By Brandy Schillace
As Editor in Chief, I’m excited to bring you this amazing documentary film. We recently started a program called Path to Publication, a means of offering editorial support to help topics collections come together for those who lack institutional or other kinds of support. Our first issue will come out in December and it takes an in-depth look at disability and technology. The disabled scholars, participants, artists, and other innovators who came together for a symposium (arranged by Special Issue editor Stuart Murray) demonstrate what we are capable of when we consider technology and access and social justice. Below is a description provided by Professor Murray—and beneath are linked short and long versions of the film, with and without audio description.
Please watch and share!
Imagining Technology for Disability Futures is a five-year interdisciplinary research project, funded by the Wellcome Trust, investigating the relations between technologized embodiment and the prospect of disability futures. It combines perspectives drawn from English/Cultural Studies, Engineering and Robotics, Design and Philosophy and works through a series of disability partnerships. The project covers topics that include speculative fiction, phenomenological approaches to the disabled body, assistive robotics, product design in augmentative and alternative communication systems, and haptic navigation. It prioritises disabled partners as mentors and research co-designers and sees them as integral in any process of disability research, and works to negate approaches that see the disabled body in terms of pathologies that require restitution and cure.
The film was made at a project symposium in Leeds in April 2024 that drew participants from all over the world. It includes conversations with academics from across disciplines in the Arts, Social Sciences and Sciences, deafblind sensory awareness trainers and musicians, blind designers, and AAC users.
Imagining Technologies for Disability futures: Full length
Imagining Technologies for Disability futures: Full length – Audio described version
Imagining Technologies for Disability futures: Short edit
imagining technologies for Disability futures: Short Edit – Audio described version