Nothing About Us Without Us

Investigating the Role of Critical Disability Studies in HCI

A workshop at CHI 2020

Call for Submissions || Organisers || Background || Schedule || Accessibility || Accepted Submissions

09:00 – 09:30Introduction
09:30 – 10:30Feedback on submissions
10:30 – 11:00Coffee break
11:00 – 12:30Experience sharing
12:30 – 13:30Lunch break
13:30 – 15:00Drafting manifesto
15:00 – 15:30Coffee Break
15:30 – 16:30Reflection and revision of manifesto
16:30 – 17:00Dissemination and closing

As a first step, we will facilitate an Introduction round for people to quickly position themselves and their interests in the workshop. To not make this too dry, we will also ask participants to share an amusing aspect of themselves. Given that the group is intended to be comparatively large, this step is intended to provide opportunities for associating faces with stories. Further, we will illustrate the schedule and goals of the workshop.

We will then break out into the previously assigned groups in which participants will provide feedback on submissions that they have engaged with prior to the workshop. Each paper will be given 15 minutes for discussion within the group. This also allows participants to engage with each other on a topical basis. These groups can be kept or switched upon for later activities.

During breaks organisers will ensure that all participants have access to refreshments, snacks and meals. Otherwise, breaks will remain largely unstructured to allow for actual downtime. However, we will provide a set of provocative statements from publications in Critical Disability Studies that participants are invited to use as a starting point for conversation.

After the first coffee break we will engage in structured experience sharing. We will invite participants to share their experiences researching accessibility topics and being an academic in the field (60 minutes). While participants share their experiences, we will identify and document challenges, best practices and opportunities for critical alternatives. We then take our notes to embed and contrast these experiences with theories stemming from Critical Disability Studies (30 minutes).

In the afternoon, we will collectively create a manifesto for Critical Disability Scholarship in HCI. It is deliberate, that we have not yet named the manifesto as we want to do this together with participants of the workshop. From the submissions and experiences shared earlier, we will identify a structure and work on parts of the manifesto in groups.

Finally, we plan to reflect on the parts of the manifesto created so far and provide feedback to each group for potential revisions. We will then invite participants to join us in publishing what happened during the workshop in an “Interactions” article and establish ways in which everyone can take ownership of and further disseminate the manifesto. In the end, we will ask everyone to share one thing they learned during the workshop that will influence their future practice.