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From the initial entry point into Disability Matters as shared by Tanya Titchkosky, it was a day full of exploring disability as intentionally frictional. This understanding of disability as intentional frictional was offered by Goodley and Lawthom as they explored the distinct yet linked necessities of engaging in practices of decolonization and depathologization. To me this seemed to be the key theme explored by all of the presenters throughout the day.

I was particularly struck with the discussion around access points when juxtaposed with the land acknowledgment which was pivotal to Tanya’s introduction into Disability Matters. In the location where the Disability Matters conference occurred, there are inescapable legacies of the making and subsequent breaking of treaties with indigenous peoples.   was a promise of reciprocal relation that was made and then broken.

Access points and the current role of technology as a medium for both making and breaking access points of potentially reciprocal relations kept bubbling up throughout the day. Cameras for video conferencing were positioned and repositioned. This occurred alongside  the repositioning of microphones that were too close for some and too far for others as well as ASL interpreters who kept repositioning themselves for the purpose of sustaining access points. These movements and motions served as a reminder of the always and already frail and uncertain conditions of access to and in reciprocal relations.

The image of a dish with one spoon also reminds me of story from my childhood. My mother and father were born at the end of World War II and in the middle of a Greek Civil War that pitted communities and even families against each other. In my childhood my parents shared memories of their own childhood where some families literally shared a dish with one spoon and passed it around the so everyone would have something to eat. This memory from listening to stories as a child, reminds me that a dish with one spoon is both a metaphor of reciprocal relations as well as materially and tangibly vital to survival with and for each other.

Access points are not add-ons but integral to survival in material, tangible and everyday ways. Access points require the ongoing and necessarily frictional work of sustaining them. Each presenter in their own way addressed and explored the simultaneous necessity and frailty of access points in ways that made disability matter.