Science of Broadening Participation: CAREER: Disability, Experience, and Technological Imagination

This is a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award, a prestigious award that NSF provides to junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. This specific award supports an integrated research and education project that investigates narrative accounts of the lived experience of technology in the context of disability. It will examine how these narratives differ from the ways in which scientists and engineers understand and explain their work related to disability. Currently, stories about technologies for disability feature accounts of life-changing technology and techno-optimism, which differs substantially from the stories disabled people tell about the technologies they choose to use. The researcher also plans to implement educational and outreach activities aimed at the inclusion of people with disabilities in conversations about technology, and about engineering and design spaces as collaborators and future practitioners. She will also develop classroom, public, and open-access materials that include narrative accounts from disabled people about technologies that appropriately bear witness to ambiguity and resistance to technological configurations; it is expected that these materials would be used to complement existing STEM educational materials.

This project highlights the disconnects between STEM practice concerning disability and the lived experience of disability. By looking at the history, narratives, and context of negotiations about technology, this work centers the expertise possessed by disabled communities about the nature of disability, offering alternative narratives for considering disabled bodies in the technological imagination - and bodies in technology, more generally. This CAREER plan seeks to bridge what we know about bodies and biases from STS and philosophy of technology with first-person observation and historical context from the field of disability studies. Since the field of STS brings with it interest in intervention in STEM practice, the intellectual merit of this proposal will have impacts beyond disciplinary boundaries. By documenting and disseminating this research through various media, this project has potential impacts in design communities, academic science and engineering courses, assistive technology spaces, and disability communities. This project promotes better modes of engagement between STEM communities and the people they desire to serve.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.