Monday, November 23rd, 2026
9:00 am — 5:30 pm
Fenn Lounge, Carleton University, Ottawa, Algonquin Territory
Register here: https://carleton.ca/sjc/cu-events/trans-crip-tech-symposium/#reg
About the Event
In the past decade, anti-trans actors have worked to refashion transness as a kind of transient infection that endangers the public. Trans people, in these readings, are represented as victims of mass hysteria, with social media serving as a supposed progenitor for all things catchingly genderqueer. But disability is also integral to these conceptions of trans life, which often position crip, mad, and diagnostic internet cultures against what it means to be trans.
What, then, might a trans-crip digital future look like? How might we re/imagine trans-crip spaces that lean into the tensions between desire and bad feelings?
The trans + crip + tech symposium threads together conversations at the intersections of disability studies, transgender studies, and critical studies in technology. This event convenes scholars and activists to think together about trans-crip digital worldmaking, especially in the wake of hostile legislation transnationally.
This event is organized by the Digital Accessible Futures Lab, which receives support from the DISCO Network. This event is also supported by the Canada Research Chairs Program.
Speakers
Cassius Adair, Assistant Professor, School of Art, Media, and Technology, The New School
Cassius Adair is a scholar and media producer from Virginia. He is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at The New School in New York City. His writing appears in American Quarterly, differences, American Literature, Feminist Media Histories, Avidly, The Rumpus, Nursing Clio, Semiotic Review, and Transgender Studies Quarterly. A coauthor of the experimental scholarly book Technoprecarious (MIT, 2020), he is currently writing a book about trans people, labor, and computer history.
Jules Edwards, Co-Executive Director, Autistic Women and Nonbinary Network
Jules is an Anishinaabe Disability Justice advocate, parent of disabled people, beadwork artist, and gardener. She works to dismantle systemic barriers for under-represented neurodivergent people. Jules writes as Autistic, Typing online; is a co-author of I Will Die on This Hill: Autistic Adults, Autism Parents, and the Children Who Deserve a Better World; serves on the Intertribal Disability Advocacy Council, and is the Co-Executive Director of Autistic Women and Nonbinary Network.
Avery Everhart, Assistant Professor, Geography, University of British Columbia
Avery Everhart is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia, as well as Co-Founder and Distinguished Fellow of the Center for Applied Transgender Studies based in Chicago, Illinois. She teaches geographic information science through the lens of social and spatial justice at UBC Geography. Improving the life chances of trans people animates her research and she draws upon her training across the humanities and the social, spatial, and health sciences to cultivate a transdisciplinary research agenda. She has published in journals ranging from Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy to Social Science & Medicine, and Journal of Biomedical Informatics to PLOS One. Dr. Everhart’s current book project Trans Data focuses on how data, statistics, and misinformation shape the conditions in which trans lives are led. In Trans Data she takes up statistical sound-bytes about trans people and issues, ranging from life expectancy and population estimates to suicidality and rates of violence, by offering alternative quantitative analyses on the same topic and interrogating the political work that these data points do for both trans communities and their antagonists.
V. Jo Hsu, Associate Professor, Social & Cultural Analysis and Rhetoric & Writing, University of Texas at Austin
Jo Hsu is an Associate Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis and Rhetoric & Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. Their research explores the knowledge that traditional argumentation leaves out, asking what story can do to bridge the distance between collectable data and effective action. They’re the author of Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics, and their work has appeared in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, The Quarterly Journal of Speech, BMJ Medical Humanities, the Huffington Post, the Hill, and many other academic, news, and literary outlets. You can find most of their work via www.vjohsu.com.
Lore/tta LeMaster, Associate Professor, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto
Lore/tta LeMaster, PhD (she/they) is an award-winning scholar and educator who lives, loves and creates on the traditional lands of the Wendat Nation, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit known recently as Toronto, Canada. There, she serves as Associate Professor of Queer Studies in the Department of Social Justice Education in the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at University of Toronto. Her research explores the intersectional constitution of cultural difference across four areas: (1) trans approaches to care work and labour, (2) queerness in popular culture, (3) trans cultural production, and (4) critical performative pedagogy. Her scholarship has been published in handbooks, anthologies, and in peer-reviewed journals. In addition, she is a co-editor of the award-winning anthology Gender Futurity, Intersectional Autoethnography: Embodied Theorizing from the Margins (Routledge, 2020) and the author of Pedagogies of the Enfleshed: Critical Communication Pedagogy, Otherwise (Bloomsbury 2025). Her forthcoming book Trans Monstrosity: Transgender Rhetoric, Embodied Criticism, Affective Horizons draws on trans media studies, Black feminist theory, and interpretive autoethnography to proffer an embodied criticism of gender expansiveness across popular, political, and mundane cultural contexts (forthcoming, 2027). And she is currently joined by Dr. Andrew Spieldenner as Co-Editors of QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking. When she is not conducting research, reviewing scholarly submissions, or supervising graduate students, this neurospicy, mixed-race Asian/white genderqueer trans femme can be found reading horror literature with her feline companion, Luci-fur (she/her), crocheting something that makes no sense at all, riding her bike around the city in search of donuts and tacos, lifting heavy things with anti-fascist queers, or crashing fan conventions in search of trading cards to complete her Garbage Pail Kids collection. She is a Pisces, but she also doesn’t really know what that means any more.
Drew McEwan, Assistant Professor Limited Term, School of Disability Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University
Drew McEwan is an Assistant Professor Limited Term in the School of Disability Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University, and a 2026 Allan Miller Research Fellow at The Arquives, Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives. Her academic work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, Canadian Literature, International Mad Studies Journal, The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly and the anthology Literatures of Madness: Disability Studies and Mental Health. She is also the author of the poetry collections Repeater, If Pressed, and Tours, Variously.