Challenging Ableism: A Critical Turn Toward Disability Justice in HCI

Against Technoableism

When bioethicist and professor Ashley Shew became a self-described "hard-of-hearing chemobrained amputee with Crohn's disease and tinnitus," there was no returning to "normal." Suddenly well-meaning people called her an "inspiration" while grocery shopping or viewed her as a needy recipient of technological wizardry. Most disabled people don't want what the abled assume they want--nor are they generally asked. Almost everyone will experience disability at some point in their lives, yet the abled persistently frame disability as an individual's problem rather than a social one. In a warm, feisty voice and vibrant prose, Shew shows how we can create better narratives and more accessible futures by drawing from the insights of the cross-disability community. To forge a more equitable world, Shew argues that we must eliminate "technoableism"--the harmful belief that technology is a "solution" for disability; that the disabled simply await being "fixed" by technological wizardry; that making society more accessible and equitable is somehow a lesser priority. This badly needed introduction to disability expertise considers mobility devices, medical infrastructure, neurodivergence, and the crucial relationship between disability and race. The future, Shew points out, is surely disabled--whether through changing climate, new diseases, or even through space travel. It's time we looked closely at how we all think about disability technologies and learn to envision disabilities not as liabilities, but as skill sets enabling all of us to navigate a challenging world.

Against Technoableism

One of BookRiot’s Ten Best Disability Books of the YearShortlisted for the Inc. Non-Obvious Book Awards“Wonderfully lucid.” —Andrew Leland, New York Times Book ReviewA manifesto exploding what we think we know about disability, and arguing that disabled people are the real experts when it comes to technology and disability., Against Technoableism, Rethinking Who Needs Improvement, Ashley Shew, 9781324076254

Nothing About Us, Without Us: Disability Justice and AI

Intersectionality, ways that AI can support the disabled, and how we can win the race to make AI more inclusive.

10 Principles of Disability Justice | Sins Invalid

INTERSECTIONALITY “We do not live single issue lives” –Audre Lorde. Ableism, coupled with white supremacy, supported by capitalism, underscored by heteropatriarchy, has rendered the vast majority of the world “invalid.”

Crip Technoscience Manifesto

As disabled people engaged in disability community, activism, and scholarship, our collective experiences and histories have taught us that we are effective agents of world building and dismantling toward more socially just relations.The grounds for social justice and world remaking, however, are frictioned;technologies, architectures, and infrastructures are often designed and implemented without committing to disability as a difference that matters. This manifesto calls attention to the powerful, messy, non-innocent, contradictory, and nevertheless crucial work of what we name as “crip technoscience,” practices of critique, alteration, and reinvention of our material-discursive world. Disabled people are experts and designers of everyday life. But we also harness technoscience for political action, refusing to comply with demands to cure, fix, or eliminate disability. Attentive to the intersectional workings of power and privilege, we agitate against independence and productivity as requirements for existence. Instead, we center technoscientific activism and critical design practices that foster disability justice.

Disability-Driven Development

Social Model of Disability | The Paper Pilot

The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology

Belonging Is a Right, Not a Reward 

CW: Ableism Disabled people have been made to prove their worth for too long. Society sees value in work, earnings, or productivity, and anyone who doesn’t meet these standards is expected to…

Anthropology and ableism

Abstract This article continues the tradition of writing about embodied knowledge production to highlight the underanalyzed issue of ableism, providing an opening for a disciplinary reckoning with oppressive legacies towards creating collective access in anthropology and academia. Building on the creative and collaborative labor of disabled and allied anthropologists, I argue that ableism is inherent to anthropology's disciplinary formations—especially expectations pertaining to fieldwork. I make a series of claims related to this argument: The continuation of fieldwork practices from the colonial model naturalizes able bodyminds, and without intervention, reproduces ableist anthropology. The normate anthropologist has always had a “nondisabled” bodymind, but once disability became a proper object for anthropology, a line was solidified between “anthropologist” and “the disabled,” thereby making disabled anthropologist a seemingly conceptual impossibility. The effect of the anthropological gaze turning towards disability introduced a “corporeal unconscious” in the discipline; the specter of becoming disabled (becoming subject to the anthropological gaze rather than being its source) haunts fieldwork and heightens the anxious relation of anthropology to disability. Illuminating the normative underpinnings of anthropology and embracing the unbearable possibility that we all might be(come) disabled should move us to collectively consider what anthropology might be otherwise. , Resumen Este artículo continúa la tradición de escribir acerca de la producción de conocimiento corporeizado para enfatizar la cuestión insuficientemente analizada de la discriminación o prejuicio contra los discapacitados, capacitismo, proveyendo una apertura para un lidiar disciplinario con legados opresivos hacia la creación de acceso colectivo en antropología y la academia. Construyendo sobre la labor creativa y colaborativa de antropólogos discapacitados y aliados, argumento que el capacitismo es inherente a las formaciones disciplinarias de la antropología –especialmente las expectativas pertenecientes al trabajo de campo–. Realizo una serie de aseveraciones relacionadas con este argumento: la continuación de las prácticas de trabajo de campo del modelo colonial naturaliza los cuerposmentes capaces, y sin intervención, reproduce una antropología capacitista. El antropólogo normate ha sido siempre un cuerpomente “no discapacitado”, pero una vez la discapacidad se convirtió en un objeto propio para la antropología, una línea fue solidificada entre “el antropólogo” y “el discapacitado”, haciendo de este modo al antropólogo discapacitado aparentemente una imposibilidad conceptual. El efecto de la mirada antropológica dirigiéndose hacia la discapacidad introdujo un “inconsciente corporal” en la disciplina; el espectro de llegar a ser discapacitado (llegar a estar sujeto a la mirada antropológica en vez de ser su fuente) ronda el trabajo de campo y realza la relación ansiosa de la antropología con la discapacidad. Iluminar los fundamentos normativos de la antropología y aceptar la insoportable posibilidad que todos podemos (llegar) a ser discapacitados debería movernos a considerar colectivamente lo que podría ser la antropología de otra manera. [ capacitismo, discapacidad, trabajo de campo, ethnograph, accesibilidad ]

Technoableism

Technoableism is a belief in the power of technology that considers the elimination of disability a good thing, something we should strive for. It’s a classic form of ableism—bias against disabled people, bias in favor of nondisabled ways of life. Technoableism is the use of technologies to reassert those biases, often under the guise of empowerment.

Disability Dongle

Disability Dongles are contemporary fairy tales that appeal to the abled imagination by presenting a heroic designer-protagonist whose prototype provides a techno-utopian (re)solution to the design problem. Disability Dongle rhetoric instills in students the value of a quick fix over structural change, thus preventing them from seeking out, participating in, and contributing to existing inquiry. By labeling these material-discursive phenomena—the designed artifacts and the discourse through which their meaning is constituted—we work to shift the focus from their misguided concern about our bodies to their under-analyzed intentions and ambitions.

Substrates via Accessibility

The social model of disability holds that disability is produced by environments, not by bodies — that when software fails to accommodate a person’s needs, the environment is disabling them. We argue that the dominant organization of computing produces such interaction mismatches structurally: the commodity form of software requires a standardized consumer, and everyone whose needs diverge from this imagined subject is disabled by the software environment. The substrates research community has identified properties — disclosure, composability, malleability — that would address this, but the commodity form actively selects against these properties because they dissolve the boundaries on which exchange value depends. This raises a question: how can infrastructure organized against the grain of commodity logic be made durable? We find a precedent in accessibility infrastructure — sustained not by patronage but by the organized counter-power of disability rights movements. Through Allio, a system for cross-application augmentation built on accessibility APIs, we illustrate both what this foundation makes possible and where its limits lie. We argue that the accessibility case reframes the substrates programme’s central challenge as political-economic: the question of who sustains substrate infrastructure, and through what social mechanisms, is as important as the question of what properties it should have.

WebAIM: Web Accessibility In Mind

Expanding the potential of the web for people with disabilities by empowering individuals and organizations to create accessible content.