“The research/experiment is how to sense entanglement?”
—Fred Moten and Wu Tsang, Who Touched Me?

The New Disability Arts movement calls for accessibility as a formal consideration and an interpersonal practice. Artists in this movement, including Jordan Lord, Carolyn Lazard, and Constantina Zavitsanos have utilized textual forms like captions, subtitles, and audio description for composition and access. These methods respond to disability’s proclivity towards alternative ways of perceiving the world, taking in information, and just being with your friends.

With this in mind, this workshop addresses the literary index as an existing type of access form—a “dependent textuality” accounting for the multi-pronged ways a document produces knowledge. Akin to the finger with which it shares a name, the literary index calls out a text.

We will make use of the literary index as a poetic form while creating our own shared document. In doing so, we will collectively explore the multivalent relationships between disability and alternative forms of knowledge transmission. The aim is not to provide an explanation, but to collaboratively assemble a citational web, and to lean into the fluid, interdependent relationships between different forms of textuality—from the book text to images and sound.