Imagining Access >> crip computing

Taught by David Adelman, Networked Disability Cultures is an undergraduate class offered by the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan. In this class, learners work from an understanding of accessibility as a lived practice that generates embodied insights about the digital and physical world around us.

The internet has long been a space for disability community, mutual aid, and activism. Kate Ellis and Mike Kent, writing in Disability and New Media, suggest that the internet has “opened up” the world for disabled people. This course offers forth an opportunity to critically (and creatively) engage this sentiment, and others like it—what is disability culture online? Who gets to produce it? How does it get produced? What are its impacts across culture and technology? The course offers the opportunity to seriously (and playfully) engage these topics as they emerge, exist, and are debated and scrutinized online. No familiarity with disability studies is presumed or required, and we will be taking a deliberately intersectional approach to the study of disability culture(s), paying particular attention to the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class alongside disability in virtual spaces.

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