Crip Technoscience Manifesto

Abstract

As disabled people engaged in disability community, activism, and scholarship, our collective experiences and histories have taught us that we are effective agents of world-building and -dismantling toward more socially just relations. The grounds for social justice and world-remaking, however, are frictioned; technologies, architectures, and infrastructures are often designed and implemented without committing to disability as a difference that matters. This manifesto calls attention to the powerful, messy, non-innocent, contradictory, and nevertheless crucial work of what we name as "crip technoscience," practices of critique, alteration, and reinvention of our material-discursive world. Disabled people are experts and designers of everyday life. But we also harness technoscience for political action, refusing to comply with demands to cure, fix, or eliminate disability. Attentive to the intersectional workings of power and privilege, we agitate against independence and productivity as requirements for existence. Instead, we center technoscientific activism and critical design practices that foster disability justice. Hamraie and Fritsch Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1)

Undergraduate Disabled Students as Knowledge Producers including Researchers: A Missed Topic in Academic Literature

“…Various sources report that academic knowledge and evidence around the social situation of disabled people that could inform policy is missing [1,[17][18][19][20]. Undergraduate disabled students could be involved in generating the evidence and knowledge missing on the social situation of disabled people, given that they are experts of their lived experience [18,[21][22][23].…”

The Care Work of Access

“…Where HCI and AT scholarship typically treat access as a physical state, a technological configuration with a certain degree of fixity (e.g., a feature might be 'accessible' or 'inaccessible'), to trouble instrumentalist assumptions about access, we instead explore what might be gained from examining access as a process, an effortful and moving assembly of actions. To make this shift in ontological status, moving from noun to verb, we draw from disability studies scholarship and activism [28], [29], [42], [57], [81] and particularly the work of Louise Hickman [34], which frames access as a form of ongoing work. By access, we thus mean the continuous negotiations undertaken to create opportunities for people with disabilities to approach and understand phenomena [21].…”

Crip Kin, Manifesting

“…It is this very ambivalence, this ability to index multiple and often contradictory affects, that leads me to frame these projects in terms of crip Terry, 2017), the uneven distributions of technology (Puar, 2017;Fritsch, 2015;Fritsch & Hamraie, 2019), the possibility that new kinship imaginaries can be conscripted into neoliberalism (Eng, 2010;Erevelles, 2011;Friedner, 2017), and the assemblage of racist, ableist, sexist, and imperialist logics in the assumption that "human" is the only animacy that matters (Chen, 2012;Kim, 2015). Kim TallBear (2018) suggests that such excesses may constitute "small moments of possibility" in which we can begin to recognize sex and sexuality more as relations than objects, relations that flow intimately between all kinds of bodies (p. 161).…”

“…Cultural productions can offer vocabularies, images, gestures, patterns, models, and designs to catalyze everyday practice (e.g., Rice et al, 2017;Schalk, 2018). As I explain below, Yi and other artists are using the technologies of art-making to theorize disability differently, positioning disabled people as producers of knowledge (Bailey & Peoples, 2017;Fritsch & Hamraie, 2019;Hendren, 2011;Miles, Nishida, & Forber-Pratt, 2017;Mills, 2011). More to the point, they are activating, interrogating, refusing, and repurposing medicalized aesthetics and technologies, finding within them inspiration and resources for their art practice.…”

“…Rather than evaluating technologies on the basis of their ability to move bodies and minds into heightened productivity, efficiency, normalcy, and speed, they are creating objects and fostering relations that interrogate those very values. All of this work requires reckoning with the ways in which technology, especially medicalized technology, is constantly being used to capacitate some and debilitate others (e.g., Fritsch, 2015;Jain, 1999;Puar, 2017;Terry, 2017 (Hamraie, 2017;Fritsch & Hamraie, 2019) to create different models of kin and relation. They imagine both disability and technology as sites through which new relations can be forged, offering a model of queer crip kin that neither requires nor expects genetic relation.…”