[Air-L] disability and technology

[Gerard Goggin]

Hi Harel, and all,

Very exciting to hear about your work - so best wishes with it - and thanks to everyone for great suggestions.

The angle it sounds like you are working on - e.g. 'what theories might explain motivation to invest in making my websites/apps etc accessible for people with disabilities?' - has been a longstanding area of inquiry/interest, but fairly tricky/contested (and also often the framing was a big limitation).

So I think what has happened over some years is that researchers, practitioners, and activists have sought to frame the question much more widely and deeply - hence the great work that has emerged, especially in last couple of years, on disability and technology.

So this has advantage of giving overdue attention to the profound ways that disability and technology interact - which then really revolutionizes how one might approach questions of how/why accessibility is framed and happens.

Here you might find useful a recent special issue of Information, Community and Society I co-edited on 'Disability Participation in the Digital Economy': https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rics20/22/4?nav=tocList

Cheers,

Gerard



On 22/3/19, 8:04 am, "Air-L on behalf of Jonathan Sterne, Dr." <air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org on behalf of jonathan.sterne at mcgill.ca> wrote:

    Hi Harel,
    
    Lots of good recommendations already.  Here are more.
    
    Kerry Dobranski and Eszter Hargittai had a great 2006 piece on the subject.
    
    Liz Ellcessor and Bill Kirkpatrick’s edited volume Disability Media Studies has good material in it.  Beth Haller has a few good chapters of classic press analysis and discussions of online community in Representing Disability in an Ableist World.  Meryl Alper chimed in on this thread but I don’t think she hawked her book, so I’ll do it for her: Giving Voice (bonus: first major scholarly study of the iPad).
    
    You should also look beyond media studies to think about disability and technology more broadly.  Aime Hamraie’s Building Access is essential reading here.  Bess Williamson Accessible America.  Also there’s great anthropology of disability: Michelle Friedner, Julie Livingston, etc.  It’s not all media studies but is very good for thinking capaciously about disability, which is essential to any theoretical accounting of the role of communication technologies in disability cultures, or vice-versa.  Melanie Yergeau’s Authoring Autism is more rhetoric than communication in its theoretical framing, but is some cutting edge stuff for communication theory.  Amit Pinchevsky and John Durham Peters have also written about autism and communication from a critical, but not necessarily disability studies perspective.
    
    Last, here’s the syllabus for the disability and technology course I teach: https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/IbLLCyoNVrcqNw4OCZnZde?domain=sterneworks.org  which has lots more ideas and readings.
    
    Good luck!
    —Jonathan
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