Labs for Liberation Summer Institute Lecture Series

Dates: June 9-July 18, 2025. All sessions are online. ASL and CART available.

Summer Institute directors: Moya Bailey and Aimi Hamraie

Accessibility coordinator: Angela Stanley 

Funded by: The Mellon Foundation 

Overview

What does it take to design an accessible world? For decades, design education has approached disability through the limited parameters of accessibility codes and standards. Schools of architecture, design, engineering, computing, and others rarely extend beyond minimum requirements to consider interdisciplinary frameworks offered by the disability justice movement, feminist theory, critical disability studies, or Black studies. At the same time, students of humanistic and social science approaches to disability understand that our built and social environments shape how disabled people are treated. But these students rarely have opportunities to actually engage with design as a collaborative praxis for working towards a more accessible world. 

The Labs for Liberation Summer Institute on Disability and Design offers a collaborative, generative, theoretically-rigorous, and lab-based space for integrating accessibility theory and practice. Our goal is to create new conversations between critical disability studies and Black feminist disability approaches to design and technology. Participants will have opportunities to engage with experts in these fields in order to bridge many realms of thinking, knowing, and making. Building on the innovative protocols of the Critical Design Lab and the Digital Apothecary Lab, the summer institute will lay the necessary groundwork for new generations of designers and theorists to understand what it means to go “beyond the code” in accessible design. 

This Summer Institute is part of a broader project funded by the Mellon Foundation.

Lecture Series

The Labs for Liberation Summer Institute on Disability and Design will host six lectures and panel discussions throughout June and July on Mondays from 10am-12pm CST. These lectures are open to the public and require registration. Please note that you must register for each lecture you would like to attend. All lectures will have ASL and CART provided. If you have any other accessibility requests, please contact Angela Stanley.