Ashley Shew is an Associate Professor in Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech, where she participates in the STS PhD program, Medicine & Society minor, Disability Studies minor; she’s also the current director of the Bioethics graduate certificate, and a longtime executive committee member with the Integrative Graduate Education Program on Regenerative Medicine. Her current research is about disabled expertise and disability-led narratives about technologies (in contrast to the tropey stories we usually get). She’s working on open educational resources on Technology & Disability with Hanna Herdegen, Damien Williams, and a team of undergraduate research assistants, made possible through NSF Grant #1750260, and her book Against Technoableism came out September 2023 with Norton.
Ashley’s past work has been in philosophy of technology with particular interest in technological knowledge, animal studies, and emerging technologies. She is a current co-editor-in-chief (with Kirk Besmer) of Techné, the journal of the Society for Philosophy and Technology. She is sole author of Technological Knowledge and Animal Constructions (2017) and co-editor of three philosophy of technology volumes: Spaces for the Future (with Joe Pitt, 2017), Feedback Loops (with Andrew Garnar, 2020), and Reimagining Philosophy and Technology, Reinventing Ihde (with Glen Miller, 2020).
Shew believes in cross-disciplinary, cross-disability, and public-facing scholarship: she has written for IEEE Technology & Society, Nursing Clio, Nature, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inside Higher Ed. She is a grateful participant with her local disability advocacy and activist community in the Disability Alliance and Caucus at Virginia Tech and the New River Valley Disability Resource Center (a CIL).
Technology and Disability 