Description
The Labs for Liberation Lecture series includes six-weeks of free, online, and accessible programming. There will be lectures and panel discussions with experts in critical disability studies and Black feminist disability approaches to design and technology in order to bridge many realms of thinking, knowing, and making.
In this session, Ashley Shew and Damien Patrick Williams lay out the problem of technoableism that we see in design and engineering spaces. Using a series of cyborg concern cases, we show how disabled knowledge plays into issues of infrastructure, and not merely issues of individual bodies in use with technologies. Often disabled people are framed as “users” of technologies in ways that dismiss the larger picture of cyborg life – one that weds disabled bodies to corporate care, ongoing issues of maintenance, and larger systems where control and misunderstanding come from nondisabled perspectives. Our intimate understanding of potential harms and failures is much larger in scope than individual designers and engineers often imagine. Our bodies are not our own, not our “owned”, because they can depend on tools, infrastructures, and processes that rely on corporations and governments and non-profit systems where disabled people have been systematically excluded.
Speakers
Ashley Shew, Professor, Science, Technology, & Society, Virginia Tech, and a philosopher of technology and author of Against Technoableism.
Damien P. Williams, Assistant Professor, Philosophy and Data Science, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and author of the chapter “Disabling AI: Biases and Values of Artificial Intelligence.” in The Handbook on Ethics of Artificial Intelligence.