New digital projects use geographic information systems (GIS) and crowdsourcing applications to gather data about the accessibility of public spaces for disabled people. While these projects offer useful tools, their approach to technology and disability is often depoliticized. Compliance-based maps take disability for granted as medical…[Read more]

When presented with the term ‘inhuman’, I was drawn to consider how certain ways of being become associated with the inhuman, how this association is involved in the constitution of what is taken as properly human, and the deleterious effects for those who become associated with the inhuman. I’m going to address these topics in three stages. First…[Read more]

In this essay, I discuss salient themes of The Child to Come: Life After the Human Catastrophe (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). I hold that The Child To Come’s main thrust is this: ‘The issue is not that there is no future but rather that there is no sure way of orienting toward that future, either to save it or to survive it’. The chall…[Read more]

As a feminist disability studies scholar working on issues of accessi – ble and inclusive design, my participation in the Critical Health, Age, and Disability Collective (CHAD) in summer 2014 was my first introduction to the field of age studies. I was surprised to find how little my training had taught me about how to think critically about age…[Read more]

In Disability Studies, Universal Design (UD) is a concept that is often borrowed from an architectural or design context to mean an ideology of inclusion and flexibility with a range of applications in education, technology, and other milieus. This paper returns to UD as a design phenomenon, considering knowledge production practices as conditions…[Read more]

Universal Design (UD) is a movement to produce built environments that are accessible to a broad range of human variation. Though UD is often taken for granted as synonymous with the best, most inclusive, forms of disability access, the values, methodologies, and epistemologies that underlie UD require closer scrutiny. This paper uses feminist and…[Read more]

On geopolitics, disability rhetoric, and the CRPD

In feminist technoscience studies (FTS), the term technoscience conveys that scientific knowledge and technological worlds are active constructions of entangled material, social, and historical agents. Feminist analyses of assisted reproduction, environmental harm, digital media, and cyborg bodies constitute some of the work of FTS, a close…[Read more]

Disability has become a hot topic for feminist philosophy in recent years. Special issues of Hypatia and Disability Studies Quarterly, multiple conference keynote addresses, and a growing cadre of scholars are exploring the intersections of feminist and critical disability thought. As a disabled feminist scholar, I perceive these trends as a…[Read more]

In this paper, I argue for historical epistemology as a methodology for critical disability studies (DS) by looking to Foucault’s archaeology of cure in History of Madness. While the moral, medical, and social models of disability frame disability history as a progressive movement and replacement of moral and medical authority with s…[Read more]

Although Universal Design gains popularity as a common sense strategy for crafting built environments for all users, accessibility for disabled people remains a marginal area of inquiry within design practice and theory. This article argues that the tension between accessibility and Universal Design stems from inadequate critical and historical…[Read more]