Unit 5: Technology, Disability, and COVID-19

For Day 16 [Monday, May 16]

Our speakers in Wednesday evening will be

Professor Ashley Shew [homepage] [twitter], who has a grant-funded project entitled, strangely enough, "Technology and Disability," and

Activist/author Alice Wong, who is founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project [personal Twitter] [project Twitter].

Reading through their Twitter feeds is a pretty amazing education, and you should read as much of the stuff they link to as you can. But, to ensure that we have a common basis for talking with them, they've asked that we study these materials (3 short written pieces and 2 ~30-minute podcast episodes):

  • Dr. Shew published this essay just two weeks ago in Nature (which is "the leading international weekly journal of science first published in 1869") that makes a lot of connections among COVID, disability, and the university.
  • She also wrote this short article that (as it happens) connects "inspiration porn" to the disability/technology theme.
  • Ms. Wong published this perspective last month in Vox, connecting COID, disability and technology in a sobering yet hopeful way.
  • Ms. Wong also produces a podcast: this episode on "Cyborgs" is a conversation among her, Dr. Shew, and another activist/author, Jillian Weise. (While the transcript is available, please give this a listen to get the feeling of the conversation.)
  • This episode in "Disabled People in Tech" is a conversation with few people, including Josh Miele, talking about a range of topics centered around education, accessibility, and the STEM/tech fields.

Questions for Speakers

By 1pm ET Monday, please post here 2 to 3 questions for the speakers. These should be

  • informed by the readings (i.e. I'll be able to tell you did the readings by looking at your questions)
  • specific enough to give the speakers a place to start
  • open-ended enough to let the speakers craft their own answers (i.e. not yes/no questions)

You might want to ask their opinion about something, or relate these readings to other course themes, or make a connection between readings and ask them to elaborate. Your questions can be directed to both of them or just one of them. Remember these are busy and very accomplished people who are giving us two person-hours of their time: how can we maximize the value of this time?

For Day 19 [Thursday, May 21]

At 3pm today we'll be joined by Evan Cumming, a NYC-based director and playwright. I'm attaching a bio, and pasting in his ideas about what we might chat about. He really wants this to be a conversation, so we'll spend a little before he shows up figuring out how to make that happen. Please look this over and see what topics seem most interesting to you.