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  • Converting Survivorship into Professional Preventive Medicine: Lessons From Wiesenthal, Feminist Rage, Disability Rights, and the Origins of Accessible France and Ghost Light Access

    By: Kelsey Maurine Brickl In 1989, Simon Wiesenthal wrote, “Survival is a privilege which entails obligations. I am forever asking myself what I can do for those who have not survived. The answer I have found for myself is: I want to be their mouthpiece, I want to keep their memory alive, to make sure…

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  • MCC Theater in New York City Corrected a Serious Accessibility Gap

    By Kelsey Maurine Brickl Those of us who work in disability-rights compliance spend a great deal of time identifying failures. We document inaccessible procedures, explain the foreseeable consequences, cite the governing law, and ask institutions to correct problems that should have been addressed before a Disabled patron encountered them. That work is not just important…

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  • Customer Service Is the Graveyard of Disability Rights

    Customer service is the graveyard of disability rights. Institutions send legal claims there to be stripped of force, recoded as dissatisfaction, and buried beneath apologies that require no action. They do this even when the writer has explicitly identified the communication as a civil-rights matter, cited the applicable statute, and warned that routing it through…

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  • The Anti-AI Campaign in the Arts Has an Ableism Problem

    The campaign against generative artificial intelligence in the arts has acquired the confidence of a moral crusade. Critics call the technology theft. Artists organize boycotts. Publishers, studios, universities, festivals, and professional organizations develop disclosure rules and prohibitions. Lawsuits continue over copyright, licensing, consent, and the use of creative work in model training. Writers, illustrators, musicians,…

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  • The Parasocial-Industrial Complex

    On confidently confused social-media fanfiction and the communal invention of public lives By: Kelsey Maurine Brickl Celebrity fan culture has developed a habit of redistributing consent through language that sounds affectionate enough to escape serious scrutiny.  A Taylor Swift fan in New York City excitedly calls the singer’s Madison Square Garden nuptials “our royal wedding.”…

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  • AI, Theatre, and the False Premise Behind the Something Rotten Pile-On

    By Kelsey Maurine Brickl Something is rotten in certain spaces online. Across TikTok, comment sections, blog posts, and opinion pieces, the Manchester, UK production of a musical comedy that flourished on Broadway is being excoriated for the alleged use of generative AI in several onstage backdrops and paper props. I am not joining this pile-on.…

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  • Not Every Dog in a West End Theatre Has the Same Legal Status

    By Kelsey Maurine Brickl Spend enough time around accessibility discussions and eventually someone will announce that “it’s a working dog,” as though that ends the conversation. It doesn’t. In fact, that is often the beginning of the accessibility conversation. One of the more persistent misunderstandings in British theatre is the assumption that every dog entering…

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  • The Ten Commandments of Accessibility in Theatre

    By Kelsey Maurine Brickl I. Accessibility Is a Matter of Compliance, Not Basic Customer Service. Accessibility is a legal, operational, and governance obligation. It is not an act of goodwill, hospitality, or discretionary customer care. Disabled people are rights-holders. Theatre organisations should therefore build accessibility into their ordinary operations rather than treating it as an…

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  • When a Disability-Rights Correction Becomes “Just Another Letter”

    By: Kelsey Maurine Brickl The most revealing part of my recent exchange with The Stage was not the publication of my civil rights-oriented corrective response. As I informed them after their staff initially wished to publish it belatedly, in July, they needed to publish it in in a timely fashion in order to operate in…

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  • Do Parasocial Fans Dream of Electric Sheep? Field Notes from Researching Modern Fandom

    By: Kelsey Maurine Brickl One of the most uncomfortable things about doing research on toxic and unhealthy fandom is the stuff you discover. Not the abstract stuff. Not the clean academic categories. Not “parasociality” as a tidy term scribbled in blue ink inside a spiral-bound notebook and waiting to be put into a journal article. …

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