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Inaccessible Access ethnographically addresses barriers to inclusion within knowledge-making. It focuses on the social, environmental, communicative, and epistemological barriers that people with disabilities confront and embody throughout the course of their learning and living and in the specific context of their higher education institutions and in research. It is presented by a neurodiverse, disabled, and non-cis cohort of authors, all of whom acknowledge a continuum of (in)access that is available to each contributor contingent on their inherent intersectionalities and alterities. The authors and editors of this book foreground the work that has yet to be done on recognizing the value of nonnormative ways of approaching, being in, and knowing research and higher education, particularly in cases where disablity-centered epistemologies are sidelined in confrontation with institutional norms, even within existing discourses concerning equality and alterity. 

In Interface Frictions, Neta Alexander explores how ubiquitous design features in digital platforms reshape, condition, and break our bodies. She shows that while features such as refresh, playback speed, autoplay, and night mode are convenient, they can lead to “digital debility”—the slow and often invisible ways that technologies may harm human bodies. These features all assume an able-bodied user and at the same time push users to ignore their bodily limitations like the need for rest, nourishment, or movement. Building on the lived experiences of people with disabilities, Alexander explores alternative design solutions that arise from a multisensorial approach to communication. She demonstrates what can be gained from centering the nonaverage user, such as blind people who pioneered ways to control the playback speed of media, and Netflix subscribers with invisible disabilities like PTSD who successfully pushed the company to redesign its previews autoplay feature. Drawing on artworks, video games, and creative hacking by users with disabilities, Alexander challenges our understanding of media consumption, the attention economy, and the digital interface.