Free and open to the public.

Whenever disabled-queer-trans bodies move in on social space, they disrupt the regimes of fitness presiding over urban and institutional infrastructure.Disabled-queer-trans, or alterite bodies, challenge normative preconceptions held by equally normate bodies.

Stalled!, is a critical platform that collects key thought leaders to expand discourse in this space, and invites broad participation from the University of Michigan network of activists, facility personnel, students, academic staff, administrators, and faculty. Working from biological, disabled, historical, political, queer, racial, spatial, and transgender perspectives, Stalled! exposes the deep structure of discrimination proliferating throughout architecture and institutions. Stalled! co-locates inclusivity and radical alterity by promoting discussion around disability, gender-fluidity, and intersectionality.

Developed by architect and activist, Prof. Joel Sanders from Yale School of Architecture, in collaboration with Taubman College, Stalled! seeks several specific objectives: the design of more inclusive public spaces, enrolling supportive partners and allies from across the University, and educating various publics regarding the needs of social groups currently denied access to inclusive restrooms. Stalled! produces a conversation that expands upon the rhetoric of diversity, equity, and inclusion, to reanimate static infrastructure as sites to demonstrate more actionable alterity.

Stalled! questions the protocols around how urban space is organized, how buildings are designed, and how everything - from the glossy messaging of advertising, to the ubiquity of our digital identities - are overwhelmingly designed around monolithic forms of gender conformity, singular concepts of ability; and by extension, within a very limited understanding of difference. Trans-Queer-Crip bodies make legible the limitations of regulatory bodies, such as healthcare, the systemic discrimination of the legal apparatus, and complacency of education to equitably or imaginatively conceptualize alterity beyond a condition to be ameliorated, incarcerated, or accommodated.

Panel 1: Trans and Queer Theory
Speaker: Mel Chen, UC Berkeley, Associate Professor of Gender & Women's Studies; Director, Center for the Study of Sexual Culture

Panel 2: Inclusive Space, Design, Infrastructure
Speaker: Jos Boys, University of Brighton, College of Art & Culture

Stalled! kicks off on Wednesday, February 7 at 6:00pm with a keynote lecture by Joel Sanders. Joel's work addresses identity, inclusivity,and social issues in architecture. Recently, his research has been focused on gender neutral bathrooms, a highly debated and relevant topic today. Stalled!, in collaboration with Susan Stryker, aims to create a relatively barrier free open precinct that encourages all embodied subjects to freely and safely engage with one another in public space. Joel believes that making these changes requires acknowledging the pivotal role that building codes play in shaping identity through design, as well as acknowledging that such codes are not neutral functional objectives but rather reflect and reproduce deep-seated cultural beliefs that shape the design of the spaces of our daily lives, including bathrooms.

In partnership with the UM Initiative on Disability Studies (UMInDS), The U-M Spectrum Center, and the U-M Women's Studies Department.