Investigating the Role of Critical Disability Studies in HCI
A workshop at CHI 2020
Call for Submissions || Organisers || Background || Schedule || Accessibility || Accepted Submissions
Katta Spiel is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Playful Physical Computing with KU Leuven and University of Vienna, where they investigate the play preferences of neurodivergent people. Their broader research agenda centers marginalised perspectives in design with a focus on gender and disability. They question epistemological paradigms, critically reflect on research, speculate on utopias and envision alternative futures through (participatory) design. They are also a co-founder of chronically academic.
Kathrin Gerling is an Assistant Professor at KU Leuven, Belgium. Her research falls within HCI, Accessibility, and Games. She is interested in the accessibility and experience that games provide for disabled people: most recently, her work has explored participatory design strategies to create movement-based games with young wheelchair users, and she currently investigates interactions of disabled players with immersive, embodied VR technology.
Cynthia L. Bennett is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research program concerns the cultural and practical accessibility of Human-Centered Design. Beginning with lived experiences of people with disabilities, she reveals how people with disabilities are not expected to occupy positions within the design profession but regularly do design work through everyday adaptations to live in a largely inaccessible world. In turn, from disabled creative practices she offers provocations, methods, and approaches to Human-Centered Design which recognize disabled people as always meaningful contributors to the field and establish eliminating structural ableism as a collective responsibility. Cynthia is also disabled and regularly does diversity work within her department, university, and SIGCHI.
Emeline Brulé is a Lecturer at the University of Sussex. Initially trained as a designer, they received a PhD in communication studies from Télécom ParisTech for their ethnographic work on the experiences of schooling of visually impaired children and their design work on learning technologies for this group. Emeline currently studies design and organisational processes behind digital products, focusing on the areas of education technologies, assistive technologies and technologies for the home.
Rua M. Williams is a Ph.D. candidate in the Human-Centered Computing program at the University of Florida. They are Autistic, multiply disabled, and Nonbinary. They research the intersection of technology and disability justice, with a focus on research, pedagogy, and design ethics. They investigate ethical problems in technological applications for autism intervention and publish work that figures disabled embodiment as natural use contexts for tech.
Jennifer Rode is an Associate Professor at University College London’s “Knowledge Lab” in the Institute of Education. Her research focuses on troubling the values embedded into technology on drawing from disability and queer studies. Her work with telepresence examines the conscious trade-offs made by disabled people between the affordances of their corporeal body and an emergent cyborg-selves. Jennifer is also disabled, with an invisible chronic illness, and is out about her struggles with depression as a result of this illness. She is chair of the faculty and staff disability advocacy group at UCL, and is founder and vice-chair of the ACM AccessSIGCHI Community.
Jennifer Mankoff is a Professor at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on accessibility, health and inclusion. Her work combines a combination of critical thinking and technological innovation. She strives to bring both structural and personal perspectives to her work. For example, her recent work in the intersection of mental health and discrimination explores how external risks and pressures interact with people’s responses to challenging moments. Similarly, her work in fabrication of accessible technologies considers not only innovative tools that can enable individual makers but also the larger clinical and sociological challenges to disseminating and sharing designs. Jennifer is also disabled, with an invisible chronic illness, and uses her experience of both medical and social barriers to provide mentorship and leadership around accessibility within her department, university, and SIGCHI.