Beyond Access? Rethinking learning environments as spaces of care | 13 April

About the event

In this talk, Jos Boys explores how thinking about disability and difference in relation to learning offers opportunities to re-imagine accessibility as more than ‘accommodating’ non-normative students to fit conventional educational practices and spaces.

Instead, by engaging with contemporary disability studies scholarship – as well as her own feminist and disability activism – Jos will discuss what we can learn about making learning environments more equitable for everyone.

Biography

Most recently Dr Jos Boys was Programme Director for the MSc in Learning Environments, The Bartlett, University College London, and Director of the Learning Environments Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Centre (LEEDIC); with a research focus on creative and inclusive educational spaces both within and beyond the academy. She has worked for over 20 years as a consultant and researcher in learning spaces in higher education, both in the UK and internationally, and has published extensively. Books include Building Better Universities; Strategies, Spaces, Technologies (Routledge 2014) and “Towards Creative Learning Spaces: re-thinking the architecture of post-compulsory education” (Routledge 2010).

With a background in feminist architectural practice, Jos is also co-founder and co-director, with Zoe Partington, of The DisOrdinary Architecture Project, a platform bringing together disabled artists and built environment students, educators and practitioners since 2008 for creative and positive actions and dialogue that can demonstrate how disability is a valuable and generative force in design, rather than a technical and legalistic ‘problem’. She is the author of Doing Disability Differently: an alternative handbook on architecture, dis/ability, and designing for everyday life (Routledge 2014) and editor of Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader (Routledge 2017).

Event format

This event will be held in the UTS LX.lab – CB06.04.020. It will not be streamed online.

Banner photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash