Jeffrey Mansfield: From Rights to Justice — Deafness, Disability, and Belonging in Civic Spaces

Abstract

The built environment plays an outsized role in shaping deafness, disability, and identity. Architecture is a reflection of social values, and we can observe evolving social attitudes towards deafness, disability, and community through the forms and vocabularies of buildings and spaces in the Deaf and Disabled communities. Built with civic funds and historically situated to the margins of our society, physically and mentally, these spaces — including schools for the deaf and blind, state hospitals, and other institutions—have defined our society and our communities.

Despite significant strides in disability rights and universal/inclusive design movements, a deeper embrace of this interplay of architecture, disability, and community has often gone unrealized in the design process. Accessible design is an afterthought or a checklist that falls short of confronting the harm the built environment has inflicted on deaf and disabled communities.

This talk will explore the theories and practices around how architecture and landscape architecture can create more inclusive communities by uplifting the lived experience and cultural memory of the deaf and disabled communities.

Biography

Jeffrey Yasuo Mansfield is a principal at MASS Design Group and the director of MASS's Deaf Space and Disability Justice Lab, which focuses on uplifting the lived experience and cultural memory of deaf and disabled communities. Jeffrey is also an inaugural recipient of the Ford and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Disability Futures fellowship and is a John W. Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress. He has taught design studios at the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Michigan, and Harvard Graduate School of Design. Jeffrey coauthored The Architecture of Health and coedited MASS Design Group's first Monograph, Justice is Beauty. Jeffrey has been deaf since birth and is a fourth-generation Japanese-American.