Making Disability: Disability Culture, Design, and STS

Abstract

Research on disability in science and technology studies often takes for granted that non-disabled people are the predominant experts and makers regarding disability technologies, while disabled people themselves are relegated to the status of users. By contrast, this panel uses disabled peoples’ making and designing practices, as well as disabled resistance to medical and technoscientific ableism, to inquire about how disability cultural frameworks can interface with and strengthen STS theories of embodiment, technologies, artifacts, and infrastructures. Pushing beyond the mainstream tech world’s emphasis on innovative and shiny new products, our exploration of disability culture addresses the ways that disabled people are hacking, tinkering, and speaking back to inaccessible worlds, despite the exclusion or appropriation of disability experiences.

Bringing together mid-career and junior scholars, graduate students, and artists, this panel pushes the intersections of disability studies and STS beyond current conversations about innovation. Papers will consider both analytical possibilities and current practices for alternate interpretations of disability within design, art, and technology. After exploring how STS has attempted to explain the concept of disability and its ordering, we investigate the politics of practices such as “simulations,” which imagine disability as a replicable experience available to non-disabled designers. We delve into the design lab and disability choreography to explore the productive processes undertaken by disabled people involved in material production and artistry. The panel brings into consideration the production of elevator maintenance forms, podcasts, maps, and dance performances to propose that critical STS concepts can facilitate crip technoscience and disability justice.

Individual Presentations

• Ableist STS? Reconsidering Our Field’s Engagement with Disability Studies - Raquel Velho, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

• Empathy and Mismatch: The Problem of Disability Simulation - Bess Williamson, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

• Disability Culture, Dance, and the Delights of Pleasurable Design - alice sheppard

• Crip Technoscience in Action: Disabled Knowing-Making in the Critical Design Lab - Aimi Hamraie, Vanderbilt University

• Imagining Practices of Crip Maintenance through the Elevator - Leah Samples, University of Pennsylvania

Session Organizer

• Aimi Hamraie, Vanderbilt University