// who we are

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.

David is a white man with short, slightly curly, dark brown hair and a close-shaven beard. He has dark green glasses on and is sitting in a power wheelchair. He is wearing a black T-shirt with white floral designs.

Digital Accessible Futures / DISCO 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.

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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

Pratiksha Thangam Menon

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.

Giselle Mills

Giselle 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.

Image description: photo of a smiling person with light skin, medium-long hair, a nose ring, and sunglasses perched on her head. The photo is in black and white, with colorful gold star "stickers" and pink and orange flowers superimposed over the photo, surrounding her face.

Program Coordinator / Graduate Scholar

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. 

Pictured is a young feminine person with bright, blonde, wavy, shorter hair. She has freckles, brown eyebrows, blue eyes, a blue stone necklace, and a small silver nose ring. She smiles at the camera with her head slightly turned to the right. She is wearing a cobalt blue, square-neckline dress. The background is blurred green-leafed trees.

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).

Photo of Raquel smiling in front of a large rose bush. They have curly brown hair, brown eyes, and white skin. They're wearing a beige cowboy hat, white button-up shirt, and glasses.

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.

A Chinese person in their mid-twenties with an asymmetrical bob haircut. She is wearing plastic-rimmed glasses and a face mask. In the background are assorted cardboard boxes stacked on top of each other.

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

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.

Pictured is a very small (four pounds!) apricot-orange-brown cockapoo puppy. She sits in a roomy tarnished bucket set in front of a raspberry bush.Her fluff glows in the summer sun. Her hair needs to be trimmed as it's starting to poke out in front of her eyes. She doesn't mind though. She is just happy to be eating raspberries at Grandma's house!

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.

Scamper

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.

Image description: A diminutive but lanky dog with wispy white and light brown hair stands on a cross-cut section of a large fallen tree trunk, looking at the camera with an alert oracle-like expression. There are bare deciduous trees in the background against a light grey sky, surrounded by a carpet of orange and brown leaves.

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.