Disability, Technology and Change

Recently, there is a growing scholarship in design, art, technology, and science regarding their relationships with disability and thus exploring issues of materiality as well as complex embodiment and cognitive difference. In opposition to previous narratives, these novel and critical accounts center disability as a creative force, an embodied experience that fosters innovation and allows for new affordances of already known and circulating objects, practices and knowledges. These works [e.g., Hamraie 2017, Hamraie, Fritsch 2019, Dokumaci 2020, 2023] delivered by scholars with and without disabilities, academic allies and engaged research practices expose the agency, political force, and creativity of people with disabilities, thus opposing discourses that presented them as recipients of technological solutions provided by able-bodied professionals, for whom they have served as challenge or as an inspiration [Jackson, Williamson 2019].

The access and participation of people with disabilities in the processes of co-creation of technological arrangements and designing the world around us in novel and unexpected ways, is in fact a political issue, which is why scholarship currently intersects with activism and takes the form of manifestos thereby raising issues of the politics of interdependence as well as disability justice (Hamraie, Fritsch 2019). Speculating and fabulating about more just and crip futures (Kafer) are at the heart of many interventions in this moment of multiple crises.
This workshop further exposes crip-epistemics (knowledge and practice based on embodied experiences of disability) and strives to make space for disability centered narratives on innovation, repair, hacking and re-adjusting. Thus, we hope that the contributions to this workshop will allow us to re-think, re-configure, and re-organise the existing knowledge about diverse and heterogeneous societies and the established histories of technology, and to ‘write back’ to discourses, that have too often failed to include the lived experiences and testimonies of disabled experts, innovators and those who do not fit the scripts inscribed by artifacts directed at the »preferred user« [Ellis, Kao, Pitman, 2020]. We aim to challenge and suggest to pluralise the established notions of the normal, normalcy or normativity in the history and theory of technology and design. Applying a critical disability studies perspective allows for a different reading of technological change too often centered on questions of innovation and progress and focused on the global North. Hence, we propose to consider the messy arrangements of assistive and inaccessible mainstream technologies on a global scale where a differentiation in techno-poor and techno-rich is noticed by some scholars [Wolbring 2009]. We argue that it is important to reflect on the impact of these technical objects and infrastructures since the 19th century in shaping politically, materially, and socially the diverse techno-sensory and embodied modes of co-existence across cultures and national borders [Friedner 2022].

Contributions by

Robel Afeworki Abay (Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences Berlin)
Fulden Arisan (University of Chicago)
Christian Bayerlein (Activist, Germany)
David Le Breton ((University of Strasbourg)
Lucie Dalibert (University Claude Bernard Lyon 1)
Ralisa N. Dawkins (Virginia Tech)
Hélène Dollfus (University of Strasbourg)
Michele Friedner (University of Chicago)
Valentine Gourinat (University of Strasbourg)
Xolani Lennox Goxo (Stellenbosch University)
Paul-Fabien Groud (University Claude Bernard Lyon 1)
Puneet Jain (Zurich University of Arts)
Miryang Kang (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)
Sasha Kurlenkova (New York University)
Aggée Célestin Lomo Myazhiom (University of Strasbourg)
Marilena Pateraki (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens)
Karen Soldatić (Toronto Metropolitan University)
Shu Wan (University at Buffalo)
Bess Williamson (North Carolina State University)

Registration

We have a limited number of places available for guests for the workshop. If you would like to discuss with us, you can register for the workshop until November 11, 2024. Please contact Maria Pape by mail: maria.pape [​at​] student.hu-berlin.de.

Organizers

Robert Stock, Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin robert.stock@hu-berlin.de
Magdalena Zdrodowska, Jagiellonian University magda.zdrodowska@uj.edu.pl

Support

Maria Pape, Student Assistant maria.pape@student.hu-berlin.de