Author: Maria Savarese, PhD Student at Scuola Superiore Meridionale, Naples. Recently visiting PhD student at the School of Law and Criminology and ALL Institute, Maynooth University.
1. Introduction
My encounter with the DANCING Project was, in many ways, unexpected. I first came across it during a seminar in Rome, where Professor Delia Ferri presented the project’s approach to disability and cultural participation (Ferri, 2024). What immediately struck me was not only its interdisciplinary ambition, but the way in which it foregrounded artistic practice as a site for rethinking accessibility. That encounter stayed with me and ultimately shaped my decision to spend part of my doctoral research period at Maynooth University, as a visiting researcher at the School of Law and Criminology, working in close connection with the intellectual environment of the ALL Institute.
Arriving there, I found myself in a position to engage more deeply with some of the core questions underlying my own doctoral research — particularly those concerning the relationship between accessibility, cultural production, and the role of disabled artists within institutional frameworks. What I found especially significant was the project’s decision to collaborate with Stopgap Dance Company, a professional dance company composed of disabled and non-disabled artists working at a high artistic level. This choice was not simply methodological. It foregrounded a crucial tension that runs through contemporary debates on disability and culture. On the one hand, many disabled artists actively resist being framed within therapeutic, assistive, or “inspirational” narratives, claiming instead full recognition as professional artists. On the other, their work often emerges in critical relation to institutional contexts—museums, funding bodies, and cultural programms—that continue to operate within normative, and often ableist, assumptions about artistic value, authorship, and legitimacy. Engaging with this tension led me to rethink the very terms through which accessibility is usually understood.
What does it mean to participate in culture? Who is recognised as a cultural subject—and under what conditions? And what happens when accessibility is no longer conceived as a tool for inclusion within existing structures, but as a practice that challenges and transforms those structures from within? These questions suggest a shift in perspective. Accessibility is not only about enabling entry into a cultural venue, but about reshaping the frameworks through which culture is defined, organised, and valued.
At the same time, engaging with the DANCING project—firmly situated within a European research and legal context—made it clear that these questions are not merely theoretical or artistic. They are deeply embedded in legal and institutional frameworks that have progressively redefined the relationship between disability and cultural participation across Europe. In this sense, the work carried out within the project resonates with, and critically engages, a broader normative shift that has taken place at the European level over the past two decades marked by the ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD, 2006) by the European Union in 2010.
While within this framework, cultural participation has progressively been recognised as a fundamental human right – rather than a residual domain of social policy- the encounter with practices such as those developed within the DANCING project makes visible a persistent gap between this normative recognition and the conditions under which cultural participation actually takes place. This gap is not abstract: it becomes visible precisely when legal recognition meets artistic practice.
2. Accessibility beyond compliance: between recognition and institutional limits
If we take seriously the questions emerging from artistic practices such as those of Stopgap Dance Company, the limits of current approaches to accessibility become more evident. If, on one-hand, it’s true that European cultural institutions—particularly museums and heritage organisations—have increasingly incorporated accessibility within their agendas, on the other, accessibility still remains framed as a procedural obligation: something to be implemented, measured, and reported leading to what has been called, by scholars as Johnson, the procedural approach (Johnson, 2022). This procedural approach produces a paradox. On the one hand, it signals a growing institutional commitment to inclusion. On the other, it leaves largely unchallenged the underlying assumptions that structure cultural production itself—assumptions about what counts as artistic value, who is recognised as an author, and which forms of expression are considered legitimate.
It is precisely here that the tension observed in the collaboration with Stopgap becomes analytically relevant. The demand advanced by many disabled artists is not simply to be included, but to be recognised as artists on their own terms. This often entails a refusal of assistive or therapeutic framings, which continue to shape both institutional discourse and public perception. At the same time, this demand for recognition frequently places disabled artists in a complex and sometimes conflictual relationship with cultural institutions, whose categories of evaluation and funding criteria remain grounded in normative—and often ableist—conceptions of professionalism and artistic excellence.
As Robert McRuer has argued, inclusion can easily be co-opted into dominant narratives of diversity and tolerance, producing visibility without transformation (McRuer, 2006). In this sense, the increasing presence of disability within cultural spaces does not necessarily correspond to a redistribution of symbolic and material power. Rather, it can function as a form of managed inclusion, in which difference is accommodated without destabilising the structures that produce exclusion in the first place. What is at stake, then, is not only access to culture, but the conditions under which culture is produced, evaluated, and circulated. Accessibility, when reduced to compliance, risks reinforcing the very norms it seeks to challenge.
3. Accessibility as cultural production: embodiment, art, and the redefinition of heritage
Reframing accessibility requires a shift from inclusion as adaptation to inclusion as transformation. This shift becomes particularly visible when we consider the role of embodiment within artistic practice. In many disability-led artistic processes, the body is not treated as a problem to be accommodated, but as a site of knowledge, experimentation, and aesthetic innovation. Accessibility, in this context, is no longer a static condition, but a dynamic interaction between bodies, spaces, and temporalities. As Tanya Titchkosky suggests, accessibility can be understood as a way of “relating to people and places,” while Aimi Hamraie shows how design practices embed assumptions about normative bodies and capacities (Hamraie, 2017 and Titchkosky, 2011). To rethink accessibility, therefore, means to interrogate these assumptions—not only to remove barriers, but to question why those barriers exist in the first place.
Within the arts, this perspective challenges the persistent framing of disability art as marginal or therapeutic, and instead positions it as a site of aesthetic and political intervention. When disabled artists draw on the sensory, temporal, and affective dimensions of their embodiment, they do more than express experience: they actively redefine what counts as art, who is recognised as an artist, and how audiences engage with cultural production.
In this sense, accessibility becomes generative. It does not simply allow participation within an existing cultural order; it contributes to reshaping that order. This transformation extends also to the field of heritage. Rather than a stable repository of shared values, heritage emerges as a contested and dynamic process, shaped by conflicts over meaning and legitimacy. From this perspective, disability does not simply seek inclusion within heritage; it redefines what heritage is. The disabled body becomes not only an object of representation, but a producer of heritage—an active agent in the creation of cultural meaning.
Conclusion
Looking back at my time at Maynooth, what emerges most clearly is how this experience has concretely shaped the direction of my doctoral research. Engaging with the DANCING project and with the work carried out by Delia Ferri led me to further interrogate the relationship between accessibility, artistic production, and institutional frameworks, making explicit tensions that had previously remained more implicit in my work. In particular, it prompted me to more systematically explore the role of European policy frameworks in structuring the conditions of cultural participation. As a result, I have decided to dedicate a more substantial part of my research to reconstructing the evolution of these policies, with a specific focus on how concepts such as accessibility, participation, and cultural rights have been defined and operationalised over time.
At the same time, this experience was not only intellectually significant. Spending time in Ireland—within the academic environment of ALL and in everyday encounters beyond it—left a lasting impression on me. I was particularly struck by the openness, generosity, and attentiveness that characterised both the academic community and the broader social context. In this sense, the questions that emerged during my time at Maynooth continue to resonate beyond the specific framework of this research. What does it mean to participate in culture—when participation itself becomes a site of transformation? If accessibility is understood not only as a condition for participation but as a practice that produces culture, then the challenge is no longer limited to opening spaces. It becomes one of reimagining them.
