The politics of disability are fundamentally spatial. They respond to the struggle for equal access and representation against different forms of socio-spatial discrimination and aspire to alternative understandings of the relation between the body and space that destabilize both current constructions of an able body as well as established norms concerning the use of space. Expanding beyond design guides and regulations to encompass more broadly structural and systemic issues related to the experience of disablement and segregation, this concern continues to be relevant well beyond the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA).1 The goal, in this context, is not only to facilitate access to buildings for differently abled bodies but also access to society itself as equal individuals.

These politics are not only concerned with space but also have been fought for in space. They are paradigmatically captured in different performances taking place at the core of the spaces of political representation. For example, in the United States, the occupation of the San Francisco Health and Education and Welfare Offices in 1977—the longest occupation of a federal government office in U.S. history to date—led to the final approval of the Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. In 1990, the Capitol Crawl comprised disability right activists crawling the steps of the U.S. Capitol Building, leaving their wheelchairs and other mobility devices behind, to demand Congress to pass the ADA. But beyond such dramatic moments, there exist more peripheral locations that have provided opportunities for those politics to unfold, helping shape and empower the collectives working to pursue them. Camp Jened was one of them: a summer camp for people with disabilities taking place since the sixties in Hunter, New York.

In the following interview, I talk to Jim LeBrecht to learn more about the camp. LeBrecht is an activist and former member of Disabled in Action, a sound designer, and a filmmaker.2 Born with spina bifida in the late fifties, he was a camper for a couple of years in his teens and is currently working on a documentary about his experience. Comprising footage shot in 1971 by a group of revolutionary videographers called The People’s Video Theatre, some 8 millimeter footage shot by LeBrecht’s family and additional images from 1974, the documentary is directed by LeBrecht and filmmaker Nicole Newnham and produced by LeBrecht, Newnham, and Sara Bolder.3 The ambition of the documentary is brilliantly captured in its bold title: Crip Camp. The term ‘Crip’ reclaims the term “cripple,” which has conventionally carried negative connotations, and has been used both by activists and scholars in the last decade to expand the discussion on disabilities beyond the politics of normalization and assimilation. In our conversation, we discuss this space and its role in resisting the normalizing nature of architecture.4

The politics of disability are fundamentally spatial. [...] These politics are not only concerned with space but also have been fought for in space. 

Before delving into his experience of the camp itself, LeBrecht and I discuss diverse questions surrounding architecture and filmmaking. He expresses concern that the ADA has meant, for many, the end of a struggle, and represents for architects and developers “a ceiling” for their engagement with people with disabilities. LeBrecht states, “We are never part of the conversation, so our concerns are rarely considered and are reduced to complying with certain regulations.” More broadly, LeBrecht argues that “the whole discussion about diversity and inclusion in the last years rarely has included disability. We are not even being thought of.” 5 In response, I tell him that the lack of engagement with these concerns and the lack of representation of architects with disabilities in the profession are questions that are increasingly being addressed.

The question of representation is at the core of LeBrecht’s concerns as a filmmaker. Representation concerns the possibility for him to be in the spaces where filmmaking unfolds: “When I became a director, I looked at what the normal trajectory was, and you have to consider not only shooting in different places but also film festivals, editing retreats in distant locations, and the questions of accessibility related to those.” Part of the advocacy for this film is a response to this context, a challenge those barriers. However, it goes beyond that: “We need to discuss the relation between underrepresented and misrepresented communities, and this is key in the realm of film. We need to tell our story through our lens, not through somebody else’s.” This goal frames our discussion of LeBrecht’s experience in Camp Jened, the story at the core of Crip Camp.

Ignacio G. Galán: I would like us to start discussing the history of Camp Jened. And I want to insist from the outset that history is very important for me in order to go beyond an understanding of architecture’s concern with disabilities as a merely technical question—that of the adequacy or adaptation of the built environment for bodies with disabilities. Accessibility to space is fundamental, and the technical dimension of this question is one of the aspects in which architecture is concerned more obviously. However, in order to discuss how architecture is concerned with the project of accessibility and inclusion for people with disabilities in a broader way, we need to consider the historical construction of disability: the delineation of what is an able and a disabled body and the ways they belong in space is something that needs to be discussed historically, and that is why I want to frame our interview in this way. In fact, Camp Jened responded to a historical context that was significantly different from ours, right?

Jim LeBrecht: Let me frame my response along my own experience. I started going to summer camps when I was eight years old or so. The majority of the camps back then, in the mid to late sixties, were very different from Camp Jened—I like to call them “straight camps.” They were fun, do not get me wrong. At least I had fun: I was the first one in the pool and the last one out. But there was one main difference that to me is key for what we want to discuss, which is the sense of community that was cultivated in Camp Jened—in my experience, it was just not formed in the “straight camps.” A lot of camps did not have disabled counselors, or disabled people in the administration, and that was key to this question. Many times, if they would see two campers talking together in a way that looked like they were interested in each other, they would break them apart because they would not want to expose them to the disappointment of a relationship not working out. We were treated more like patients, and that is the way I would characterize these camps as a product of their time.

This was two months where I did not have to worry about architectural barriers, and this meant I was not a burden to anyone. I could get independently wherever I wanted. It was a space of freedom. 

IGG: Was there an architecture that you would deem characteristic of those camps?

JL: Well, it was the architecture that is characteristic of those institutions in which patients are interned. They called the places where we slept “dorms” rather than “bunks,” for example, and we had to go to bed at 8:30. I find that meaningful.

IGG: What was the alternative that Camp Jened offered?

JL: Different from those “straight camps,” I call Camp Jened a “Hippie camp”—and its links to hippie camps provided an alternative model for it, different from that of institutions. I went there for the first time in 1970, for half a month, and then full-time in 1971. I had heard about this camp from other campers in 1969, people were talking about it: a camp where you slept in bunks, where camp counselors slept in the same rooms where you did, where they were playing music all the time, and where campers were up late. It was supposed to be a wonderful environment. So I told my dad, “I want to go there.” I had also heard you could smoke dope with the counselors, but that was just some bonus points.

I was 14 when I went first. So, I find myself arriving there, in the bus, and I look outside the window, and I cannot figure out who are the campers and who are the counselors. Because I saw people in wheelchairs that were assisting the campers that were getting off the bus. There were people with disabilities receiving us, because they were also in positions of authority. And there are all kinds of wild looking people, hippies, that I could not tell if they had disabilities. Then I get there, and I was not infantilized. I was treated as a teenager.

IGG: Would you link this project to the politics of the period?

JL: Well, at this point, there were many liberation movements working in parallel. They were all, in different ways, seeking to challenge the authorities and the establishment. And the people that were running Camp Jened wanted to provide a space and an experience where people could feel or get a sense of their life, of what they were capable of. Of course, we all wanted to have fun in the camp, but there was this additional mindset that made the space of the camp special to develop a sense of community that you could deem political. In fact, a lot of us in the bunks started to talk about our future and discuss Black Power, Women’s Liberation, Gay Rights, etc. And we thought, “We really need the same thing for ourselves.”

At that point in history, summer camps were a space where one could find a community and come together to talk and organize. A place that did not really exist for us otherwise, really. There were only some universities where disabled students were starting to go and discuss their concerns together, like University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign or UC Berkeley. In New York, where I lived, it was Hofstra and Long Island University. However, I was still 14 or 15, so the camp for us was the only alternative.

IGG: You are referring to the camp as a space enabling certain politics, and I wonder if there was something political also in the space itself.

JL: This was two months where I did not have to worry about architectural barriers, and this meant I was not a burden to anyone. I could get independently wherever I wanted. It was a space of freedom. And this is a space in which I could be picked first for the basketball team versus not being picked at all. This was also a space where I met my first girlfriend in 1971.

Not being an architect, but having had to live with the very mixed results of the work of architects, I think that universal design is still the most appropriate way of looking at the questions that concern us.  

IGG: I am interested in the way in which you discuss the socialities of the camp in relation to its architecture, in contrast to the way in which you described the hierarchical relations of what you called “straight camps” and how certain forms of affection were prevented.

JL: Well, they just prevented them to avoid us being possibly frustrated.

IGG: I understand. But it seems to me that what you are describing in Camp Jened is that links of assistance and affection were normalized beyond institutional hierarchies and constraints. And this seems to be something that the camp might allow illuminating for our understanding of what it means to be a social being more generally, in ways that do not necessarily celebrate autonomy or individualism but accept how we are all assisted in different ways both physically and affectively.6 Could we understand the camp as a space in which those socialities were being tested?

JL: Yes, one of the counselors described it as a “bubble.” And it was different from the world outside it. When we would go into town, which was about one mile down, into Hunter, New York, both social and physical space were significantly different. There were no ramps into the pizza place, for example, but there were not only physical barriers. The people there did not want us to come, because customers were uncomfortable with us: we had wheelchairs that occupied more space, we talked really loudly because of our different disabilities, our bodies looked unfamiliar to them, and they interpreted them as grotesque. So the camp was an exception to that reality.

IGG: I understand the conceptualization of the camp as a “bubble,” and there is a tradition to discussing summer camps in that way, a space were alternative socialities are possible for a limited period of time. But I wonder if we could understand the camp not as an exception, a space out of which you would come out to the “normal” space after the summer but rather as a laboratory where new social realities could be tested, one in which there was work being done towards another politics for people with disabilities.

JL: I like to put it in these terms: you cannot strive for a better life if you do not know one exists. Once you experience a better life, it is an extraordinary catalyst for you to find it and protect it. That is what the camp meant for us.

IGG: The camp, in fact, was at the core of the work that many of you continued to do in the following years, in different activist projects that strived to make the world increasingly more like the camp.

JL: Absolutely. And there were particular places where that took shape. Many of us ended up gathering in Berkeley, for example, where there was the Center for Independent Living among other things.7 We knew there was a promised land forming in Berkeley, where you could live independently. The interconnections between the Disability Civil Rights movement and the Independent Living Movement came together there. There was a sort of migration for people with disabilities out to Berkeley. A friend told me once, “It’s like a migrant’s story,” because we had to travel somewhere else to achieve the life that we wanted for ourselves. To me this is a profound thing. If one is from a different country, you look for a butcher from your country, or a community center. The question for me is how do you do this, how do you gather in a way that allows for the form of mutual assistance that one looks for and that facilitates the political organizing, without these resulting in an isolated community but rather one that remains integrated in a larger one. However, the discussion about disabilities in the late sixties and early seventies seemed very often to follow the paradigm “separate but equal.” At the time, the Chancellor of UC San Diego, for example, suggested that it might be better to have one or two campuses that are accessible and that could concentrate disabled students. Really?

It is important that architects embrace the diverse ways in which bodies occupy space, not as something you have to do but as something you want to do.

IGG: This puts on the table the fundamental question about inclusion. I wonder if there were alliances at that time between the politics of the camp and other politics of inclusion. You have mentioned before some of the liberation movements as a model for what you strived for—but were there also partnerships in this shared aspect of some of your fights?

JL: The camp hired several African American counselors from the South, and that brought to the fore multiple perspectives towards the problem of segregation. In fact, we could relate to many of their struggles. They could make clear to us how our experience could relate to them entering into a restaurant at the time when segregation was still well in place in the South. Segregation in general was something I could relate to since we were many times received by the same unwelcoming contexts. Nobody wants to appropriate anyone’s struggle, but we could see that there was a universality in being not “normal” that we shared.8

IGG: Did this translate in specific forms of support between each of these movements and causes?

JL: Indeed. In the struggle for the final approval of the Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act in 1977, with the occupation of the Federal Building in San Francisco, Black Panthers were there with us, the Unions were there, the Butterfly Brigade was there, which was an LGBTQ group protecting others in their community. There was an outpouring of support from other communities that had experienced oppression.

IGG: I guess we can finish this conversation with this occupation—for I understand occupations both as political performances and spatial practices. They involve an active appropriation of space and its transformation, a challenge to its order through its inhabitation. Crip Camp is an invitation to continue imagining ways in which we can challenge the normalizing and segregating tendencies of space upon bodies and communities through their occupation. This seems to me to be the architectural project of today.

JL: Not being an architect, but having had to live with the very mixed results of the work of architects, I think that universal design is still the most appropriate way of looking at the questions that concern us. An elevator located away from the main flow of movement or ramps to the side and not meant for everyone reinforces the imposed “otherness” of the disabled community—a community constructed as an exception to the norm. It is important that architects embrace the diverse ways in which bodies occupy space, not as something you have to do but as something you want to do. This shift might lead to the invention of spaces that can be for everyone. The solution can never be “separate but equal.” That has never been the right solution for any collective.

1   As Aimi Hamraie has recently argued, “working in concert with post-racial narratives, which insist that American racism ended along with state-sanctioned segregation, the post-ADA narrative uses the formal guarantee of disability equality to elide the existence of material inequalities…[hiding] the persistent architectural, attitudinal, and economic barriers that disabled people continue to face in the post-ADA world.” See Aimi Hamraie, Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 3.

2   I owe immense thanks to Raymond Lifchez for talking to me about Jim LeBrecht’s work.

3   For more information on the film see cripcamp.com

4   Developing in parallel to Queer Theory, Crip Theory aims “to resist the contemporary spectacle of able-bodied heteronormativity.” See Robert McCruer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York and London: New York University Press, 2006), 3.

5   This also applies both to architecture discourse and to the architectural profession. Jos Boys has argued that “[w]hilst readers and anthologies already exist that explore architecture and other identities of difference—such as gender…, sexuality…and race…—disability as a concept, and disabled people as a constituency, continue to be assumed as completely separate from social or cultural politics.” Jos Boys, Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2017). David Gissen has recently pointed out that the report, “Inclusion in Architecture,” that has recently been produced by the J. Max Bond Center on Design for the Just City at the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York, did not include disability among its areas of concern. Gissen considers the lack of architects and architecture students as one that “relegates people with disabilities to being a topic of discussion versus agents of change.” See David Gissen, “Inclusion in Architecture. Why are there so few disabled architects and architecture students?,” The Architects Newspaper (June 15, 2018).

6   For this concern, see the conversation between Sunaura Tyalor and Judth Butler, “Examined Life,” (October 6, 2010). Sunaura Tayor: “In my opinion, help is something we all need…and we are all interdependent in all sorts of ways.” Judith Butler: “My sense is that what’s at stake here is really rethinking the human as a site of interdependency…Do we or do we not live in a world in which we assist each other?”

7   On the Center for Independent Living, see Raymond Lifchez and Barbara Winslow, Design for Independent Living. The Environment and Physically Disabled People (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1979).

8   The intersections between race and disability have been discussed already not necessarily as parallel struggles but in diverse and conflicting relations in their definition. See, for example, Chris Bell ed., Blackness and Disability: Critical Examinations and Cultural Interventions (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011).

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