Creative Misfits - I: Crafting Misfits: Technosocial Constructions of Disability

Abstract

Feminist STS scholars have stressed the importance of including engagements with creative life including literary and visual media as entry points into analysis of technosocial infrastructures, processes, and relations. Concepts like cyborgs and monsters also emphasize the boundary-crossing, embodied, and material aspects of knowledge creation by which subjecthood and world come into being together. However, use of non-normative forms of human embodiment and experience in STS scholarship has often resulted in the deployment of what feminist disability scholar Rosemarie Garland Thompson calls “the theoretical generic disabled body” (2011). She proposes instead that disability experience is, in part, one of “misfitting” between material embodiment and material world. Her definition recognizes the centrality of the “fleshiness and contingencies of human embodiment” but also the tangible effects of the techno-social worlds we inhabit.

This panel explores the productive and imaginative possibilities that arise from this “misfitting” of humans and material-social worlds, notably the ways in which practitioners and creators interact with and adjust the conditions of possibility for their representational practices. We invite papers that explore the generative frictions and interruptions to relations of power that engaging with non-normative bodyminds and experiences entail. We are particularly interested in how disabled identities are shaped by, and in turn influence creative practices, from online fan-fiction communities to graphic medicine. From web accessibility protocols to novel technologies, how are structures and processes created that make innovative representations possible? How might analysis of creative practices highlight the relational aspects of materiality as identity- and knowledge-building?

Individual Presentations

• Unconventional Bodies: Diversity, Kinship, and Medical Illustration - Drew Danielle Belsky, STS Program, York University

• Imagination as an Embodied Craft - Marisol Marini, University of São Paulo

• Non-Normative Bodies in Sociotechnical Practices of Engineering Care Robotics - Arne Maibaum, TU Berlin; Philipp Graf, Technische Universität Berlin

• Misfit Managed: Empty Fortresses, Social Robots, and Irony in Autism Research - Rua Mae Williams, University of Florida

Session Organizers

• Catherine Duchastel, STS Program, York University

• Drew Danielle Belsky, STS Program, York University