ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sociol.
Sec. Sociology of Emotion
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2025.1468401
This article is part of the Research TopicAffecting, Emoting, and Feeling Disability: Entanglements at the Intersection of Disability Studies and the Sociology of EmotionsView all 11 articles
"I am used to being extremely patient because I'm forced to be": The affective politics of accommodation for disabled archivists
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of California, Los Angeles, California, United States
- 2School of Information Studies, Faculty of Arts, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
- 3Rhode Island College, Providence, Rhode Island, United States
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Archives—repositories that store, organize, and give access to historical materials—produce a constellation of affects for both the people who use them and work within them. This article, drawing on data collected through semi-structured interviews with 12 disabled archivists in Canada and the United States, focuses on how disabled archival workers experience, manage, and perform emotions while navigating work-related access and accommodation in archival institutions. The ineffectiveness of traditional systems of individual accommodation—which sometimes forced them to disclose their access needs or, alternatively, feel pressured into denying their own needs—produced complex emotional responses among participants. Many spoke about the emotional toll of requesting accommodations, while others described their exhaustion and refusal to engage with such processes. Yet, participants highlighted how collective (rather than individual) approaches to access transformed the affective experience of access towards ease and empowerment. Centering this affective reality for many disabled archivists, this research echoes the growing body of research and theory around access labor, while also adding focus on the affective debt of archival access that occurs through accommodations processes—both an internal indebtedness, where one “borrows against” their patience and energy to survive, and an external indebtedness, where one is required to “pay” in gratitude, vulnerability, and being nice in order to be deserving of accommodation. We draw attention to how the very people who facilitate access to historical documents are also navigating their own access—performing additional forms of labor to manage inaccessible, precarious, or hostile work while also imagining access otherwise.
Keywords: Disability, Archival studies, critical access studies, Emotional labor, Archival access, Workplace accommodation, Disability accommodation
Received: 22 Jul 2024; Accepted: 09 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Karpicz, Brar, Brilmyer and Denison. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Julia Rose Karpicz, University of California, Los Angeles, California, United States
Gracen Mikus Brilmyer, School of Information Studies, Faculty of Arts, McGill University, Montreal, H3A 1X1, Quebec, Canada
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.