Schedule

This schedule is a living document. It might be updated during the semester. If anything changes, I will announce it in advance. Changes will always be intended to benefit students—for example, I will never move deadlines earlier.

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Week 1 — Introduction: All Tech is Assistive

January 8 (Thursday)

In class

Astra Taylor, dir. Judith Butler & Sunaura Taylor in conversation. From Examined Life. 2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0HZaPkF6qE.

Week 2 — Extending Capabilities, Not Fixing Defecits

January 13 (Tuesday)

Readings

Sara Hendren. “All Technology Is Assistive: Six Design Rules on Disability.” In Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities, edited by Jentery Sayers. University of Minnesota Press, 2018. https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-aa1769f2-6c55-485a-81af-ea82cce86966/section/b22b7f2d-f386-4ec5-bcee-30591c0078ba.
Mills, Mara. “Technology.” Keywords, April 27, 2015.

Due

Reading responses

January 15 (Thursday)

Readings

Petrick, Elizabeth. “The Computer as Prosthesis? Embodiment, Augmentation, and Disability.” In Abstractions and Embodiments: New Histories of Computing and Society, edited by Janet Abbate and Stephanie Dick. 2022.

Optional:

Douglas C. Engelbart. Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. SRI Summary Report AFOSR-3223. Stanford Research Institute, 1962. https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html

Due

Reading responses

Week 3 — Against Technoableism (Part 1)

January 20 (Tuesday)

Readings

Shew, Ashley. Chapter 1: Disabled Everything. From Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement. Norton Shorts. W.W. Norton & Company, 2023.
Shew, Ashley. Chapter 2: Disorientation. From Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement. Norton Shorts. W.W. Norton & Company, 2023.

Due

Reading responses

January 22 (Thursday)

Readings

Shew, Ashley. Chapter 3: Scripts and Crips. From Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement. Norton Shorts. W.W. Norton & Company, 2023.
Shew, Ashley. Chapter 4: New Legs, Old Tricks. From Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement. Norton Shorts. W.W. Norton & Company, 2023.

Due

Reading responses

Week 4 — Against Technoableism (Part 2)

January 27 (Tuesday) — Class on Zoom

Readings

Shew, Ashley. Chapter 5: The Neurodivergent Resistance. From Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement. Norton Shorts. W.W. Norton & Company, 2023.
Shew, Ashley. Chapter 6: Accessible Futures. From Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement. Norton Shorts. W.W. Norton & Company, 2023.

Due

Reading responses

January 29 (Thursday) — Class on Zoom

Readings

Winner, Langdon. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Daedalus 109, no. 1 (1980): 121–36.

Due

Week 5 — Disability Futures

February 3 (Tuesday)

Readings

Kafer, Alison. “Introduction: Imagined Futures.” Feminist, Queer, Crip. Indiana University Press, 2013.
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Conserving Disability and Constructing a Habitable World.” ABC Religion & Ethics, December 2, 2020. https://www.abc.net.au/religion/rosemarie-garland-thomson-conserving-disability-and-constructin/12408108.

Due

Reading responses

February 5 (Thursday)

Readings

Angelini, Robin, Katta Spiel, and Maartje De Meulder. “Speculating Deaf Tech: Reimagining Technologies Centering Deaf People.” Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York, NY, USA), CHI ’25, Association for Computing Machinery, April 25, 2025, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713238.

Due

Week 6 — Crip Technoscience: Disabled Knowing and Making

February 10 (Tuesday)

Readings

Hamraie, Aimi, and Kelly Fritsch. “Crip Technoscience Manifesto.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5, no. 1 (2019): 1. https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/29607/24772.

Due

Reading responses

February 12 (Thursday)

Readings

Brody, Miriam, Izabella Rodrigues, Jane L. E, and Jingyi Li. “Expanding Norms, Negotiating Bodies: How Artists with Disabilities Perceive and Use Creative Tools.” Proceedings of the 27th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (New York, NY, USA), ASSETS ’25, Association for Computing Machinery, October 22, 2025, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3663547.3746331.

Due

Week 7 — Common Cyborg

February 17 (Tuesday)

Readings

Weise, Jillian. “Common Cyborg.” Granta, September 24, 2018. https://granta.com/common-cyborg/.
Kafer, Alison. Chapter 5 “The Cyborg and the Crip: Critical Encounters.” Feminist, Queer, Crip. Indiana University Press, 2013.

Due

Reading responses

February 19 (Thursday)

Readings

Hollan, James, Edwin Hutchins, and David Kirsh. “Distributed Cognition: Toward a New Foundation for Human-Computer Interaction Research.” ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. (New York, NY, USA) 7, no. 2 (2000): 174–96. https://doi.org/10.1145/353485.353487.

Due

Week 8 — Posthumanism: Who is the "Human" in HCI?

February 24 (Tuesday)

Readings

Romanska, Magda. “The Bionic Body: Disability, Technology and Posthumanism.” Body, Space & Technology 23, no. 1 (2024). https://doi.org/10.16995/bst.11480.
Alice Wong and Ed Yong. “What Counts as Seeing.” Orion Magazine. July 12, 2022. https://orionmagazine.org/article/ed-yong-alice-wong-interview/.

Due

Reading responses

February 26 (Thursday) — Reading day

Week 9 — Care, Interdependence, and the Myth of Autonomy

March 3 (Tuesday)

Readings

Mia Mingus. “Access Intimacy, Interdependence and Disability Justice.” Leaving Evidence, April 12, 2017. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/access-intimacy-interdependence-and-disability-justice/.

Due

Reading responses

March 5 (Thursday)

Readings

Bennett, Cynthia L., Erin Brady, and Stacy M. Branham. “Interdependence as a Frame for Assistive Technology Research and Design.” Proceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (New York, NY, USA), ASSETS ’18, Association for Computing Machinery, October 8, 2018, 161–73. https://doi.org/10.1145/3234695.3236348.

Due

Week 10 — Disability and the Arts

March 10 (Tuesday)

Readings

Finnegan Shannon. “Do You Want Us Here or Not, 2018–Ongoing.” Finnegan Shannon, 2018. https://shannonfinnegan.com/do-you-want-us-here-or-not.
Godin, M. Leona. “Iconic Photographs of Blind People Prove Seeing Isn’t Knowing.” ARTnews.Com, November 27, 2025. https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/blindness-photography-paul-strand-walker-evans-jacob-riis-1234763708/.

Due

Reading responses

March 12 (Thursday)

Readings

Mills, Mara. “HOLDING THE LINE: On the Art of Christine Sun Kim.” Artforum, April 1, 2025. https://www.artforum.com/features/christine-sun-kim-mara-mills-whitney-museum-review-1234728306/.

Due

Week 11 — Spring Break

Week 12 — Life at the Limits of Language (Part 1)

March 24 (Tuesday)

Readings

Edwards, Terra. Chapter 1: Life at the Limits of Language. Going Tactile: Life at the Limits of Language. Oxford University Press, 2024.
Edwards, Terra. Chapter 2: Creating DeafBlind Identity. Going Tactile: Life at the Limits of Language. Oxford University Press, 2024.

Due

Reading responses

March 26 (Thursday)

Readings

Davis, Jenny L. “Introduction.” from How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things. Design Thinking, Design Theory, edited by Ken Friedman and Erik Stolterman. MIT Press, 2020.

Optional:

James J. Gibson. “The Theory of Affordances.” In The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. 1979. https://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs137/2017/readings/Gibson-AFF.pdf

Due

Week 13 — Life at the Limits of Language (Part 2)

March 31 (Tuesday)

Readings

Edwards, Terra. Chapter 3: The Collapse of the World. Going Tactile: Life at the Limits of Language. Oxford University Press, 2024.
Edwards, Terra. Chapter 4: The Protactile Movement. Going Tactile: Life at the Limits of Language. Oxford University Press, 2024.

Due

Reading responses

April 2 (Thursday)

Readings

Clark, John Lee. “Against Access.” McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern 64: The Audio Issue, October 2021. https://audio.mcsweeneys.net/transcripts/against_access.html.

Due

Week 14 — Disability, Bias, and AI

April 7 (Tuesday)

Readings

Whittaker, Meredith, Meryl Alper, Cynthia L. Bennett, Sara Hendren, Elizabeth Kaziunas, Mara Mills, Meredith Ringel Morris, Joy Lisi Rankin, Emily Rogers, Marcel Salas, and Sarah Myers West. “Disability, Bias & AI Report.” AI Now Institute, November 20, 2019. https://ainowinstitute.org/publications/disabilitybiasai-2019

Due

Reading responses

April 9 (Thursday)

Readings

Vinitha Gadiraju, Shaun Kane, Sunipa Dev, Alex Taylor, Ding Wang, Remi Denton, and Robin Brewer. “‘I Wouldn’t Say Offensive but…’: Disability-Centered Perspectives on Large Language Models.” ACM Conference on Fairness Accountability and Transparency, ACM, June 12, 2023, 205–16. https://doi.org/10.1145/3593013.3593989.
“ASAN Says No Generative AI in Plain Language.” Autistic Self Advocacy Network, July 29, 2025. https://autisticadvocacy.org/2025/07/asan-says-no-generative-ai-in-plain-language/.

Due

Week 15 — Sociotechnical Considerations for Design

April 14 (Tuesday)

Readings

Lundgard, Alan, Crystal Lee, and Arvind Satyanarayan. “Sociotechnical Considerations for Accessible Visualization Design.” 2019 IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS), October 2019, 16–20. https://doi.org/10.1109/VISUAL.2019.8933762.

Due

Reading responses

April 16 (Thursday)

Readings

Zong, Jonathan, Crystal Lee, Alan Lundgard, JiWoong Jang, Daniel Hajas, and Arvind Satyanarayan. “Rich Screen Reader Experiences for Accessible Data Visualization.” Computer Graphics Forum, 2022. https://vis.mit.edu/pubs/rich-screen-reader-vis-experiences/.