by Ashley Shew
Joshua Earle, Damien P. Williams, and I have our Technology and Disability courses as part of APA Syllabus Showcase. Grateful to the venue and editors!
We teach on the same topic, but with different contexts and contents. Dr. Earle is in an STS department located in an engineering college and teaches this course almost exclusively to engineering undergrads. Dr. Williams is in a position shared by Philosophy and Data Science, and his class is situated as a Philosophy of Technology and Disability course with a lot of emphasis on data science-interested technologies. The one PDF linked on the site contain all three of our syllabi!
Here is the part we wrote together to talk about our goals:
“There are a couple of goals that we have with this course—one of the main ones is for students to read disabled people as experts about their own experiences. There’s a long history of disabled people’s testimony, even about themselves, being disregarded, viewed with suspicion, or downplayed… Because we want to center disabled people as experts about disability and technology, we also end up drawing from a pool of literature that looks very different from other philosophy and STS courses. We draw from historical work, disability studies, memoir, poetry, media analysis, novels, and popular writing by disabled people that is focused on technology….
A second goal is to help students understand what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson identifies as “eugenic world-building” versus “inclusive world-building” and provide other concepts that help students make sense of conversations about technology. This class offers conceptual tools to help students understand and analyze dialogue about technology they find in the world. These approaches to thinking about future development, especially in the context of social systems, infrastructure, and technology, facilitate students’ learning to recognize disabled lived experience as a valid form of knowledge, in itself. And centering disabled and otherwise marginalized people within policy, engineering, epistemic, and ethical contexts allows students to envision, argue for, and build a more representative and inclusive understanding of the world.”
Here’s the whole post: https://blog.apaonline.org/2025/06/18/technology-and-disability-ashley-shew-damien-p-williams-and-joshua-earle/
This website started with just me putting up my syllabi for semesters and linked readings for students. As more stuff has gone to Canvas Learning Mangement, I have not been very good at adding things here, so I hope for this Syllabus Showcase to also be an update to those syllabi with fresh and classic materials and readings — as well as a look at how Drs. Earle and Williams are situating the topic and material.
Thinking things can be perfectible (or that there’s one right way to do something) is a really eugenicsy vibe. One thing that I think a lot about in design (of courses or anything) is how there can actually be many ways to do things right/well/toward some end. (This doesn’t mean there aren’t wrong ways!) I really want multiple ways to do things, new flexibilities, and openings for creative remix, repurpose, reinvention. Please feel free to help yourself (as long as you aren an AI bot sucking up all the data for the un-creative remix of GenAI — in which case, delete your account).
Technology and Disability 
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