[Air-L] disability and technology

[Jonathan Sterne, Dr.]

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://sterneworks.org/COMS411-F18-3Sep.pdf  which has lots more ideas and readings.

Good luck!
—Jonathan