Beyond Access: Flourishing in Sacred Spaces
“Access is something that has so many different dimensions for different people. It’s not a one-size-fits-all experience.”
A community’s sacred spaces—whether religious or secular—are, in many ways, a physical reflection of its beliefs and values. They represent fellowship, belonging, spirituality, and unity. But sometimes these same spaces fail to represent a community’s values in a way that allows all members—and in particular, disabled people—to thrive.
In her Religion and Disability class last spring, Professor Julia Watts Belser’s students worked with Ethics Lab to address questions of accessibility in sacred spaces and how they might redesign these spaces to make them more inclusive.
“Access is something that has so many different dimensions for different people. It’s not a one-size-fits-all experience,” Belser says. “We asked ourselves: what does accessibility look like, but also what does it feel like? How do you know it when it’s there?”
The collaboration between Belser and Ethics Lab challenged students to dive into specific sites, both religious and secular, to analyze their accessibility. One aspect of the collaboration was inspired by an event at King’s College Chapel where Tristan Rimmer, a boy with autism, and Paul Rimmer, his father, were kicked out of a service; Tristan was vocalizing, and was seen as a disruption.
“It was a really powerful case,” Belser reflects. “It runs counter to the explicit message of the church, which is ‘everyone is welcome here.’ And of course the implicit message is, ‘not everyone is welcome here.’”
“If the norm for services is everyone sitting, facing forward, paying attention, that’s not always friendly to someone with a disability,” says Marcello Antosh, a Postdoctoral Fellow at Ethics Lab who helped design the project. “Maybe it’s hard for you to sit still, to pay attention. If you’re autistic, like Tristan Rimmer, maybe you’re vocalizing.”
Students were first given a virtual tour of the church without knowledge of the Rimmer case, and asked to map out accessibility concerns for people with disabilities. Most focused on wheelchair accessibility at first. After becoming acquainted with Tristan’s case, students were asked to reconsider their initial maps in light of broader concerns about disability and access. By examining the church through the experiences of others, students discovered both physical and mental barriers to access that they hadn’t initially considered.
“Whose bodies are allowed to be where in space?” asks Belser. “Where is the center point? Who gets to go there? Cathedrals, for example, are spaces where you can see how clearly power is marked out, in terms of who has access to what space. Who has access to the altar? Who gets to be close, who has to be far away?”
With these questions in mind, students also conducted site visits at synagogues, meditation centers, Quaker meeting houses, coffee shops, and yoga studios. They examined the ways in which these spaces perpetuated exclusive practices, and considered how they could be more inclusive and accessible.
While students were conducting these visits, the semester was disrupted by the pandemic, which sent them home in March. COVID-19 presented an unexpected opportunity for students to look at digital accessibility in a world that was suddenly physically inaccessible to everyone.
“Power is a funny thing,” says Belser. “Wheelchair users, for example, have been asking for work-from-home and church-from-home options for years, but have been told ‘it’s too much, it’s too hard, it won’t work.’ This is bittersweet for a lot of folks. All of this access, in the space of two weeks, became available...but only because normative bodies, the majority culture, needed it.
“And is it going to go away again, as soon as most people are perceived to be able to go out and gather safely? What’s that going to feel like for those who are frustrated at being shut out of those spaces?”
Belser says she will incorporate these questions of digital access into her spring class, which will include another accessibility project co-designed with Ethics Lab.
This collaboration was made possible through the generous support of Matthew and Jenae Ruesch.