Access is a lived practice, not an end goal. Crip Computing invites us to learn from disability culture as we (re)imagine accessible futures.
Disability is a rich method for generating embodied insight. Technology can and should be used to facilitate greater cultural participation for disabled people, who are ingenious inventors of everyday solutions. With funding support from the Mozilla Foundation’s Responsible Computing Challenge, this project invites learners to consider the technological by centering disability in their everyday lives. How might we imagine future technologies that prioritize disabled people?
Crip Computing engages new and diverse perspectives on accessible computing by introducing students to digital disability cultures and their intersections with race, gender, sexuality, and class. Through a series of carefully sequenced readings, exercises, and assignments, our project asks students to imagine digital futures in which disabled people are desired and valued. Focusing on multiple Disability Studies classes at the University of Michigan, our curricular project centers collective access as a means to address important social issues, reimagining accessibility as iterative and based in community knowledge.
Project components include:
- Developing scaffolded, in-class exercises situating the ethics of digital access audits, principles of design justice, and histories of intersectional disability liberation movements.
- Organizing workshops — called Community Conversations — with local disability design experts and advocates.
- Creating annotated syllabi and exercises for our courses as a resource for future instructors.
- Piloting a shared final project in participating courses in which students 1) research local and technological access histories and 2) offer speculative imaginings for local and technological access futures.