性和前瞻性地设计无障碍空间，以了解在不同背景下，残疾人的经验和理解的变化如何影响无障碍空间的实施。研究者为城市研究、人类学和残疾研究提供了新的材料，以考虑前瞻性和回顾性设计对包容性和可及性的影响。该项目支持研究生的培训，并与学术和非学术受众及利益相关者广泛分享其研究结果。本研究项目使用比较的视角来告知不同的利益相关者如何解释、理解和制定访问。在两个促进无障碍环境的城市中，研究者使用各种综合人种志和档案方法来研究三个相关问题：(1)谁的专业知识决定了如何定义和实施无障碍？(2)异质性残障人士如何融入无障碍环境？(3)区域政治如何影响无障碍环境的专业知识和可变经验的评估？通过从比较的角度理解获取，该项目将有助于为科学残疾研究、城市规划、政治人类学等领域的前沿问题提供信息，同时为关于身份和包容的关键辩论提供信息。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Disability affects large swaths of the global population but is variably defined and operationalized, affecting a broad range of issues, from identity, to accommodation, access, and equity. This doctoral dissertation project leverages unique natural experiments in cities that are both retrospectively and prospectively designing barrier-free spaces to understand how variation in the experience and understanding of disability impact the implementation of accessible spaces as they are rolled out in different contexts. Contributing to urban studies, anthropology, and disability studies, the investigators provide new materials to consider the effects of prospective and retrospective design on inclusion and access. This project supports a graduate student’s training and shares its findings broadly with academic and non-academic audiences and stakeholders. This research project uses a comparative lens to inform how different stakeholders interpret, understand, and enact access. In two cities promoting barrier-free environments, the investigators use a variety of synthetic ethnographic and archival methods to engage three related questions: (1) Whose expertise determines how barrier-free is defined and implemented? (2) How do people with heterogeneous disabilities engage with barrier-free environments? (3) How do regional politics impact the valuation of expertise and variable experiences of barrier-free environments? By understanding access from a comparative perspective, this project will help to inform cutting-edge issues in scientific disability studies, urban planning, political anthropology while informing key debates on identity and inclusion.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.