Critical Design Lab blog launches!

This week marks the launch of a new blog from Aimi Hamraie's Critical Design Lab at Vanderbilt University, an intentional space for transformative research practice at the intersection of critical and interrogative design, intersectional feminist design theory, and crip technoscience. Over the past year, I've been a long-distance collaborator with the lab, working together to … Continue reading Critical Design Lab blog launches!

Ethnography & Design on the AnthroPod PodCast

I am glad to be featured this week on the AnthroPod podcast, produced by the journal Cultural Anthropology. The piece is the first of three in a series on ethnography and design, featuring two other dear colleagues and my collaborators the past two years in the UC Collaboratory for Ethnographic Design, Lilly Irani and Keith … Continue reading Ethnography & Design on the AnthroPod PodCast

I WAS NEVER ALONE keeps on moving

I WAS NEVER ALONE (IWNA), a play script based on ethnographic fieldwork in Petrozavodsk, Russia with adults with disabilities, just keeps on moving - developing in new ways and finding collaborators and possibilities that, as a first-time documentary playwright, continue to astound and amaze me. The February  2016 staged reading  of IWNA (dir. Joseph Megel) … Continue reading I WAS NEVER ALONE keeps on moving

I WAS NEVER ALONE workshop and staged reading

This week takes me back to North Carolina to work on logistics leading up to a planned workshop and staged reading that will take place at UNC-Chapel Hill Performance Studies during the first week of February 2016. The workshop will be the second process presentation for I WAS NEVER ALONE, a documentary play script and … Continue reading I WAS NEVER ALONE workshop and staged reading

New photo essay on Disability in Russia

I'm happy to announce the publication of my photo essay and accompanying text in the interdisciplinary journal Landscapes of Violence. You can download the PDF version from the LoV website, or read the abstract, below. Abstract A recent Human Rights Watch report documented the ways in which people with mobility impairments in Russia are both … Continue reading New photo essay on Disability in Russia

What are we doing when we say Putin has Asperger’s Syndrome?

I am someone who thinks about disability and Russia for many hours of the day, most days. So, naturally, I paid attention when the social media world was suddenly flush with posts and tweets about the strange story that a US government report had speculated that Putin has an Autism Spectrum Disorder. This was a … Continue reading What are we doing when we say Putin has Asperger’s Syndrome?

Using Oral History to teach engaged Disability Studies at UNC-CH

I wrote recently about the launch of a collaborative website - a digital archive of oral histories of disability advocacy at UNC-CH, gathered by undergraduate students in two disability studies courses during the spring of 2014. I wanted to highlight the philosophy behind that project, so I've excerpted below the "Why Oral History" page from … Continue reading Using Oral History to teach engaged Disability Studies at UNC-CH