Minor Resistance: The Everyday Politics and Power Dynamics of Assistive Technology Adoption
Stacy Hsueh, Danielle Van Dusen, Anat Caspi, Jennifer Mankoff · 2025 · ASSETS 2025: 27th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility · doi:10.1145/3663547.3746465
Summary
This paper proposes a power-aware framework for understanding assistive technology adoption that moves beyond the traditional "fit" model, where adoption signals good fit between device and user while abandonment signals poor fit. Drawing from an eight-month ethnographic study at Open Doors for Multicultural Families (ODMF), a Seattle-based nonprofit serving low-income, racially diverse, and disabled families, the researchers examine how sociopolitical forces shape AT access and use. The study included seven months of participant observation at ODMF and 22 semi-structured interviews with case managers, program managers, families (primarily parents of children with cognitive disabilities including non-verbal autism), and a speech language pathologist. The families served were primarily immigrants, refugees, and people of color from diverse cultural backgrounds, with 89-90% from low- to very low-income households, many with limited English proficiency. The paper identifies four forms of agency loss that families experience when navigating AT systems: definitional agency loss (institutions defining what counts as AT through restrictive boundaries), assertive agency loss (bureaucratic processes wearing down families' willingness to advocate), interpretive agency loss (information opacity preventing informed decisions), and temporal agency loss (institutional timelines misaligned with families' lived realities). The authors introduce the concept of "minor resistance" drawn from James C. Scott's theory of everyday resistance and Sara Ahmed's notion of "willfulness" to describe how families exercise agency within these oppressive structures.
Key findings
The study identifies four distinct forms of minor resistance that families employ: (1) Selective compliance—families superficially meeting institutional expectations while preserving their own routines and practices, such as using an iPad at school but maintaining sign language and picture cards at home. (2) Strategic refusal—deliberately opting out of available resources not from disinterest but from careful assessment that the costs (financial risk, emotional toll, complexity) outweigh the benefits, such as declining to borrow lending library devices due to fear of liability for damage. (3) Covert disobedience—intentionally deviating from professional guidance in favor of lived experiential knowledge, such as seeking second medical opinions or borrowing AAC devices from nonprofits when disagreeing with a speech therapist's approach. (4) Folk bridgecraft—families developing stopgap solutions and informal support networks to bridge gaps left by institutional systems, such as a father adapting an Xbox controller for his son's hand exercises while waiting months for an approved device. The paper argues that AT is not a neutral tool for access provision but an instrument through which disability and communication norms are articulated and enforced, and that those with more privilege are more likely to receive accommodations while those with less recognized disabilities are often excluded.
Relevance
This paper fundamentally challenges how the accessibility field thinks about AT adoption and abandonment. Rather than treating non-use as a design failure to be fixed, it reframes it as potentially a strategic, rational response to power dynamics that make access costly. For accessibility practitioners and researchers, this has profound implications: it shifts the goal from "optimizing use" to "lowering the cost of choice" and from designing better-fitting devices to addressing the structural barriers—bureaucratic, financial, linguistic, temporal—that constrain meaningful choice. The concept of minor resistance provides a vocabulary for recognizing and supporting the everyday strategies that marginalized families already employ. The paper's design implications include building infrastructure for collective action (community networks, loaner device tracking), facilitating collective cataloging of AT alternatives (centralizing scattered DIY adaptations), and creating tools for collective sensemaking of complex institutional processes. This work is essential reading for anyone involved in AT provision, policy, or design.
Tags: assistive technology · power dynamics · social inequity · intersectionality · ethnography · technology adoption · technology abandonment · disability justice
Standards referenced: UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities