Wednesday, October 23rd, 10:00 – 11:30 AM EST
The DISCO Network and the Digital Accessible Futures (DAF) Lab, housed in the University of Michigan’s Digital Studies Institute, invites you to a virtual Zoom conversation featuring panelists Michele Friedner, Ruth Osorio, and Victor Zhuang.
This roundtable conversation considers what it means to design accessible conference presentations, as well as how to survive and navigate conferences as a disabled scholar. How might we advocate for access in inaccessible and often high-stakes terrain? What strategies might we use in our own conference practices to support the work of access creation?
Panelists
Michele Friedner
Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago, USA
Michele is a medical anthropologist and works at the intersections of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, disability studies, deaf studies, and sensory studies. Her most recent book is Sensory Futures: Deafness and Cochlear Implant Infrastructures (Minnesota, 2022). She is excited to talk about the sensory and other infrastructures of academic conferences.
Photo: A middle aged white woman with reddish hair in a black jacket stands in front of slightly fuzzy purple flowered trees making a lopsided power pose.
Ruth Osorio
Associate Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies, Old Dominion University
Ruth is a feminist rhetorician who researches disability activism, critical access literacies, and feminist historiography. She has researched and participated in disability access advocacy at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and Feminisms and Rhetoric Conference. Outside of work, she’s a troop leader for a large LGBTQIA-affirming Girl Scout troop in Norfolk, avid reader of novels, and a lover of nature.
Photo:A white middle-aged woman stands in front of a full bookshelf and smiles at someone off to the side.
Kuansong Victor ZHUANG
Assistant Professor in Disability Communication, Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University Singapore
Victor is a disability studies scholar working at the intersections of disability, media, cultural and communication studies. His research focuses on disability and inclusion in contemporary societies such as Singapore. He is also exploring questions of digital inclusion, in particular, the sociotechnical imaginaries of disability in emerging technologies, and the intersections of sustainable futures and disability in smart cities.
Photo: An Asian-presenting man with black hair, smiling at the camera. He is wearing a pair of metal rim spectacles and a grey sweater over a white collared shirt.