Episode 40: Contra* Podcasting in Community with Qudsiya Naqui

The podcast introductory segment is composed to evoke friction. It begins with the sound of an elevator crunching as it goes up. A robotic voice says “floor two.” Then music with a mysterious tone comes on. A series of voices define Contra. Layered voices say:

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Contra is friction… Contra is texture… Contra is questions…Nuanced…Collaborative…Contra* is world-changing…Contra is innovation, messy, solidarity, interdependence…Contra is thinking about design critically. Contra is a podcast.

 

Throughout, there are sounds of typing, texting and Zoom being opened. 

Then an electric guitar bass note fades into the sound of a digital call ringing and starting. The intro ends with the sound of a Facetime call ringing and then picked up.

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Qudsiya Naqui:

I’ve really appreciated cross-disability understandings of access, negotiating access, understanding that as we ave different disabilities, we have different access needs. Sometimes they might clash, that we might need to like, have respectful conversation and how to make that work together. 

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[Bright pops. Strings ripple under Aimi’s voice.]

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Aimi Hamraie: 

Welcome back to the Contra* podcast. I’m your host, Aimi Hamraie. On this season of Contra* we are drawing on the Remote Access Archive, a free online archive that documents how disabled people and communities have used technology for remote participation both before and during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Today’s episode features an interview with Qudsiya Nacqui, host of Down to the Struts podcast, which is also an interview based podcast about disability and design. 

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It was recorded by me, Aimi Hamraie, on March 22nd, 2023, via Zoom. Qudsiya and I talk about becoming disabled, and negotiating access. Blindness and screen readers, experiments with remote access technologies and how she came to use podcasting to build remote, cross disability communities. 

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Qudsiya Naqui:

My name is Qudsiya Naqui. I'm 39 years old and I live in Washington, DC. I am a South Asian woman. I identify as a disabled person. I also identify as a blind person. 

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Aimi Hamraie:

So we're going to talk about your experiences of remote access. Do you have any recollections from your life up until that point of using remote access?

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Qudsiya Naqui:

Absolutely. When I was a child, I remember writing letters, when I still had some usable vision and I could still read handwritten text, and I would send letters back and forth with my cousins in India, as my family immigrated to the US from India and I was born in the United States. So that's probably my first experience with remote access as a child and because I had so much family abroad all over the world, we used the telephone a lot to communicate with people before there were smartphones or video chat or any of that. After that, as technology evolved, remote access included things like texting, again international WhatsApp or phone calls or video chats. So I was using all of those modalities, also email and instant message to communicate with people that weren't in my immediate physical space before the pandemic started. 

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Aimi Hamraie:

Great. Do you, do you remember anything about changing forms of accessibility in those different mediums. For example, was there a time when texting or email was not accessible to you and something changed to make it accessible?

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Qudsiya Naqui:

Yes. I lost a lot of vision over time, particularly in my early and mid, I had pretty good usable vision during the day. I've always been night blind. I could read print and things like that and then after a certain point those things started to become increasingly difficult. And I think there was a period of probably a good solid 5 to 10 years where things like text, email, accessing the internet, all of those things were really, really, really hard because I didn't have exposure to accessibility technology. And as I became more aware and I started to seek out more accessible options to use my computer, use my phone, and I discovered text-to-speech. I was never trained in Braille as a child because when I was in elementary school, because I had a decent amount of usable vision they just didn't put me in that category and it was never offered to me. So text-to-speech really, really changed the way I could interact. And so once I kind of had mastered those skills, I was able to regain some of that access to emails, to texting, to operating the internet that I had sort of lost in some way for a period of years.

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Aimi Hamraie:

Do you remember about when that was, that you started to have access to text-to-speech? 

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Qudsiya Naqui:

I would say it was in my late twenties, early thirties. 

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Aimi Hamraie:

And was it a matter of the technology just not really being available or not being able to get it ?

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Qudsiya Naqui:

I think the technology was available, things like JAWS were available since I think the nineties. But again – in rehabilitation practice when I was a kid, it was all about maximizing your vision. So I wasn't really exposed or introduced to those as options because it was always about how can we maximize the use of your usable vision. So I was more using magnification or really good lighting as as access solutions as opposed to the text-to-speech. 

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So I think by the time I was using it, I think it was around iPhone 5 or iPhone 6. That Voice Over technology had already been developed and I think it was just a matter of me starting to be friends with more blind people and watching them use that stuff. And same thing with JAWS, just kind of realizing, okay I really, my visual acuity is extremely poor. It's not feasible anymore for me to try to read stuff. And it's also exhausting. And not very time efficient. And then I started to build my skills and using those things. 

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Aimi Hamraie:

I'm curious if over the course of your life, the more you connected with other blind people and blind community, if in any way remote access may have been part of that?

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Qudsiya Naqui:

So my first real deep exposure to blindness community or disability community in general was actually not via remote access. It was when I moved to Washington DC. I was introduced to one person who was also blind who then introduced me to all kinds of other people and that's how those relationships sort of cultivated and really built my understanding of what it means to be in disability community. 

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And it wasn't until I started my podcast in 2020 that I started to use mediums like Zoom to connect with more disability community on a broader scale. And that also included the things I did to promote my podcast, so social media and things like that. So that was really the – it was really in 2020 that I started to connect with disability community outside of my physical living area.

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Aimi Hamraie:

Oh, very interesting. So this is kind of a pandemic era phenomenon. 

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Qudsiya Naqui:

Yes. 

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Aimi Hamraie:

And prior to that, the connections that you had were more in person and then during the pandemic you had more remote connections, is that right?

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Qudsiya Naqui:

That's right. 

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Aimi Hamraie:

Are there any other things that you want to say about remote access before the pandemic? Did you ever have trouble getting remote access, were there interesting ways that people made that happen? Or things that you did, things that you used?

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Qudsiya Naqui:

Once I had a command of the text-to-speech, remote access became pretty easy. And I used the typical tools. One area though where I struggled a little bit with the remote access was when it came to work. And I think that's because prior to the pandemic I think most employers have this culture that was very sort of antithetical to remote access and systems weren't really set up to work well at home. So for example, if I wanted to work at home and I needed to be on the VPN, the problem is when you're on the VPN at one of my jobs, JAWS doesn't work. So it was effectively impossible to work at home and have full access. So that's an area where I feel like there were barriers to remote access for me before the pandemic.

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Aimi Hamraie:

And do you wanna say a little bit about what kind of work you do?

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Qudsiya Naqui:

So I work as a lawyer. 

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Aimi Hamraie:

So I would imagine that a lot of your job involves documents and things like that, so using JAWS would be pretty important to that. And if you weren't able to get on the VPN then that could be very complicated.

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Qudsiya Naqui:

Yes, it would be pretty much functionally impossible to do my work. 

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Aimi Hamraie:

Has that changed at all? 

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Qudsiya Naqui:

Oh my goodness, yes. Since the pandemic – I can't pinpoint if it's because the technology has improved or because folks’ willingness to use different types of technologies that might facilitate remote work has changed. But yes, I work 100% remotely and I have done for the past 3 years. And it's been extremely smooth and has actually just really improved my overall quality of life I think. 

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Aimi Hamraie:

Oh great. Do you want to say more about any of the technical aspects of it or things that have changed that have been working out so well.

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Qudsiya Naqui:

It's a combination of factors, I think, and it's the employer’s flexibility and willingness and ability to implement technologies that work better remotely. Plus my own skill development as a JAWS user in particular. I've become a lot better at using JAWS. And also the tech setup at home is really great. Now I don't need to worry about JAWS not working, it's definitely going to work on the VPN. So then I can be anywhere and fully access my computer as if I was in the office. And it's actually opened up a lot of other possibilities for me, like I can work on a train, I can work in my home, I can work in other people's homes. So I have far more flexibility and mobility because the computer set-up works really well. I've had almost no issues working with a laptop anywhere other than my office.

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Aimi Hamraie:

I'm glad to hear it. 

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[Upbeat, jazzy chords]

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What are some ways that remote access has been significant for you since the pandemic started?

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Qudsiya Naqui:

The pandemic really catalyzed me to start my podcast which is called Down to the Struts and it's a podcast about disability design and intersectionality. We all had a lot of time being in our homes, if we were so fortunate to be able to be in our homes during the pandemic I know a lot of people weren't. I had so much time on my hands all of a sudden and I thought about how I wanted to use that time. 

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I had very recently in my early thirties started to come into disability community and start to appreciate and understand disability culture. And I really wanted to dive deeper into some of those issues. Both because I hoped that people would listen to the stories that I shared and they would help someone, but also frankly for myself to explore my own disability identity and community with others. I started the podcast. And in the course of doing outreach and interviewing people, that's really when the online universe and nature of disability community and disability organizing really became visible to me. I continue to be a very, very, very reluctant social media user, but because of the podcast I got onto things like Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and I started using them, not so much as a tool to show people about my life, but as a tool to really meaningfully connect with others and learn about their experiences, learn more about myself through their experiences, and share their stories. I can't explain how many people, opportunities, things I've been able to do because of the podcast. And I've done all of them remotely. I haven't interviewed a single person in person for my podcast. It's all been virtual. And because people I interview are all over the world and it just wouldn't be possible without the technology to do that.

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Aimi Hamraie:

Do you feel like people were more available and willing to be on your podcast because of the pandemic normalization of remote access?

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Qudsiya Naqui:

Yeah, I definitely think so. I definitely think that. Because you didn't need a studio and people didn't need to travel. I think people were more inclined to say yes because it had very little burden on them to do it. And it was very little burden on me too, to manage the logistics of having someone come and setting up a studio and all that kind of thing. My studio was my walk-in closet and I just got a microphone and I had a laptop and that's all that I needed and it really worked well.

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Aimi Hamraie:

But what is the technological setup that enables you to create podcasts and build community around that?

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Qudsiya Naqui:

So it's a few things and I mentioned a couple of them. So I had like I said, a walk-in closet. It's not very big but it's a great semi-soundproof place. I invested in a microphone and a microphone stand. And I have a laptop. And then the platform I use to record is just Zoom. The other thing I should mention that's really important is that I was able to get a team together. So two friends of mine who heard about what I was doing and they were really excited about it, one of them had audio producing skills and the other one had social media skills. And my friend who does my social media and the website is in London and my other friend actually she lives in DC so I actually see her on a regular basis. But we don't interact around the podcast in person, we see each other as friends here in DC, but all of the podcast production process with the three of us happens totally remotely. 

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Aimi Hamraie:

I was curious about that because I know that you're working with a team of folks. And I think that’s – it is a normal thing to do if you're not part of a podcast network or something like that. That these forms of media themselves are produced remotely in digital files, are sent back and forth. Are the people who are working with you on the podcast also in your disability communities? 

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Qudsiya Naqui:

Sort of. So I met them both through adaptive sports. So I think they would probably identify themselves as non-disabled. However, we met in the context of doing adaptive sport. One of them I've ridden tandem with, she served as a tandem captain for Blind Stokers, and the other is my running partner who I still run with three days a week. My social media manager and I recently ran the London Marathon. And she was my guide for that and we ran together. So they are part of my disability community in that sense, that they are in community with us through adaptive sports.

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Aimi Hamraie:

Yeah, it sounds like they're part of disability culture. And doing access work in certain ways. And so interesting that you have this really close embodied in-person relationship with them and then also that you do this work remotely. 

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Qudsiya Naqui:

Yes, it's really a gift to work with them. 

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Aimi Hamraie:

Because I was wondering about whether audio production technology is accessible. I know that in many fields, the technical softwares – there's a lot of variation in whether they're screen reader accessible and things like that. But it sounds like somebody else is doing that part.

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Qudsiya Naqui:

Yeah. I provide the sort-of story editing element. So I'll edit on a transcript and then she'll create the audio and manipulate the audio file. I think you also spoke with my wonderful colleague in podcasting, Thomas Reid, and he does everything himself. He's a one-man show. And he is proof positive that it is possible to do it accessibly. He's just an audio wizard. But I do not have that skill set. I'm just a lawyer so I had to get myself some help. 

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Aimi Hamraie:

Yeah, I mean, totally. I completely understand that. And with the podcast that my lab does there are a lot of parts we have to kind of outsource because it's like, how much time and effort can we invest into this and still do other stuff. 

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[Upbeat, jazzy chords]

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Aimi Hamraie:

So maybe we can talk a little bit about Down to the Struts and the social world around it. I think something that to me is striking about it, is that you do a lot of social media outreach. So what has come about in terms of your access to disability community or other people connecting to each other and this kind of information as a result of your podcast?

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Qudsiya Naqui:

It's been really powerful. So if you look at the socials for the podcast, I don't have like 100,000 Instagram followers, I don't have that kind of reach there. But the thing that matters most to me is the things that people probably don't really see. So getting emails from someone saying, I listen to your podcast and it made me think differently about my disability or I feel empowered or I feel liberated in some way. Those moments are really some of the most meaningful to me. It's actually led me into – the ways in which I really connected with disability community the most is through – I've gotten a bunch of opportunities to do speaking engagements, to do writing projects. I wrote a piece for Alice Wong's Disability Visibility Project blog about disabled immigrants. I spoke at a conference about disability and immigration. I guest-produced a podcast for a travel magazine about accessible travel. And all along the way of all these things, I have made deep connections and friendships with people. It's really changed my life, I have to say. I mean, it sounds very dramatic but there's no other way to put it. I think it really changed the course of things for me. And I feel so grateful to have this community because I was so alone my whole life in my disability experience and it's so liberating to know that I'm not alone. It's just such a supportive space.

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Aimi Hamraie:

Yeah, that's beautiful. I think you're really highlighting some of the ways that, in this time that we're living in right now, so much of disability culture is through these networks that are joined together on the internet. And so for example, Alice Wong's Disability Visibility Project. If someone was to draw a diagram, that would be the central hub for so many people and their connections. And I think Alice herself is someone who has really creatively used media itself and the internet to make disability culture something that we can point to and be like, that's a real thing.

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Qudsiya Naqui:

And it's cool! It's cool and it's fun. And Alice was actually the first person that I reached out to when I was thinking about starting the podcast. I had found DVP and I was listening to her DVP podcast and I just cold emailed her out of nowhere. And she responded to me within 24 hours. Connected me with Thomas and Cheryl Green. It's not even just that her – It's not even just the website, it's her as a human. She is so generous. And I found that with so many people. I found that with you. I found that with everyone I've interviewed. There's something special about this community, that I haven't seen in any other community that I'm part of, that I really love and it keeps me coming back. And I am still to this day a very reluctant social media user and I think I always will be. However, I started to understand that it's not all bad, right? It is such a critical form of not just community building, but organizing, sharing information, and this was very true during the pandemic. People's ability to communicate over Twitter sometimes could mean the difference between having access or not, having resources or having help or not. Being in a dire situation, being able to get yourself out because you have this network of people you can communicate with.

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Aimi Hamraie:

Yeah, beautiful. So you emailed Alice and then what happened? 

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Qudsiya Naqui:

She responded. She actually said, and I love this, again it's very disability community. She's like, I am super busy. Because her book Disability Visibility had just come out. She's like, I'm really underwater right now, but first she introduced me to Cheryl Green who is just the most lovely human on earth. And then Cheryl led me to Thomas and then it just kind of went on from there. And I still keep in touch with Alice a little bit. She so kindly, back in 2021, agreed to be on my show and to talk about her memoir that came out I think either later that year or 2022, I can't remember. Year of the Tiger. And so it was really, really kind of her to do that. 

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I also interviewed Judy Heumann, which was wild. And not something I would have expected that would happen. But that just goes to show you the people who are quote “super famous” like Alice and Judy, when it comes to their community, will show up. And that's such a model for me. I've tried in my small way in my little corner to pay that forward. 

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Aimi Hamraie:

So many of our movement leaders are incredibly generous. And it seems like without remote access some of those conversations probably couldn't have happened too. 

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Qudsiya Naqui:

Oh no. Oh, no way. The remote access both of the internet being a font of information. I think I searched “disability podcasts”. That's how I found DVP. And then Alice was really accessible and easy to get in touch with.

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And the last thing I'll say is, I think the podcast – and the underpinning of all of it, right, is remote access because it wouldn't have happened without remote access. I think the podcast made me an activist. I don't think I was before. I think it really made me realize that there are modalities by which I could participate in making change. So let me give you an example. I never felt like going out into the streets and protesting was a thing that felt accessible fully to me, that I could do independently. And I think the access to disability community that the podcast afforded made me realize there's a million and one ways that are equally meaningful that you can contribute to creating the change you want to see in the world. That was the biggest message of disability culture that I received. Which is like, you are valuable, you have things to contribute, you may not be able to participate in one way that might not be the most accessible to you, but you can certainly do it in another way, and it's all equally valuable. That's kind of the last lesson I would share that I learned from the experience of doing the podcast.

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Aimi Hamraie:

Yeah, that's really great. And it's striking to me too that you, through this process of becoming an activist and creating the podcast, you're also connecting with other disability activists who are using this medium and space. It may have looked really different if all of you were meeting in person, like in Washington DC or something like that. 

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[Upbeat, jazzy chords]

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Aimi Hamraie:

Are there any other types of remote access that are significant for you in this pandemic era that you want to talk about?

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Qudsiya Naqui:

It's funny because Zoom is such an interesting thing when you're blind. Right? It's not that different from being on a telephone. But there's something about it, this ability to just send a link and be connected that is really – there's something about it.

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Aimi Hamraie:

I wonder if we could get into Zoom accessibility a little bit more. And I'm thinking about how there’s certain practices. Across access needs and disability communities there are things about Zoom that are accessible and some that are really inaccessible. Or ways that people have had to take Zoom and do something to it to try to make it accessible. 

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So for example, I feel like the process, in some spaces, of people image-describing themselves at the start of a call is a new thing in the Zoom era. Would you say that that's true? 

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Qudsiya Naqui:

Oh yes, I had never seen that before and I really like it. I know there's been some debate in the blindness community about it. But I think if it's not like a rambling thing and it's just like give me the information that I would have if I was sighted. That's really useful. 

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Something about the virtual setting, I feel like made people more willing to experiment with these sort of access techniques. Somehow. I couldn't picture people doing self description in an in-person meeting. Or maybe feeling way more self conscious about it. And I definitely want to go back to your point about these video platforms because I've literally used them all. Google Meet, Zoom, Teams, Webex, they all have their benefits and their drawbacks. 

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In the job that I was in during the pandemic, I had a colleague on my team who was hard of hearing. She could lip read, but she used VRS which worked the best with Zoom for us. But it was interesting just thinking about your term, Aimi, of negotiating access. It was very interesting as we work together on this pretty small team. There was like 6 or 7 of us. Navigating potentially conflicting access needs between the two of us, which was really interesting. 

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Aimi Hamraie:

What's an example of something that you had to navigate? 

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Qudsiya Naqui:

It was before the organization adopted Teams. I think there were only two options. It was like Teams and Webex. Teams for a while they didn't have the telephone options set up as a paid feature for the enterprise account. So that was a disaster for my colleague because she couldn't connect to her VRS. But Teams was way more accessible to me as a screen reader user than Webex. Because Webex, I think they fixed the glitches, but there were some major problems, like I couldn't operate any of the buttons, they were all unlabeled, my cursor would get stuck, all this kind of stuff. But Webex worked great with her VRS. So we had to navigate that. Often times I would just log into the Webex and I would be able to do the basic, but I wouldn't be able to mute and unmute or I had trouble with certain things but I would do it so that she could have the VRS. And then we just fought a battle with IT to get a phone option for Teams and then once Teams could work for her, then we were good. 

And oh, the other thing we would do is – we didn't have an enterprise account for Zoom so we forced the institution to give our team a Zoom account. So Zoom worked well for both of us. That was the middle ground platform. So we did that a lot of the time too. But it was a really interesting conundrum that we had to navigate.

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Aimi Hamraie:

That sounds like you had to both figure out how to play with the technology to compromise, but also do a lot of advocacy for the right tools. And it's interesting that those other ones didn't work as well as Zoom or that Zoom ended up being the one that worked for both of you and also has become a more popular platform than a lot of these other ones in certain ways. And something that I've noticed, and I wonder if you've noticed any examples of things like this, is that Zoom seems to evolve and incorporate a lot of accessibility technologies over time. Are there any features of Zoom that have changed over time that have made things more accessible for you?

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Qudsiya Naqui:

I think in terms of the screen reader experience, I haven't seen a ton of change, but it was already really good. It just works really, really well. I still struggle with things like screen sharing, but all the platforms are the same in that regard. Actually, I think Teams is the only outlier. In Teams when you're screen sharing, you can actually – I can navigate my screen reader into the thing that's being shared to actually read it, but in Webex and Zoom I don't think you can quite do that. When a screen is being shared you can't really – the screen reader doesn't have the capacity to read the shared screen. But there's workarounds, which is sending materials in advance or separately in an email and then I would just open up the file on my computer alongside the Zoom and kind of do it that way. That was something we had sort of figured out. But Zoom was, baseline for screen readers, really good.

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Aimi Hamraie:

Yeah, that's really helpful to know about. I'm curious, and this kind of touches back on something we were talking about a little bit earlier, when you were saying that people have become more accustomed to certain accessibility practices on Zoom. Do you feel like people are doing image description as part of calls and are they doing a good job with it?

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Qudsiya Naqui:

No. I think that getting people to describe stuff is really hard. The self descriptions as part of intros is becoming more normalized, I wouldn't say it's fully normalized, but it's getting there. But the other thing that I think people are getting a little bit better at, they're not perfect, is saying their name before they speak, which can be helpful for people with multiple different types of disabilities. 

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In terms of describing things in a meeting, that is really hard to get people to do. And I often wonder, I feel like someone should do a study about what the psychological barriers are, why people don't do that. Sometimes what I'll do with people is I'll tell them, imagine that I'm on the phone and I have no access to your PowerPoint that you're sharing right now. How would you describe it? And that sometimes helps, but then they forget again after like five minutes. 

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Aimi Hamraie:

Before the pandemic, my students didn't really even know what image description was and why you had to do it. And some practices and discourse came about as a result. But then of course, there are these questions about: how do you do it well and make it meaningful? As you mentioned before, there are debates about whether those self descriptions are meaningful or sometimes people misunderstand what it is. They think they’re saying their identities, not describing visually what's on the screen. So there are a lot of different directions that goes. 

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Qudsiya Naqui:

And I will say though in the written form – I think orally having people describe what they're talking about in a meeting, really hard. Very few people do that that I know of. However, I feel like there is a slight shift in culture around alt text, for instance. Or describing an image on a website. I'm coming across more websites that do that, or more documents that do that with images.

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Aimi Hamraie:

And can you say a little bit more about the significance or impact of that on you in terms of remote access?

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Qudsiya Naqui:

It has a huge impact. I'll give you an example of something that didn't go well. During the pandemic a lot of my cousins, we started a family WhatsApp chat. Because I have family all over the world and we're all very close with each other. And they would constantly send family photos and no one ever described them. And I asked three times, I even sent a link, here's how you input alt text into an image using iPhone, because everyone had an iPhone. Strike 1, strike 2, strike 3, and then I actually left the group in protest. And there was a big hullabaloo around it. And everyone was like, oh my god, sorry. And I'm like, I don't want to hear your sorry anymore. I want you to just do it. It takes two seconds. Two seconds. And now what I do is if I'm texting, I'm still not back in that group, but when I'm texting with my mom and my sister are texting with me and they're sending me, my sister sending me photos of her kids or whatever, I won't respond. And there’ll be a pause. And then I'll get an image description.

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I think the other thing that's changed is the demand. Once you climb to the top of the access mountain, it's really hard to be marched down and told you have to expect something less. And so I think part of the reason the culture is slowly, slowly, slowly changing is because as a disability community we don't tolerate not having access. We don't accept it as the norm anymore.

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Aimi Hamraie:

Do you notice differences between disabled and nondisabled communities in terms of how they're doing remote access?

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Qudsiya Naqui:

think in disability community, let me start there. I would say, I really appreciate it, and I think this is something that's changing and maybe didn't exist before: cross disability understandings of access. And again, going back to that concept of negotiating access, understanding that we, as we have different disabilities, we have different access needs, sometimes they might clash, we need to really hold space for that and have respectful conversation about how we make that work together. For me I feel like that's broken down a lot of silos between different disability communities, which I think is a really good thing.

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With non-disabled folks, I think it's still a mixed bag. There's some people who really get it and there's people who just really don't because they don't think about disability, they don't interact with disability. I think there's still so much work to do to really shift culture in a really larger scale way.

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But progress. My mom and sister not getting a response from me and realizing like, oh we should put an image description. And then I'll respond immediately. So I mean that's huge. I think that's great. 

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Aimi Hamraie:

Are there any final things you would like to share about this before we wrap up?

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Qudsiya Naqui:

This was an unique moment in our history, when there was a pandemic in 1918, but we didn't have all this technology and it's just such an interesting analysis or study of what this did and how this shaped disability culture, culture at large. So I'm personally really excited to access the archives. 

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Aimi Hamraie:

Thank you so much.

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[rippling music and rhythmic pops underneath]

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Aimi Hamraie:

You’ve been listening to Contra*, a podcast about disability, design justice and the lifeworld. Contra* is a production of the Critical Design Lab. This season’s episodes draw on our recent project the Remote Access Archive, created by a team of disabled researchers collaborating remotely. Learn more about our projects, including the Remote Access Archive at www.criticaldesignlab.com. 

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If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe on Spotify. Rate and leave a review. 

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This season of Contra* is edited by Ilana Nevins. Kelsie Acton and Aimi Hamraie developed the episodes.

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The Contra* podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial, share alike international 3.0 license. That means you can remix, repost or recycle any of the content as long as you cite the original source, you aren’t making money, you don’t change the credits and you share it under the same license.

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