Crip Technoscience in Action: Disabled Knowing-Making in the Critical Design Lab

• In Event: Making Disability: Disability Culture, Design, and STS

Abstract

Crip technoscience (Hamraie 2015, 2017) describes disabled peoples’ uses of technological and designerly knowing-making to critique and transform the world. This presentation investigates the theory and methodology of crip technoscience through the work of the Critical Design Lab, a multi-institutional collaborative focused on disability, design justice, and the lifeworld. I will discuss how crip technoscience informs our lab structure, major projects such as Mapping Access and the Contra* podcast, and the experimental sensibility underlying the design of “protocols” (Murphy 2012). I will also draw upon podcast episodes from season one of Contra* to further develop crip technoscience theory, pointing toward the ways that concepts such as expertise, design friction, and technoscience activism are emerging from within disability culture (and can thus better inform Science and Technology Studies, as well as Disability Studies).

Cited:
Hamraie, Aimi. “Cripping Feminist Technoscience” (peer reviewed review
essay), Hypatia: journal of feminist philosophy 30.1 (Winter 2015): 307-313.

Hamraie, Aimi. Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Murphy, Michelle. Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism,
Health, and Technoscience. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.

Author

• Aimi Hamraie, Vanderbilt University