# “I am used to being extremely patient because I’m forced to be”: the affective politics of accommodation for disabled archivists

## TL;DR

This paper explores how disabled archivists experience and manage emotions while navigating workplace accommodations in archival institutions.

## Contribution

The study introduces the concept of 'affective debt' in accommodation processes and highlights collective approaches to access as transformative.

## Key findings

- Disabled archivists face emotional tolls and exhaustion from requesting accommodations.
- Collective approaches to access improve the affective experience of disabled workers.
- Participants describe internal and external indebtedness tied to accommodation processes.

## Abstract

Archives—repositories that store, organize, and give access to historical materials—produce a constellation of affects for both the people who use them and work within them. This article, drawing on data collected through semi-structured interviews with 12 disabled archivists in Canada and the United States, focuses on how disabled archival workers experience, manage, and perform emotions while navigating work-related access and accommodation in archival institutions. The ineffectiveness of traditional systems of individual accommodation—which sometimes forced them to disclose their access needs or, alternatively, feel pressured into denying their own needs—produced complex emotional responses among participants. Many spoke about the emotional toll of requesting accommodations, while others described their exhaustion and refusal to engage with such processes. Yet, participants highlighted how collective (rather than individual) approaches to access transformed the affective experience of access towards ease and empowerment. Centering this affective reality for many disabled archivists, this research echoes the growing body of research and theory around access labor, while also adding focus on the affective debt of archival access that occurs through accommodations processes—both an internal indebtedness, where one “borrows against” their patience and energy to survive, and an external indebtedness, where one is required to “pay” in gratitude, vulnerability, and being nice in order to be deserving of accommodation. We draw attention to how the very people who facilitate access to historical documents are also navigating their own access—performing additional forms of labor to manage inaccessible, precarious, or hostile work while also imagining access otherwise.