Misfit Bodies, Misfit Environments

This project is developing an easy-to-print and distribute zine with photos, quotes, anecdotes and texts, in collaboration with artist and MCP’23 classmate Melissa Teng.

It offers provocations based on my field work in Slovo Park, and informal settlement in Johannesburg,  South Africa in 2022 and 2023 for my research on the intersection of profound disability and urban informality. It is a reflective exercise based on what it means to do embodied research – while being attuned to disability justice, racial justice, decolonial research practices.

There is in situ upgradation in Slovo, which is a form of grassroots planning celebrated from just city approaches. But it is still not inclusive of its profoundly disabled residents. And their voice and participation is not represented. The zine offers a set of considerations that asks planners what would it take for that, and explores 3 issues which I confronted while trying to do this research:

1) Embodied form of research – questions of showing up as professionals versus as people in relationship with each other, questions of kinship and relationality – which is not stable or static but planning approaches, including participatory approaches, kind of assume that they are. What happens when people’s relationship to not only their home and land is not stable, but is also not stable to each other? How do you plan from a place with that as your starting point?

2) What happens when the environment you are in forces you to disable yourself or those around you? When everyday life is a choice between caring for your disabled child or between breadwinning for them. Between capacitating your child or yourself. What does it mean to plan in an environment where disability is actively produced socially?

3) What happens when a family structure is not stable – when structural forces, such as apartheid, have eroded the family. Who cares for people whose survival depends on needing others to care for them?