Director
M. Remi Yergeau (they/them/theirs) is an Arthur F. Thurnau associate professor of Digital Studies and English at the University of Michigan. They currently direct the Digital Accessible Futures Lab as a part of the DISCO Network, which receives funding support from the Mellon Foundation. Remi’s scholarly interests include rhetoric & communication, digital studies, queer rhetorics, disability studies, and neurodiversity. Their book, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness (Duke UP), is a winner of the 2017 Modern Language Association First Book Prize, the 2019 CCCC Lavender Rhetorics Book Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship, and the 2019 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award. They are currently at work on a second book project on disability, techno-rhetorics, and sociality, tentatively titled Crip Data.
Digital Accessible Futures Postdoctoral Fellow
David Adelman (he/him/his) is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Digital Accessible Futures lab at the University of Michigan. His research interests center disability and crip studies, with a particular emphasis on disability media studies, digital disability cultures, disability film studies, and critical sexuality studies. Through an interdisciplinary crip studies/feminist lens, he pursues questions which emerge at the intersection of power, culture, technology, identity, and desire. His recent dissertation, “Ambivalent Pleasures: Pleasure, Desire, Authenticity, and the Production of Value in Online Disability Cultures,” examines how discourses of “desirable disability” manifest in cultural productions and Internet publics. This project traces the circulation and intensification of such discourse in popular culture across a range of audiovisual material, exploring the neoliberal commodification of identity politics that occurs and, concomitantly, is contested, online. He also maintains an artistic practice which centers experimental video and remix as a means to explore disability culture, aesthetics, and politics. For more, visit www.davidadelman.work, and on Twitter: @DavidAdelman90.
Research Associate / Graduate Scholar
Pratiksha Thangam Menon (she/they) is a PhD Candidate in Communication and Media program at the University of Michigan, and research assistant at the Digital Accessible Futures lab. She is a media, cultural studies, and digital humanities scholar whose analytical perspectives are informed by feminist, anti-racist, and postcolonial frameworks. Her dissertation examines the mainstreaming of supremacist ideologies through the circulation of online humor, with a specific focus on Hindutva and White supremacy. Pratiksha’s recent public-facing scholarship can be found on JSTOR Daily; she has also worked on the Library Diversity Council-award winning Anti-Racism Toolkit Team, and has collaboratively authored the DEI section of a forthcoming National Humanities Alliance report on engaging historically underrepresented students in the humanities.
Research Associate / Graduate Scholar
Sarah Hughes (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the Joint Program in English & Education at the University of Michigan. Her research interests center digital rhetorics, gender and discourse, gaming studies, writing pedagogy, and environmental writing. She has taught Developmental, First-Year, and Upper-Level Writing courses at U-M and various community colleges and universities in Ann Arbor and Chicago. She has served as a Graduate Student Research Assistant with the English Department Writing Program and a Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative Fellow at U-M, as well as a Communications Fellow with the Ecology Center in Ann Arbor. Her dissertation project explores women’s discursive practices for reclaiming space in online gaming ecologies
Program Coordinator
Giselle Mills (she/they) currently serves as the DISCO Grant Initiatives Program Coordinator. She graduated from the University of Michigan in 2023 with a Bachelor of Arts with Distinction and High Honors in History, the Sweetland Minor in Writing, and a minor in Russian Language, Literature, and Culture. Giselle enjoys film photography, knitting, and animal documentaries.
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Tess Carichner (she/her) is a sophomore University of Michigan student pursuing a major in nursing and a minor in global health. Her primary interest is how ableism in healthcare settings perpetuated against neurodivergent people (particularly Autistics and those with OCD and/or ADHD) permeates other institutions and social norms. Tess aspires to become a researcher that merges the fields of disability studies and nursing science to reframe disability in healthcare education by addressing past and present abuses of the disability community. As a Women and Gender Summer Fellow and Research Scholar at the University of Michigan Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP), Tess is authoring a literature review that aims to educate healthcare professionals on the experiences of neurodivergent women and gender diverse people. She is the founder of Disability Nursing Association, an Eisenberg Family Depression Center Student Advisory Board Member, a Sweetland Writing Center Student Advisory Board member (accessibility consultant), and a member of the School of Nursing Foundational Course Initiative (accessibility consultant).
Lab Member, 2024-25
Eric Whitmer (they/he) is an interdisciplinary musician, artist, and scholar interested in the intersections of music, morality, and community. Eric performs as the percussionist in Sono Trio and as the resident carillonist for Grosse Pointe Memorial Church. They are a Ph.D. Pre-Candidate in Musicology with Historical Emphasis at the School of Music, Theater, and Dance, University of Michigan. Their musicological work focuses on ways that morality gets institutionalized through processes of philanthropy, education, and care practices. Additionally, Eric is a member of the Digital Accessible Futures Lab at the University of Michigan and regularly pursues research related to disability studies and activism. In their limited spare time, Eric can be found baking some new and challenging pastry, behind a camera, taking a portrait of a friend, or on a paddleboard in one of Michigan’s many great (pun intended) lakes.
Lab Member, 2024-25
Yuki Nakayama (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in the Film, Television, and Media Department at the University of Michigan. Her scholarly interests include media history, media industry cultures and workers, media ethics, queer history, crip history, and historiography and research ethics. Using a cultural studies and media industry studies approach, her dissertation examines the 70-year history of Japanese variety programs, a genre that continues to be understudied by scholars despite it being one of the most watched and popular media forms. She is also passionate about programming and curation as a form of public engagement and community-building. Recently, she curated the Center for Japanese Studies 2024 Film Series, which focused on a historical exploration of Japanese horror films.
Lab Member, 2024-25
Megan Rim (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in American Culture and Digital Studies at the University of Michigan. Her research interests broadly look at race and digital technology with specific attention to social movements, surveillance, infrastructures, and algorithmic bias. Her work is theoretically and methodologically inspired by Black and Women of Color Feminisms, Feminist STS, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Disability Studies and Critical Data Studies. Her current dissertation project examines how the deployment of facial recognition technologies reinvigorates and expands racist, sexist, and eugenicist systems, infrastructures and logics. Looking at sites from Black Lives Matter protests to TikTok augmented reality face filters, the project explores the stakes of adoption and use of the technology in the United States today. She has a recent chapter, “Race, Gender, and Visibility on Social Media” in the edited volume Technology and Ethics (Routledge 2023).
Program Coordinator & Graduate Scholar, 2022-24
Elise Nagy (she/they) is a PhD candidate in the Joint Program in English & Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, and program coordinator for the Digital Accessible Futures lab. Her research interests include visual and literary self-representation, feminist pedagogy, the women’s health movement of the 20th century and ongoing critiques of normative constructions of “health,” radical community-based care and health education, and fat politics/fat subjectivities. Her dissertation project explores how undergraduate women’s health courses reproduce and resist hegemonic ideologies of health, fat embodiment, gender, race, sexuality, and (dis)ability. Elise has served as a coordinator for U of M’s English Graduate Group (EGG) and organized the Disability Studies Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop at the University of Michigan and the AW Mellon Disability Studies/Disability Activism at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
DISCO Network Graduate Scholar, 2022-23
Raquel Escobar (they/them) is a second-year PhD student in the Joint Program in English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. Their research interests include Feminist Disability Studies, queer crip time, Comics Studies, biodata and digital health tools, and speculative embodiment. They have experience as a Graduate Student Instructor in Women’s and Gender Studies, a Program Assistant and Workshop Facilitator for the Engelhardt Social Justice Fellowship, and a Research Assistant to Dr. Petra Kuppers. Their current involvement in the collaborative research project, Dancing and Writing Disability Differently: Non-Realist Embodiment and the Speculative Imagination, led by Dr. Petra Kuppers and Charli Brissey, intertwines with their work as a member of the Digital Accessible Futures Lab.
Lab Member / Graduate Scholar, 2022-23
L. Cynthia Lao (she/they) is a 3rd-year PhD student in English at the University of Michigan. Her research interests include queer and disabled online sociality, digital affect, surveilled subjectivities, queerness and disability in science fiction, mediation and the communicative body, and techno-orientalism. They teach first-year writing under the English Department Writing Program and have worked as a research assistant under Dr. Yergeau.
DISCO Postdoctoral Fellow, 2022-24
Jeff Nagy is a historian of computing and AI. His current book manuscript tells the story of how emotion was made computable through a series of exchanges between computing and the psychological sciences. He is also working on a project on the history of disability in science and technology, with a focus on mid-century American behaviorism.
Doggo Scholar
Toni “Chubbs” Carichner is the dog-hter of Tess Carichner. For clarity, Toni’s name is spelled with a heart over the “i.” Though from humble Craigslist roots, Toni has found a loving home full of sweaters, tum rubs, zoomies, and homemade haircuts. She is leader in the fields of car vomiting, snuggles, and absolutely serving in a cable knit sweater.
Doggo Scholar
Scamper “Moji-Moji”: Scamper of the House Goldaeryen, the First of Her Name, the Lightly Toasted, Queen of the Doggos, the Floofers and the First Borkers, Queen of Southeast Michigan, Khaleesi of the Butt Scritches, Protector of Tiny Humans, Lady Regnant of the Treat Kingdoms, Breaker of Squeakers and Mother of All Things Pawsome.
Doggo Scholar
Loki Yergeau is an esteemed scholar of squeaky toys and life-size plushies. Her contributions to the burgeoning field of Bark Out the Window Studies are longstanding and deeply felt by all who dare walk past the front yard. In her spare time, Loki begs for belly rubs and stares pleadingly at all who eat in her presence.
Doggo Scholar
Luna Lewis is Elise (Lewis) Nagy’s doghter and a thousand-year-old fae creature. Her research interests include baby bunnies under the porch; deconstructionism (with a focus on fallen tree branches); and howling at children, golden retrievers, and anyone in a snowsuit. Grounded in her own embodied experience of lifelong tail paralysis, Luna also maintains a creative practice exploring multimodal communication, counter-normative affective performance, and imaginative ways to express joy to both dogs and people.
Kitty Scholars
Rocky and Apollo Rim Kean are two brothers both adopted from the local SPCA. 2 year old Rocky is a gloriously fluffy scholar of plastic straws and 3 month old tuxedoed Apollo is devoted to the study of all things string. Their collaborative projects are keeping their parents up at night and sleeping all day. It has been confirmed by a panel of experts that they are both the best boys.