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Welcome to the portal for our specialized six-week course designed to challenge how we think about disability, rights, and institutional compliance.
Traditional disability programs often hand accessibility to participants as a finished product, inadvertently reinforcing a dynamic of charity rather than civil rights. True independent living requires friction, critical awareness, and the reclamation of power.
This class moves beyond passive instruction of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Here, participants step into an environment where standard accommodations are not pre-packaged. Success in this space requires identifying barriers, naming specific access needs, and leveraging the history and mechanics of the law to demand rights in real time.
Core Objectives:
Deconstruct the historical origins of the ADA and the disability rights movement, analyzing the compromises and limitations built into the original legislation.
Evaluate how legal frameworks function in everyday life, shifting the perspective from compliance checkboxes to lived autonomy.
Practice real-time self-advocacy by identifying environmental and systemic barriers within the immediate classroom setting.
Articulate specific access needs clearly and assertively, treating accommodation requests not as favors to be asked for, but as legal and human rights to be enforced.
The 6-Week Breakdown:
Week One: Foundations and Friction. Introduction to disability history, the lead-up to the 1990 ADA passage, and an immediate introduction to the course environment where participants must audit the room for missing structural supports and begin voicing their needs.
Week Two: The Anatomy of a Law. Examining Title I through Title V of the ADA, separating statutory promise from practical enforcement, and analyzing how institutional barriers persist despite the law.
Week Three: Mapping Everyday Access. Practical strategies for documenting architectural, digital, and attitudinal barriers in local communities and workplaces, moving from the classroom micro-level to the macro-level.
Week Four: The Art of the Demand. Developing scripts, collective bargaining strategies, and legal grounding for verbalizing access needs under pressure and handling institutional pushback.
Week Five: Challenging the System. Critiquing modern tokenism and organizational compliance models, questioning whether standard institutional frameworks truly serve independent living or just manage liability.
Week Six: Beyond Compliance and Final Synthesis. Integrating the lessons of the course into a lifelong framework for self-advocacy, mutual aid, and community-level disruption.
When you enter this class space, you may notice that things feel off. Access features might be missing, obscured, or intentionally omitted.
This is not an oversight.
For decades, disabled individuals have been forced to navigate spaces built without them in mind, constantly having to justify their right to exist in public and private spheres. In this class, we make that reality explicit. Your access needs matter, but we are flipping the script: instead of the institution anticipating every need automatically, you will experience what it means to actively name, claim, and demand the accommodations you require to participate fully.
Use this space to practice your voice, test the boundaries of the ADA, and refuse to accept passive barriers.