On dialogue: disability studies and science & technology studies

Science, Technology & Human Values, 2014

What is the ''conventional sense'' of disability, and how do the questions addressed in this special issue of Science, Technology, & Human Values (STHV) differ from those inspired by Donna Haraway and the cyborg? In industrialized societies, the medical profession has authority over the determination of who should count as disabled while ''assistive technologies'' enable specific kinds of subject positions (in terms of personhood and competencies as well as limits). In this special issue of STHV, the focus of the essays as a whole is on the different enactments of disability, as complexity that simultaneously implicates bodies, gender, sexuality, technology, and politics. The study of disability offers scope for refinement and further articulation of many issues of long-standing concern to science, technology, and society (STS). In addition, we hope they will encourage further reflection on our field's normative engagement.

Disability & Society, 2011

Journal of …, 2010

Over the years, disability rights advocates have scored significant victories. The most notable, the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990, and most recently, the ADA Amendments Act (ADAAA) of 2008. Additionally, alongside the political movement, we have seen the emergence of disability studies, which now sets the pace for developing new representations of disability.

given me much support and encouragement along the way to here, for which I am very grateful. I am indebted to the active student members of the seminar courses and voluntary reading groups with whom various aspects of this book have been put through the discussion wringer. I am especially grateful to Terri Pitts and Barbara Barker, who helped proof-read. Dan and Annette Ahem encouraged me throughout the writing of the book and offered me an unwavering belief that the project would come to fmition. Their sensitivity and humour were invaluable sources of support to me. xiv Acknowledgments Lindsay MeVicar responded to much of this work, offering many thought-provoking comments. Dan and Judy Macinnes contributed many good thoughts and shared many good times with me when I most needed them. Judy treated both my writing of the manuscript and its potential publication as an unquestionable matter of fact. I am especially grateful to Dan Macinnes, who was the Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology while I was writing this book. Against many odds, Dan treated me as a bona fide and valuable colleague, supported the continuation of my teaching, and encouraged me to teach courses that would enhance my writing. My deepest respect and gratitude I give to Rod Michalko. A life with him in blindness has made for much reading and many wonderful conversations, and has filled them, as well as this book, with vigour and life. I thank him also for maintaining a faith in me that I could not develop or maintain on my own. The provocation of his life, work, and wisdom has taught me the importance of developing a sociological stance that can speak to embodiment and to the moral implications behind being-in-the-world as disabled people.

The 22nd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, 2020

Accessibility research and disability studies are intertwined felds focused on, respectively, building a world more inclusive of people with disability and understanding and elevating the lived experiences of disabled people. Accessibility research tends to focus on creating technology related to impairment, while disability studies focuses on understanding disability and advocating against ableist systems. Our paper presents a refexive analysis of the experiences of three accessibility researchers and one disability studies scholar. We focus on moments when our disability was misunderstood and causes such as expecting clearly defned impairments. We derive three themes: ableism in research, oversimplifcation of disability, and human relationships around disability. From these themes, we suggest paths toward more strongly integrating disability studies perspectives and disabled people into accessibility research. • Human-centered computing → Accessibility theory, concepts and paradigms.

Current Anthropology, 2020

Disability is a profoundly relational category, shaped by social conditions that exclude full participation in society. What counts as an impairment in different sociocultural settings is highly variable. Recently, new approaches by disability scholars and activists show that disability is not simply lodged in the body, but created by the social and material conditions that " disable " the full participation of those considered atypical. Historically, anthropolog-ical studies of disability were often intellectually segregated, considered the province of those in medical and applied anthropology. We show the growing incorporation of disability in the discipline on its own terms by bringing in the social, activist, reflexive, experiential, narrative, and phenomenolog-ical dimensions of living with particular impairments. We imagine a broad future for critical anthropological studies of disability and argue that as a universal aspect of human life this topic should be foundational to the field.

Syllabus "Disability, Health, and Normality"

We use words like disability, health, and illness every day, and yet we rarely pause to consider how our understanding of what is normal influences how we understand the present and how we imagine futures. This course centers the experiences of multiply-marginalized disabled people and introduces students to a transnational framework that considers how our thinking about disability is anchored in settler colonialism, capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. From an intersectional, interdisciplinary perspective and based on narratives and knowledges created by disabled people-ranging from scholarly works and life writing to vlogs, television shows, and art-students will learn to critically examine the history of Western medicine, law, politics, and culture. This class offers a space in which we approach disabilities, from depression and anxiety to autism to spina bifida, as well as Deaf culture, chronic illnesses, body size, sexual orientation and gender identity, and many other forms of difference as complex sites of social expectations, personal experiences, state interventions, knowledge production, and exuberant life.