The Disability Inclusive Built Environment Scholars’ (DIBS) 2023 Critical Reading Workshop Series
The Disability Inclusive Built Environment Scholars’ (DIBS) 2023 critical reading workshop series is open to GRs, ECRs, scholars, and professionals in the disability inclusion space. These monthly groups provide an opportunity to connect people across disciplines and career stages to engage with contemporary debates and literature within disability studies and the built environment.
Based at MSD, these workshops will showcase disability-inclusive topics and methodologies as well as foster inter-disciplinary collaborations.
These workshops invite built environment academic and industry professionals to lead discussion around a selected topic. These hosts will select a ‘reading’ to guide discussion and workshop focus. This may include examining methodologies in academic papers, book chapters, podcasts or industry-related projects that raise a pertinent issue for discussion and analysis. Through these workshops, we hope to foster discussion, grappling with the ableist practices within the built environment disciplines and critical reflection with a vision to embed inclusive design and thinking in practice and scholarship of the future.
To ensure productive discussion at these workshops, we will limit workshop attendance. We also request that each host selects a reading, podcast/film or other pre-workshop exercise for circulation prior to the meeting. This will enable participants to come prepared with questions and reflections about the topic. Interested staff may contact Imogen Howe to join the monthly workshop with the first starting on Tuesday 14 February 2023, 2.15pm-3.15pm.
Planned Workshop Themes | ||
Date | Theme | Prompt for Discussion |
February | Diversifying Disability in the Built Environment | Diversity is a cornerstone of understanding how to analyse, critique, and procure just built environments. |
March | Indigeneity & Disability – Intersectionality & Identity Considerations | Australia is located on settler-colonial land. Indigenous Australians continue to face discrimination and inequality in the built environment and are far more likely to experience disability. It is important as scholars on stolen land to be reflexive and critical of these tensions to prevent the continued imposition of settler-colonial ideologies that marginalise Indigenous Australians. When considering the nexus between disability, Indigeneity, and higher education, these tensions become even more important to unpack and decolonise for the future of equitable and just design. Academic institutions are spaces of critical learning on disability inclusion in the built environment. At present, these institutions fail to include large scale examination of disability within many required and elective subjects or as part of accreditation of certain disciplines. As part of academic training, this workshop aims at interrogating the politics behind these tensions and suggest ways forward in promoting experienced-based learning and social procurement of the built environment. |
April | Disabilities and Sustainable Development | Sustainable development is a critical space of engagement within the built environment profession. In the context of biodiversity loss and climate change, climate adaptation plans can often prefer one facet of sustainable development over another, often environmental. It is critical to engage with triple bottom-line approaches to sustainable development and adaptation work in un/built environments. Doing so, ensures equitable developments that consider people living with disabilities in sustainable development. |
May | Co-designing for the Built Environment Part I: Knowledge | Co-production and codesign require critical engagement and discussion on knowledge geometries which inform planning processes. This workshop aims at interrogating and breaking down knowledge power hierarchies in operation in the built environment to ensure future built environment industry development mirrors community needs. |
June | Co-designing for the Built Environment Part II: Universal Design (for learning) | Universal Design Principles have been presented as a solution to producing equitable and inclusive environments for all. However, there is critique surrounding the appropriateness of implementation. This workshop will aim at unpacking some of the tensions in facilitating Universal Design and suggest avenues for upholding these principles as minimum requirements for development. |
July | Co-designing for the Built Environment Part III: Representing & Designing with rather than for | This workshop provides discussion on strategies of inclusion within design and development processes. This focuses on methodologies within the built environment which at a bureaucratic level can exclude populations professionals are designing with. Ensuring graduate and early career researchers understand these tensions and are provided with a technical toolkit for including people with disabilities in design. |
August | Regulations, Urban Policy, and Planning | Operating within a political space, built environment professionals often come against regulations which limit the efficiency of their work to codesign and implement universal design principles in meaningful ways. This workshop interrogates ways forward in navigating these tensions as well as opportunities to challenge regulatory constraints to procure more productive design processes and defences for people living with disabilities. |
September | Safeguarding Universal Design | The implementation of universal design can often be challenged by regulatory constraints within planning schemes and building requirements. It is essential to uphold and safeguard these principles within the development process. This workshop aims to interrogate critical case studies in how to bolster universal design within local government and development processes. |
October | Spatial urban-regional inequalities for people with disabilities | Engagement in formal work, and forced peri-urban and regional living to access affordable housing, gentrification, and inaccessibility to resources are the realities of people with disabilities and their carers. When examining the spatiality of people with disabilities, the ‘place’ where people live must also be critically interrogated to preserve equity in universal design. Affordable, adequate, and equitable housing stock which is in close proximity to essential services is an essential point of focus for the future of urbanisation in Melbourne. This workshop interrogates some of these tensions and aims to make attendees aware of the spatial consequences of some of their ‘urban’ work. |
November | Social Procurement of the Built Environment | How do we consider social justice and ethics in the procurement of the built environment? |