Shortly after the United States announced its withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, mayors of global cities committed to addressing climate change via urban-scale projects aimed at promoting liveable, sustainable, and healthy communities. While such projects are taken for granted as serving the common good, this paper addresses the…[Read more]

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]

An overview of proposed categories for the growing graphic medicine genre of cancer comics (i.e. cancer narratives in comic book form) and an initial theory on the significant linkage between this illness and particular medium.

This article collides St. Apollonia’s medieval passion narratives – manuscript illustrations, church screens, and paintings by Francisco De Zurbarán and Carlo Dolci – with A.L. Kennedy’s contemporary short story “Story of My Life” to find out what happens when we move beyond the theoretical violence imposed by traditional approaches to gothic studies.

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]

Review of LISSA: A STORY ABOUT MEDICAL PROMISE, FRIENDSHIP, AND REVOLUTION (University of Toronto Press) by Sherine Hamdy, Coleman Nye, Sarula Bao, and Caroline Brewer

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]

The movement for Digital Social Innovation (DSI) insists on the need for a long memory to not take anything unexpected as “innovative” just because there is no awareness of what has happened before or elsewhere. In this article we want to briefly collect three case studies from the recent past that have seen social justice movements aut…[Read more]

A comic about the power of sharing: a collaboration between figshare, Symbola Comics and La Grúa Estudio.

Concept and story by Francisco De La Mora & Ernesto Priego

Art by Cristina Durán La Grúa Estudio

Design by Daniela Rocha

Originally published as

de la Mora, Francisco et al.. “The Power of Sharing”. figshare, 21 Mar. 2018.…[Read more]

While organ transplantation has been established in the medical imagination since the 1960s, this technology is currently undergoing a popular re-imagination in the era of global capitalism. As transplantation procedures have become routine in medical centers in non-Western and developing nations, and as organ sales and transplant tourism become…[Read more]

Parables of Care presents true stories of creative responses to dementia care, told by carers, taken from a group of over 100 case studies available at http://carenshare.city.ac.uk/. Creativity, emotional intelligence and common sense are amply shown in these 14 touching and informative stories. Drawn by Dr Simon Grennan with Christopher…[Read more]

Parables of Care: Instrumentality, Aesthetics and Utility in Devising a Comic for Dementia Caregivers. PDF file.

Presented at the 2017 Comics & Medicine Conference: Access Points Seattle. Public Library Central Branch, 15th – 17th June 2017. Seattle, USA.

This set of slides was modified slightly from its original version for online s…[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]