Minor Resistance

A concept describing the everyday, often subtle strategies that people use to exercise agency and push back against power structures that constrain their choices, particularly in the context of assistive technology adoption. Drawing from James C. Scott's theory of "weapons of the weak" and Sara Ahmed's notion of "willfulness," minor resistance in AT contexts includes selective compliance (superficially meeting institutional expectations while preserving personal routines), strategic refusal (deliberately opting out of resources whose costs outweigh benefits), covert disobedience (deviating from professional guidance based on lived experience), and folk bridgecraft (creating informal stopgap solutions when institutional systems fail). The concept reframes AT non-use from a design failure to a strategic response to structural power dynamics.