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Session 2: Access as aesthetic and relational praxis | with Leni van Goidsenhoven
Date and Time: 23 September, 15:00-17:30
Location: University of Amsterdam, BG2, Room 0.12
This is the second event in the reading group series that is part of The Ugly Sides of Care, hosted by invited guest Leni van Goidsenhoven. In dialogue with the project’s focus on care frictions and the messy realities of relational practice, this session conceives of accessibility and access intimacy* as similarly unstable and negotiated processes. Accessibility, too, emerges through dependency, discomfort, adjustment, and incomplete ways of living and working together.
Together, we will reflect on the gap between accessibility as a lived and negotiated praxis and the ways it is commonly institutionalised. Accessibility is often approached as something that can be delivered through protocols, accommodations, and checklists, and is increasingly shaped by institutional and European policy frameworks on inclusion and universal design. Although such policies and institutional frameworks remain crucial and materially necessary, they often reduce accessibility to a self-evident moral good (Hamraie 2017; Price 2024), while leaving its conceptual and philosophical grounding as relational, historical, and political underdeveloped.
We will explore the moments where accessibility goes beyond checklists and protocols: when it becomes unstable and inconvenient, when different access needs rub against one another, when adaptation remains unfinished, or when a space requires ongoing collective attunement. Drawing on Lauren Berlant and Aimi Hamraie’s work, participants are invited to think through these frictions and forms of inconvenience as situations that make visible how we are organised around norms, temporalities, and expectations. Berlant’s notion of ‘loosening’ becomes important here: those instances in which established frameworks temporarily loosen their grip, and other ways of relating, sensing, and inhabiting space become imaginable.
During the session, we will draw on our own experiences and (artistic) practices and read several excerpts together. A small reader containing fragments from different authors will be distributed to help deepen and enrich our discussion.
Participants are invited to reflect beforehand on moments in which accessibility was supposedly present but did not feel accessible in practice, moments in which unevenness or difficulty emerged, situations where accessibility itself became a source of tension, as well as moments in which access unfolded more intuitively and effortlessly. The texts will be provided in advance, but there is no mandatory preparation needed before the session.
* Access intimacy, a concept coined by disability justice activist Mia Mingus, describes the “elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else gets your access needs".
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Leni Van Goidsenhoven is Assistant Professor in Critical Disability Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her current research sits at the intersection of disability heritage, accessibility aesthetics, critical neurodiversity studies, and the medical humanities. Drawing on literary and cultural analysis, crip theory, and participatory methodologies, she examines how disability is mediated, remembered, and made meaningful through artistic, archival, and heritage practices.
Identifying as a white disabled/neurodivergent scholar, Leni’s work has developed from earlier research on autism, voice, and narrative towards an exploration of access aesthetics: artistic and social practices that understand access not as accommodation or inclusion alone, but as a creative and political force. Across performance, exhibition-making, and literature, she is interested in how access can generate new forms of intimacy and collective world-making.
Van Goidsenhoven is particularly known for OnGehoord, an award-winning participatory project developed with minimal-verbal young adults. Combining artistic practice, research, and community engagement, the project resulted in a book, exhibition, film, residency, and workshops for healthcare professionals, and received the 2021 Science Communication Award of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium.
Throughout her career, she has worked closely with artists, performers, and cultural institutions, including collaborations with Sonja Jokiniemi and Iris Bouche, NTGent, STUK, and Museum Dr. Guislain.
