Climate Changing: A journey through audio description

Margaret Price, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Disability Studies program at Ohio State, served as a member of the interdisciplinary exhibition advisory committee for Climate Changing: On Artists, Institutions, and the Social Environment. In spring 2021, she taught a Digital Media Studies seminar titled "The Politics of the Interface through Critical Access.” One of the forms of critical access they discussed was audio description (description of visual content created to provide access for Blind, vision impaired, or neurodivergent people, among others). Price and her students enrolled in this seminar created a video that functions as an experiment in critical and creative audio description, using the Wex exhibition as a case study. Each student selected one work in the exhibition to describe, thus the final video is a collage of different perspectives that illuminate the many questions that can arise in creating audio description and critical access work.

Price is at work on a mixed-methods investigation, the Disabled Faculty Study, that combines survey and interview data to learn more about the experiences of disabled faculty in higher education. Her forthcoming book, Crip Spacetime, reports findings from that study and proposes a new way of thinking about access in higher education. Find out more about Margaret’s collaborative work on the Transformative Access Project at Ohio State here and read excerpts from a roundtable discussion with Climate Changing's advisory committee here.