I recently heard the sad news that Australian academic Christopher Newell has died at the age of 44.  Many tributes are being paid through the Society for Disability Studies lists and elsewhere, and Beth Haller has pulled together obituaries and a full collection of references to Newell’s work at her Media-dis-n-dat blog at http://media-dis-n-dat.blogspot.com/2008/06/australia-loses-top-bioethicist.html.

I knew very little about Christopher Newell, having only read his publications in the field of disability and communication technologies. I now discover this was only a fraction of the important work that Newell constributed to Disability Studies and wider academe. 

For me, his book 2003 book Digital Disability: The Social Construction of Disability in New Media, written with Gerard Goggin, is still the seminal text for those examining this digital divide and was the first concrete text I could find that distinguished disabled experience against more generic socio-cultural critiques of embodiment in virtual spaces.  It is still a landmark in understanding regarding the intersection between disability and new media.