The Digital Accessible Futures Lab, housed at the University of Michigan and one of the five DISCO Network labs, is excited to announce a new project, Crip Computing: On Access Histories and Access Futures. Crip Computing is a 12-month project funded by the Mozilla Foundation through the Responsible Computing Challenge. The Challenge works to explore social and political contexts of computing in classrooms around the globe.
The project is spearheaded by M. Remi Yergeau, Associate Professor of Digital Studies and English, Associate Director of the Digital Studies Institute, and director of the Digital Accessible Futures Lab, and David Adelman, postdoctoral research fellow in the Digital Accessible Futures Lab and the DISCO Network. The Digital Accessible Futures (DAF) Lab focuses on pressing issues at the intersection of disability justice, techno-ableism, and critical accessibility studies. The DAF Lab centers crip wisdom and possibility in its articulations and desires of disability and access futures.
The grant supports two disability studies classes in imagining what a radically accessible technological future might look like. Crip Computing: On Access Histories and Access Futures aims to work with students from a range of fields and disciplines to think about access as something more than meeting checklists or designing rehabilitative tech. Both of these classes culminate in a web-based final project, in which students will engage with disability’s many technological pasts and presents as a means for dreaming just futures. Through classroom conversations with local leaders in disability justice and accessibility, students will have a more robust understanding of grassroots activism, accessible design practices, and disability culture. These courses position disability as a source of expertise, knowledge, and world-making, and as a site of technological possibility.
M. Remi Yergeau (they/them/theirs) is an Arthur F. Thurnau associate professor of Digital Studies and English at the University of Michigan, as well as the Associate Director of the Digital Studies Institute. They currently direct the Digital Accessible Futures Lab as a part of the DISCO Network, which receives funding support from the Mellon Foundation. Yergeau’s scholarly interests include rhetoric and 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.
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. 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. 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/X: @DavidAdelman90.
Elise Nagy (PhD Candidate, English and Women’s & Gender Studies) and Giselle Mills (DISCO Grant Initiatives Program Coordinator) will also provide research, curriculum, and program coordination assistance with the Crip Computing project.
