75. Disability and Technoscience for Crip Solidarities
Miryang Kang, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology; Hawon Chang, Pusan National University;
Recently, there has been a growing movement to take a nuanced, relational approach to disability, technoscience, and medicine both in STS and disability studies. Instead of rejecting technoscience altogether or treating disability as someone else's issue, these scholars try to design, utilize, and politicize technoscience in order to build worlds that are more accessible, equitable, and careful (Hamraie and Fritsch, 2019; Mauldin, 2016; Shakespeare et al., 2018; Mol, Moser, and Pols, 2010). This panel contributes to this new wave by inviting scholars from STS, history, anthropology, and disability studies who are interested in bringing technoscience to bear on disability justice.
We regard disabilities not only as research subjects but also as modes of inquiry into how we conduct research with our bodies. Authoritative methods in STS, such as interviews, direct observations, and archival visits, all take certain bodies to be the precondition for knowledge production. What kinds of bodies do these methods presume in terms of disability, gender, sexuality, and race? We are thus particularly interested in methodological experiments that weave bodies, senses, and things in creative ways. Our transnational dialogue will lead us to reflect on our own ways of engaging with non-innocent technoscience for crip solidarities.
Potential topics may include, but are not limited to: disabled people as makers, curators, and authors of one's own semiotic-material life; ambivalent relationships between disability and medicine; care as crip practices for interdependence; accessibility activism in mobility infrastructures; autoethnographic accounts of making alliances with technoscience.
