Technology and Disability

Summer II 2020

This is the course information for Joshua Earle’s version of STS 3284: Tech & Dis, offered in Summer II of 2020 — it’s also on his website, CyborgApologist.com.

Summer II 2020 Syllabus

STS 3284: Technology and Disability

CRN: 64694

Instructor: Joshua Earle

Email Address: jearle@vt.edu

Office Hours: Remotely (via Zoom, Google Hangouts, Skype, or other program) by appointment

Description

This undergraduate course is designed to introduce students to the material cultures surrounding disability, the social meaning of “health” technologies, and the lived experiences of those who deploy, resist, and wrestle with technologies aimed at their bodies and minds.

Having successfully completed this course, undergraduate students will be able to:

  • Identify landmarks in the history of technologies for disabilities
  • Understand the social and medical models of disability and how those play into technological design
  • Recognize and critique common narratives and assumptions about technology and disability 
  • Analyze the relationship between disability studies and engineering orientations of disability
  • Discuss contemporary issues and controversies about technologies for disability communities
  • Identify, lift up, and defend the voices of disabled people in the context of policy and engineering
  • Recognize ableism in social narratives about technology and disability

Specific topics include:

  • Cochlear ear implants and hearing aids
  • Prosthetic arms and legs
  • Exoskeletons
  • Text-to-speech interfaces
  • Apps for ipads aimed at a people with disabilities
  • Closed captioning
  • ADA specifications
  • Mobility aids (wheelchairs, crutches, scooters, canes)

We will pay close attention to the historical and social contexts within which technologies are aimed at disabilities, resistance to and acceptance of technologies, and identity and passing in the context of technologies. In all these things, we will take disabled people as experts on the experience of disability and on disability-related technologies.

Accessibility for all students

Disability rights are civil rights, and disabled people fought hard to secure the rights to your accommodations in the classroom and workplace. Those people who fought for your accommodations were spit on, arrested, isolated, and dismissed, but they wouldn’t take less than they deserve when it came to securing your rights to access education and other public goods. They are my heroes, and their work also works to accommodate me within our classroom as a multiply disabled university employee. You can bet that I really want you to use your accommodations, or help you get them if you don’t have any in place, or find a system that works for us if you don’t care to go through the official channels. Most requests are easy – and you don’t have to be disabled or diagnosed to request from me; I am happy to distribute any in-class readings in larger or otherwise more accessible fonts, disability issue or not! And, if you need text-to-speech software to read aloud with you, I would love to introduce you to my friends in Accessible Technologies and then make sure you get the formats you need to use the AT.

Assignments:

1) Syllabus Quiz. Due by Tuesday Sept. 3. Worth up to 50 points, you can re-take it until you get 100%.

2) Question Formation Exercises. Due every week.

Part 1, the questions, is due by 5pm Wednesday. Ask two (2) “how” or “why” questions about your readings for that week. Each question should be about a different sub-topic that you chose for that week (e.g. if for week 2 you chose the Institutions and Stigma sections to cover, one question would be about the Institutions readings, teh other about the Stigma readings). You should include which section your question is about either in the header to your post or on the first line of the post. Follow your questions with a quoted and cited passage from the readings that inspired the question, and a 150-300 word explanation of why the question is a good/important one.

Part 2, answering 2 other questions, is due by the end of the day on Friday of that same week. Posit an answer to 2 of your classmates’ questions. At least one question you answer should be from a section you did NOT read that week. You should skim the piece from which the question was taken in order to gain some good context for the question itself. You should reference at least one of the readings (it can be the same one the question was about, but any quote you use should be different that the one used by the asker), but I urge you to try to use the readings you did to answer the question about the readings you didn’t. This should help you draw connections between the different reading sections. Please spend 150-300 words on your answer.

Worth up to 100 points per week (25 points per post (question or answer)), for a total of 600 for the semester.

3) Photo Essay. Take 3-5 pictures of various spaces to which you have relatively easy access (including being able to keep 6ft of physical distance from others). These pictures should capture some part of the built environment or infrastructure that you consider to be discriminatory to disabled people. Only one picture may be of any kind of discriminatory architecture (e.g. you can only have one picture of a set of stairs). Describe the image, and describe who it discriminates against, how it discriminates against them, and how it might be built otherwise to be non-discriminatory. Post your essay to the appropriate discussion board by 11:59pm Friday, July 24th. Worth up to 150 points.

4) Reflection 1. Worth up to 50 points.

5) Reflection 2. Worth up to 150 points.

Possible total points: 1000

Extra Credit:

Life happens. We get sick, we drink too much, we burn out and need a mental health day… it happens to us all. To that end, should you be so unfortunate to miss an assignment, or didn’t do as well on one as you would have liked, I allow for unlimited extra credit. You will need to pitch a project to me, discuss it in person or over email, along with a possible point total and rubric before you turn it in. Any extra credit must line up with the themes of the course, but in theory you could do none of the work assigned and still get 100% if you do enough extra credit. That said, the amount of effort per point for extra credit will usually be higher than your average assignment from the syllabus.

Principles of Community

Virginia Tech is a public land-grant university, committed to teaching and learning, research, and outreach to the Commonwealth of Virginia, the nation, and the world community. Learning from the experiences that shape Virginia Tech as an institution, we acknowledge those aspects of our legacy that reflected bias and exclusion. Therefore, we adopt and practice the following principles as fundamental to our on-going efforts to increase access and inclusion and to create a community that nurtures learning and growth for all of its members:

  • We affirm the inherent dignity and value of every person and strive to maintain a climate for work and learning based on mutual respect and understanding.
  • We affirm the right of each person to express thoughts and opinions freely. We encourage open expression within a climate of civility, sensitivity, and mutual respect.
  • We affirm the value of human diversity because it enriches our lives and the University. We acknowledge and respect our differences while affirming our common humanity.
  • We reject all forms of prejudice and discrimination, including those based on age, color, disability, gender, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, political affiliation, race, religion, sexual orientation, and veteran status. We take individual and collective responsibility for helping to eliminate bias and discrimination and for increasing our own understanding of these issues through education, training, and interaction with others.
  • We pledge our collective commitment to these principles in the spirit of the Virginia Tech motto of Ut Prosim (That I May Serve).

Honor Code

The Undergraduate Honor Code pledge that each member of the university community agrees to abide by states: “As a Hokie, I will conduct myself with honor and integrity at all times.  I will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor will I accept the actions of those who do.”

Students enrolled in this course are responsible for abiding by the Honor Code. A student who has doubts about how the Honor Code applies to any assignment is responsible for obtaining specific guidance from the course instructor before submitting the assignment for evaluation. Ignorance of the rules does not exclude any member of the University community from the requirements and expectations of the Honor Code.

For additional information about the Honor Code, please visit: https://www.honorsystem.vt.edu/Links to an external site.

To add to this statement, please ask questions as we go if you want clarification on what is expected in this course.

Mandatory Reporting

Please be advised that, as a faculty member at Virginia Tech, I am a mandatory reporter, which means that I am obligated to notify the Title IX Office at Virginia Tech if I am given knowledge about sexual assault or violence by other employees and students. Confidential sources, those who do not have to report to the Title IX Office, include staff members at the Schiffert Health Center, the Cook Counseling Center, Virginia Tech Mental Health Centers, and The Virginia Tech Women’s Center.

Course Schedule

Week 1, July 8-10: Disorientations

Wednesday, July 8:

Thursday, July 9:

  • Read: “Care Webs: Experiments in Creating Collective Access” from Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018). pp 32-68. (See: Files, in epub format)
  • Watch: Cripborgs Resist (Part 1)Links to an external site., by Dr. Ashley Shew on Disability Tropes

Friday, July 10:

Week 2, July 13-17: Violence Against Disabled People; State, Systemic, and Individual

Science as Violence

Institutions:

Law:

Stigma:

Interpersonal Violence (All of the Trigger and Content Warnings)

Week 3, July 20-24: Infrastructure and the (Built) Environment

Infrastructure

The Built Environment

War and the Military

The Environment

Week 4, July 27-31: Digital Technologies and Media

Hearing Aids, Cochlear Implants, Audism and d/Deaf culture

Speech, Text, & Captions

Social Media

  • Peruse the Twitter hashtags #DisabilityTaughtMe, #DisabledAndCute, #a11y (which stands for accessibility, not ally), #DisabilityDongle, #SuckItAbleism. Try to find other disability hashtags, what are those about?
  • Also, peruse the twitter accounts of Imani Barbarin (@Imani_Barbarin), Alice Wong (@DisVisability & @SFdirewolf), Jaipreet Virdi (@jaivirdi), Matthew Cortland (@mattbc), and Ashley Shew (@ashleyshoo). What topics are they discussing? With who?
  • Peruse the podcast Disability Visability (Links to an external site.). Find 2 or 3 that you find interesting and listen to them.
  • Revisit Care Webs (from week 1), paying particular attention to how social media is used in creating these webs.

Representation in Media

Futurism

Week 5, August 3-7: Prosthetics and Transmobility

Prosthetics

Sport

Transmobility

Exoskeletons

Disability Dongles & Lifehacks

Week 6, August 10-14: Neurodiversity and Crip Futures

Autism and ABA

Madness & Intellectual Disability

Genes and Futures

CRIPS! IN! SPAAAAAAACE!!

Disability in Fiction