This blog post serves as an exploratory and developmental process for my PhD. Its focus is on the academic literature I engage with, presented in a blog format, against the backdrop of professional contexts. A blogging approach enables exploration of the ties between research and practice, supporting reflexivity.
Licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY-4.0), except for any content quoted from third-party sources or where otherwise noted. Quoted material remains under the copyright of its respective owners.
Table of contents:
Nikki Andersen once wrote a blog post called ‘Disability Justice is a form of disruption that libraries need‘ with a focus on the concept of access. I recently returned to read this, considering how disability culture might not only disrupt our work in libraries but also be a leadership practice in itself.
Disruption and access are of interest here. Increasingly, I’ve heard the word disruption appear in leadership spaces (something I have many thoughts on!). And access is a core function of our work in libraries, as well as access needs being a fundamental part of the disability landscape.
The intersection of these topics left me reflecting on how disruption and access are often experienced as being ‘done to’ or ‘for’ people. What intrigued me was the parallels this creates between disability access needs and open access publishing.
Engaging with values from disability culture and disability justice (e.g., interdependence, tolerance for lack of resolution, collective access) provides an opportunity to reframe our leadership and governance practices for access and disruption. And, as I’ll explore further along, this includes in the context of scholarly publishing.
Disruption and discomfort
Both disruption and discomfort are inherent parts of leadership; however, at some point, I started to feel like I was having my own experiences of disruption and discomfort explained back to me (and ‘done to’). So, when I hear the word disruption, I ask:
- Disruptive to whom?
- Who retains or gains agency in disruption?
- What are we building together?
These questions matter because not all disruption or discomfort functions the same way. There’s a difference between:
- Discomfort that shares or redistributes power from those who are already comfortable in our systems and spaces, and
- Discomfort that destabilises those already struggling in, marginalised by, or bearing the weight of our systems.
It’s the first type of discomfort where I see the greatest opportunities to build and shape through disruption, in library leadership and scholarly publishing.
Compliance cultures
We can’t easily talk about disability and leadership without acknowledging the discomfort that often accompanies acts of disability resistance and excellence.
Building inclusive cultures is often on library agendas. However, when discomfort with disability appears in leadership, along with a desire to neatly smooth things over and placate, we inhibit building cultures that extend beyond compliance approaches. Limiting ourselves to compliance means that our discomfort as leaders is protected. Compliance approaches also carry assumptions that center accommodations over disability culture and identity, and aren’t necessarily sufficient in creating positive experiences for disabled people. 1 With this, we miss the relational qualities that lie beneath the surface of access and accommodations as structures.
Beyond compliance lies an opportunity to embrace disability culture and identity, and with it, values such as interdependence, flexible and adaptive approaches, and tolerance for a lack of resolution. These values of disability culture are ones we often experience discomfort with in leadership, yet they are also part of navigating various forms of disruption for anyone.
Interdependence
Interdependence, one principle of disability justice, recognises that all humans rely on others and are interconnected. It challenges the idea of total independence and going it alone. As a relational concept, interdependence is also part of disrupting the idea of ‘care’ or access as something done to disabled people. Instead, we all give and receive care reciprocally.
And often, because of our heightened focus on individualisation, the reciprocal quality of care and access is ignored. Instead, disabled and neurodivergent people are perceived as “passive objects of support and intervention,” as Wiklund et al. (2022, p. 24) describe, which sees them positioned as a problem to solve.
To be clear, this isn’t about doing away with support or accommodations. These structural aspects of access remain crucial. Rather, it’s about acknowledging that support is relational (it flows in multiple directions) and that disabled people and broader communities contribute to how we collectively build access.
Someone once observed that my experiences with disability would mean I’d likely be very attuned (and unimpressed!) if I felt my agency was under threat. I certainly have the sense of having fought hard for agency. I also hold tight to my independence when it’s needed. Both are hard-earned.
Interdependence, however, is what I prefer to lean into.
Turning to Nikki Andersen’s writing on disruption and disability justice in libraries, Andersen writes:
“Instead of understanding access as the result of specific accommodations for individuals, collective access focuses on developing strategies for practicing mutual interdependence and supporting access for communities (Kumbier & Starkey, 2016)” (Andersen, 2020).
Here, interdependence is about proactively designing access and inclusion together so that it’s not just one person’s responsibility to solve. And, ideally, it’s something we build through an ongoing dialogue.
There is often talk about ‘managing’ neurodivergent or disabled employees, and, in this, a subtle implication that we’re making disability or neurodivergence less disruptive (that is, more manageable) to the systems we work in/with. ‘Managing’ becomes about trying to ‘solve’ a person and disability itself, rather than recognising that we can build something together.
And as Nathan Sentance states (and Nikki Andersen echoes), “diversity means disruption.“
In ‘Access is not problem solving: Disability justice and libraries,’ Kumbier and Stakey (2016) discuss how viewing disability or access as either a problem to solve or through a compliance lens means we miss nuances. Such nuances include the disability justice principle of collective access, which sees us creating access, together in community, with “flexibility and creative nuance.” That is, building together.
It’s not only about the (still essential) structural supports for access (e.g., accommodations) but also about relational understandings that allow us to focus on human realities and social contexts beneath the surface.
Access alone doesn’t ensure agency. Understanding the relational qualities and interdependencies inherent in our structures and processes is necessary.
‘Nothing about us without us’
‘Nothing about us without us‘, a principle of self-determination notably popularised by the disability rights movement, means that decisions need to be made with the full and direct participation of those affected. The principle matters here since access and inclusion on their own don’t guarantee agency. The capacity to act is not merely an individual choice but one that is relational and structural.
Yet our language and assumptions in leadership often work against this understanding. Across many spaces in my life, I’ve seen how our language in ‘managing’ can strip agency. It’s a word I pay sharp attention to.
As a disabled person, I’ve had a lifetime of experiences where I’ve been spoken about while right there in the room. It can be disrespectful when it happens to anyone, but it can cut deeply into dignity for people who know what it’s like to be reduced to an object of pity, inspiration, or someone else’s agenda or power play.
And those in marginalised communities know that if they name what is happening, that other people’s discomfort will also be disruptive, but it will fall to those marginalised to manage and absorb that disruption. But what if we led differently?
What if, instead of something to manage, disability is something to be in relationship with? And how can we apply these same values and principles to disruption and access in libraries?
A shift from independently managing to interdependently leading would be disruptive in itself. Interdependent leadership would mean building in disruption together rather than managing disruption on our own. Importantly, however, focusing on interdependence also requires seeing disabled people as colleagues, as leaders, and as people with expertise about the systems we all navigate together.
Interdependence isn’t just a strategy for accommodations. It reframes leadership itself. It asks us to accept relationships and dialogue that may lack resolution, while affirming our differences and shared humanity.
Care in processes and publishing
It’s here that I want to turn – perhaps more abruptly than I anticipated – to parallels in open scholarly publishing. What I notice in dialogue about alternative approaches to publishing is a mirroring of disability culture values. The literature that follows from here engages with (1) an acceptance of differences, (2) concern for interdependence (through an ethics of care), (3) flexible, adaptive approaches, and (4) a tolerance for lack of resolution.
In Samuel Moore’s ‘Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and the Commons,’ we see a willingness to accept a lack of resolution in ‘fixing’ open publishing. Instead, an exploration of care ethics and governance practices emerges that prioritises “process over outputs, [and] cultures over outcomes” (2025, p. 27).
The approach of punctum books – a scholar-led OA press that Moore uses as an example – relates care to process by removing the conformity and predetermined outcomes that are typically demanded in grant, research, and publishing processes (2025, pp. 121-122). With this, space (and care) is created for difference and deviation.
And with this focus on difference, I immediately think of the intersection with disability leadership and disability culture, with their different ways of doing things. In a reflection on the 2015 Radical Open Access Conference, ableist conditions in publishing are described, marginalising disabled scholars as the pressures of “productivity and institutional surveillance persist [even] in moments of vulnerability.” Yet, publishing projects that expand space for relationships and mutual care are also described, with a recognition of differences in ways of collaborating. 2
And so, relational and collective processes become acts of care in publishing.
Open access is also then positioned as something that can be “built on structures that avoid resolution,” and the concept of openness itself is “open to otherness and difference, and open to adapt to different circumstances” (Moore, 2025, pp. 135, 149). There are no neat endpoints, but rather, collaborative processes that push back against extractive forms of publishing and help to realise alternative and experimental forms.
The process itself is just as important as the access at the end – something that also resonates with me from a disability perspective.
Compliance functions in publishing and disability
Returning to my earlier mention of compliance cultures in leadership, Moore also describes how some approaches to open access publishing can position librarianship as a support for compliance functions. Library workers become supporting “infrastructural objects” [emphasis added] rather than being seen as equal partners (2025, p. 91). I explored similar ideas with Mary Anne Kennan in 2021, writing about how service ethics play a role in positioning librarians as support staff and their impact on collaborative partnerships.
Such approaches echo the limitations of compliance cultures (discussed earlier), which reproduce disability access needs as a one-way support, hiding the relational qualities of access, care, culture, and identity.
In both disability and scholarly publishing, relational processes and care in creating access are often made invisible as they respond to the incentives of compliance (with its legal obligations) and publishing marketisation (with its endowment of prestige).
As such, library work risks becoming flattened into compliance and support functions, and disabled people predominantly experience legalised and compliance-focused interactions, instead of ones that acknowledge the cultural identity of disability. 3
Leadership practices
Reflecting on my own leadership and library practices, I can see the ways these values have intersected with my work (as well as times I’ve felt pressures or tensions around them).
Some of the most impactful leadership conversations and projects I’ve had were those where I could be with people without immediate resolution. The objective wasn’t to solve a person, but to sit with the messiness of disruption together. This, of course, isn’t to say solutions never arrived, but rather that we took the time to understand the root causes and created space for complexity and care.
In contrast, I occasionally experience other people’s discomfort with disability as an impulse to ‘fix,’ rather than build together. I’ve also observed how sometimes the desire to independently manage disruption for others can create the very disruption we might aim to contain. Here, difference and disruption are being governed in service of palatability for others, rather than through norms of interdependence, reciprocity, and mutuality.
These same norms also drive open knowledge diplomacy, a collaborative process concerned with the production and sharing of open knowledge internationally. And, again, in writing on open publishing, Moore doesn’t lay claim to any ‘fix’ for publishing, and instead, asserts that “no such fix exists” (2025, p. 153). It’s the process that matters.
In essence, the rush to fix and find solutions is distinct from an ethics of care that invites interdependence and mutuality, where space is made for difference, and access is experienced relationally, in dialogue.
In governing disruption and access, there’s a risk that we reproduce the compliance and service models that position people – disabled people, library workers, or otherwise – as ‘objects of support,’ rather than recognising and giving value to the reciprocal qualities of care and access that occur in partnership.
I leave my writing here, with parts still unresolved, but knowing that disability culture and its values don’t offer library leadership a problem to solve. Though perhaps a problem to solve is what we think we need.
I also leave us with the question: When we experience disruption, is our impulse to manage it away or build with it?
Disability culture and justice offer a way of being in relation with each other. And through this, an approach to building access interdependently and governing disruption, together, with a focus on the process.
- Saia, T. (2022). Disability Cultural Centers in Higher Education: A Shift Beyond Compliance to Disability Culture and Disability Identity. Journal of Postsecondary Education & Disability, 35(1). ↩︎
- Drawing on Mad Studies scholarship. ↩︎
- Saia (2022, p. 21). ↩︎