Tagged: HCI

Call for Papers: Disability, Technology and the Global South


Call for Papers: Disability and the Global South

An International Journal

Special Issue: Disability, Technology and the Global South.

Editors: Sarah Lewthwaite (King’s College London) and Anupama Roy (State University New York at Oswego)

Disability and the Global South is the first peer reviewed international journal committed to publishing high quality work focused exclusively on all aspects of the disability experience in the global South. It provides an interdisciplinary platform prioritising material that is critical, challenging, and engaging from a range of epistemological perspectives and disciplines. Disability and the Global South is an open access journal.

In this special edition we call for papers addressing the areas of disability, technology and the global South. Contributions will voice a range of global perspectives, recognising diversity rather than a ‘globalist account of a unified technology-driven world order’ (Selwyn, 2013). This special issue will examine the relations between technology, disability and impairment at the levels of design, development, resourcing, manufacture, distribution, governance and use in and across diverse locations. At present, notions of enabling and assistive technologies, their function and use, are mostly assumed by the global North. There is a scarcity of literature documenting technology initiatives that are rooted in the global South or expressing Southern, non-Western perspectives. This special issue seeks to voice research and critical positions on areas currently missing from global debate over the relations between technology and disability, and highlight overarching global issues that are currently silenced in technicist geo-politics.

We encourage contributions exploring a range of themes, including (not exclusively):

  • The intersection of disability and the resourcing, development, production of technology and its supply chain
  • Disability rights, technology governance and development policy
  • Universal Design
  • Web accessibility and web standards
  • Assistive technologies
  • ‘Digital Divides’
  • Disability and gaming
  • Data-farming, eSweat-shops
  • Learning Technologies, e-Learning, Disability and Education
  • Disability perspectives on global technology initiatives such as One Laptop Per Child
  • Disability perspectives on emerging development and technology disciplines such as ICT4D (Information and Communications for Development), M4D (Mobiles for Development).

The editors also welcome abstracts on any related areas and are happy to discuss potential submissions by email. We invite researchers and scholars from social science and technology disciplines such as disability studies, science and technology studies, development studies, communication and media studies, HCI, accessibility and Web Science, alongside activists and practitioners to submit papers and engage in debate around all aspects of disability and technology, prioritising viewpoints, experiences and knowledge from those in the global South.

Timescale:

First complete drafts of full papers due by: Monday 30th June 2014

Following peer review, comments returned to authors by: Monday 1st September 2014

Final revised copy to be submitted by authors: Monday 1st Dec 2014

Likely publication: Feb/March 2015

We welcome informal inquiries. Abstracts and inquiries should be submitted by email addressed to:  Sarah Lewthwaite (King’s College London): sarah.lewthwaite@kcl.ac.uk and Anupama Roy (State University New York at Oswego): onupama@gmail.com.

Free Research +1: Enacting Disability by Vasilis Galis


Last week I highlighted Routledge’s online festival of free access to academic journals (to access the journals you have to register on their site, to begin 14 days  of access at any point up until the 30th June 2012). My last post highlighted 19 papers with particular relevance to non-academics working in Education, Disability and Technology, based on a clutch of blog posts that I mustered for a similar festival last year. However, I also promised to highlight more recent research. So, for those of you hungry for the cutting edge – here’s my starter for 10.

Vasilis Galis (2011) “Enacting Disability: how can science and technology studies inform disability studies?”, Disability and Society, 26:1, p 825-838.

I blogged about this paper on the King’s Learning Institute’s Technology Enhanced Learning Blog for blogging against disablism day. This is a highly academic paper, and blog post, concerned with how disability studies and science and technology studies interact. However, I think many readers outside academia will still find something useful within it. Galis uses Actor Network Theory to identify how Disability might be concieved as an interaction, rather than an individual attribute, or external environment.  Below, I reproduce my review from the KLI blog, which draws out particular implications for Technology Enhanced Learning.  Your thoughts, as ever, are welcome. More posts on research from the last 12 months will follow in the next few days!

At the Sharp Edge of Technology Enhanced Learning: Science and Technology and Critical Disability Studies

…This post focuses on what learning technologists and disability scholars have to learn from one another and the importance of encouraging this traffic of ideas to combat digital disablism.

Specifically, I’d like to review a recent paper published in Disability and Society by Vasilis Galis (2011) “Enacting Disability: how can science and technology studies inform disability studies?”. At King’s, increasing interdisciplinary is resulting in new approaches to learning and technology across the College. However, when thinking about disability, much technology research and discussion focuses on accessibility, a fundamental part of user experience and human computer interaction rooted in computer science. In contrast, Disability Studies builds on a critical social science perspectives. Both engage activists, working to make digital experiences more inclusive. However, both accessibility and disability studies represent many diverse understandings of what disability is. When learning experiences are built on the results, for increasingly diverse student groups and interface devices, the picture complicates further.

Galis’ paper identifies theoretical frames from Science and Technology Studies that can  assist in the ordering of disability and the representation of disability issues in different techno-scientific forums (or fora, depending which way you like your latin sliced) to clarify this space. His position has tangible applications for accessibility and Technology Enhanced Learning development.

To begin, Galis argues that:

Dominant conceptual models of disability have produced distinct dichotomies between the body, and semiotic and material entities (Galis, 2011: 826)

To set the scene, Galis reviews the medical model of disability, the social model of disability  and the trajectory of postmodern approaches. He observes that many such lenses on disability rely on unhelpful distinctions (such as individual/social, illness/culture, body/socio-structural environment). Galis proposes a bridging intervention, highlighting the value of Actor Network Theory for promoting an interactional model of disability, in which disability (and impairment) are understood as being co-created between humans and “non-humans”.

Actor Network Theory

Within this model, “non-humans”, be they assistive technologies or other surfaces of technology (a ramp, browser, power supply, internet connection and so forth) and environmental factors, are considered ‘symmetrically’. Galis explains:

Actor Network Theory attempts to cancel the divide between human and non-human actors. In this way, ANT does not privilege impaired bodies (according to a medical model), or socio-material constructions (according to a social model). Instead ANT provides an analysis of a situation which may produce disability or ability (Galis, 2011, 830).

Actor Network Theory, he suggests, expands the vocabulary available to disability researchers and scholars. Importantly, Galis takes time to express criticism of this position, and carefully demarcate its limits.

From Galis’ argument, Actor Network Theory looks like a useful additional lens to those working at the chalk face of disability theory and leveraging the multiple-perspectives that are necessary for any mapping of the complex and contested arena of ‘disability’. However, I’m not sure that a relational model of disability, one that is gaining increasing traction with more critical Accessibility discourse (In my own work, most recently with Martyn Cooper et al. 2012) necessarily requires the vocabulary of Actor Network Theory. Moreover, this position strikes me a falling back into technicist discourses which render power relations invisible. Galis goes into this in some depth, drawing on Foucault and other critical theorists to forefront issues of ‘who is disabled, and who decides’. In this way, he applies a bricolage– recommending a use of ANT in the wild, (Callon, 2003) that produces knowledge through more recognisable emancipatory and participatory research practices, that engage disabled people, rather than foisting hierarchical academic power-relations upon them. This, Galis advises, requires the hard sciences to engage with ‘anti-science’, ‘concerned groups’ (Callon and Rabeharisoa, 2003) and ‘hybrid forums’ (Callon, 2003). Beneath the disciplinary jargon, this translates into a more precise, technical vocabulary for Sciences engaging with participatory disability research in the field.

Having undertaken participatory disability research in the wild, from within education (social science) and human factors (engineering), I recognise the strengths of a relational view of disability. By setting this view within an ANT vocabulary and an explicitly political framework, Galis overcomes the criticisms of localism and hegemony. However, I can’t help wondering whether, rather than informing disability studies with Science and Technology Studies, STS itself has instead been tested and developed by a critical engagement with disability?  In any event – the benefits of critically considering disability, and its positioning within Science and Technical disciplines remains a rich seam that demands further investigation to ensure our design, deployment and social use of technology for learning does not “enact disability”.

 

Free access to Education, Tech and Disability research: Fill your boots!


The letters OMG are carved into a dense encyclopedia
Detail photo by See-Ming Lee of book sculpture "OMG LOL". From Eyebeam Art & Technology Center Open Studios.

Last year, academic publisher Routledge offered 30 days of free access to their education journals.  This year, they’re offering similar access with a couple of additional constraints. Firstly, to access the journals you have to register on their site, secondly, articles are only available for 14 days this time around. On the plus side – you can register and begin the 14 days  of access at any point up until the 30th June 2012.

Dedicated readers may remember that last year I highlighted a set of papers that I felt would be of interest to education, technology and disability professionals outside of academia. Normally, the cost of accessing closed, subscription journal articles is far too much for people to bear, with articles usually retailing at around £23 ($36). So my advice? Sign up and take two weeks to fill your boots!

To recap: some great (mind expanding) papers for people working in the area of disability, technology, user experience, accessibility, technology enhanced learning and human computer interaction will be available. I still heartily recommend these papers and special issues, I’ve blogged about each as follows:

  1. Aversive Disablism: subtle prejudice towards disabled people by Mark Deal
  2. Identity and Disability by Nick Watson
  3. The use and non-use of technology assistive technologies by Soderstrom and Ytterhus
  4. Disability, Technology and e-Learning edited by Jane Seale… Note: Jane is currently editing a second special collection of papers about digital inclusion and learning for Research in Learning Technology with William Dutton of the Oxford Internet Institute. Peer-review is underway. As Research in Learning Technology is now an open access journal this will be freely available when it is published.
  5. Hierarchies of Impairment by Mark Deal
  6. The anti-social model of disability by Dewsberry et al
  7. Three papers on disability and the internet including: Disability Discourses for Online Identities by Bowker and Tuffin, Holding the line online: exploring wired relationships for people with disabilities by Seymour and Lupton and Being there by Anderberg and Jonsson.
  8. Digital agility and disabled learners by Seale, Draffan and Wald
  9. Critical approaches to accessibility for technology enhanced learning by me, Sarah Lewthwaite.

Next week I’ll be recommending ALL NEW additional research papers that Routledge have published in the field since last year’s Open Access festival. If you have any additional papers you’d like to list, or any other comments, please post, I’d love to hear from you.

The Platonic Upper Cut


Watching some of the tweets rolling out of South By South West (SXSW) I was reminded (again) of the continuing relevance of cyberfeminist theory for Human Factors, HCI and UX researchers. In particular, Katherine Hayles work “How we became post-human: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics” (1999) springs to mind, in terms keeping an eye to the messy complexity of users, in balance with the ‘perfect’ world of code. I think this has particular relevance for those creating scenarios and personas or otherwise seeking to ‘abstract’, summarise or theorise a user group.

At the risk of alienating all but the most committed readers – here’s a snipped from my thesis where I discuss Hayles’ work. Here, I highlight problems with collecting onscreen information without consulting a user about the purpose, meaning and motivation behind their activities.  Please excuse the appallingly academic language, I have added some links to expand on particular terms that may have different meanings for different readers.  Comments are welcome.

The following excerpt is taken from p 125-127 from:

The sections quoted are from:

  • HAYLES, N. K. (1999) How we became posthuman : virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. Chicago, Ill. London, University of Chicago Press.

Onscreen Data:

…In analysis, the results of screen capture have been used primarily for illustrative purposes, for reference and data triangulation (Merriam, 1999). This has been for several reasons. Firstly, from an ontological position, I have felt it important to recognise that shifting the focus of research from the individual to their onscreen representations would fail to report authentic understandings of this content. Privileging my own view on student screen phenomena arguably instigates a research hierarchy that privileges the researcher’s observation over the student construction of meaning that those artefacts realise.

There is also a further ontological issue at stake here, available to us through arguments posited by Hayles (1999). Hayles actively seeks to complicate the abstract dichotomies present in dominant technology discourse. In a statement of intent, she problematises the leap from embodied reality to abstract information, with important implications for research straddling these spaces:

Abstraction is of course an essential component in all theorising, for no real theory can account for the infinite multiplicity of our interactions with the real. But when we make moves that erase the world’s multiplicity, we risk losing sight of the variegated leaves, fractal branchings, and particular bark textures that make up the forest. (Hayles, 1999: 12)

Hayles continues to identify two moves that she deems central to the construction of an information/materialist hierarchy that distorts understandings of the real world and its online equivalents. She terms these the ‘Platonic backhand and forehand’:

The Platonic backhand works by inferring from the world’s noisy multiplicity a simplified abstraction. So far so good: this is what theorising should do. The problem comes when the move circles around to constitute the abstraction as the originary form from which the world’s multiplicity derives. Then complexity appears as a ‘fuzzing up’ of an essential reality rather than as a manifestation of the world’s holistic nature. (Hayles, 1999: 12)

This back-to-front semblance of the real world in theory is important, but not complete. When considering the interface between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ realms, the ‘platonic forehand’ comes into play:

Whereas the Platonic backhand has a history dating back to the Greeks, the Platonic forehand is more recent. To reach fully developed form, it required the assistance of powerful computers. This move starts from simplified abstractions and, using simulation techniques such as genetic algorithms, evolves a multiplicity sufficiently complex that it can be seen as a world of its own. The two moves thus make their play in opposite directions. The backhand goes from noisy multiplicity to reductive simplicity, whereas the forehand swings from simplicity to multiplicity. They share a common ideology – privileging the abstract as the Real and downplaying the importance of material instantiation. When they work together, they lay the groundwork for a new variation on an ancient game, in which disembodied information becomes the ultimate Platonic Form. (Hayles, 1999:12-13)

When conceptualising online spaces, it is thus desirable to recognise any instinct towards the abstraction of the Real, and, arguably, over-estimation of the complexity of online representations. For this reason, my interviews privileged students and the meanings that they ascribed to online phenomena and activity, rather than the ‘authentic’ onscreen phenomena itself. Where dissonance between onscreen phenomena and student talk occurred, this was raised within the interview. In this way, the interviews could be characterised as ambulant; moving through online spaces, charting them with respect to the guidance offered by participants.

 

#8 ‘Digital Agility and Disabled Learners’ by Seale, Draffan and Wald


Over the course of April I have been highlighting influential disability, technology and education research published by Routledge. All the papers cited are available for free this month to all.

SEALE, J., DRAFFAN, E. A. & WALD, M. (2010) Digital agility and digital decision-making: conceptualising digital inclusion in the context of disabled learners in higher education. Studies in Higher Education, 35, 4, 445-461.

Studies in Higher Education
Studies in Higher Education

My last post outlining a selection of papers on disability and the internet was focussed on research that has taken place prior to the advent of Web 2.0. If you’ve been following my blog – you’ll also know that the vast majority of papers listed have sprung from the pages of Disability and Society. Today’s offering is strikingly different. Digital Agility and Digital Decision-Making is a paper based on landmark research undertaken by the team behind the LexDis project: Mike Wald, EADraffan and JaneSeale. LexDis been concerned with the use of technology amongst disabled learners in higher education. The strength of LexDis is that it demonstrates the capabilities of disabled students, their strategies and tactics for technology use with regard to the media they actually use – with participants actively engaging in the development of the research.

Digital Agility and Digital Decision-Making recognises and theorises disabled users’ agency, how disabled students’ ”break and enter” otherwise closed systems, the cost/benefit analyses they conduct when applying assistive technologies and so on. In this way disabled students’ ‘digital agility’ is recognised (arguably, for the first time) and presented in a lucid and viable framework.  This does not mean that barriers to accessibility can be left unresolved, or that digital skills should not be taught – but the authors identify the value of an empowerment model of development that recognises disabled people as collaborators and agents, rather than passive recipients of digital services.  As such this paper is highly recommended for anyone interested in HCI, user experience, accessibility, e-learning or assistive technology.

If you are accessing this page outside of Routledge’s free for all – be sure to check the documents stemming from the Lexdis Project itself. These are freely available day in, day out. The reports, methodology documents and other papers published from the research all reward attention.

Finally, another essential aspect of JISC funded and JISC TechDis work springing from Southampton’s accessibility Gurus  is the Web2Access website. A task-based resource which allows educators (and anyone else) to describe the task they want to achieve with students or other users, and then presents evaluative information about Web 2.0 technologies available. I’ve blogged about this before, but it’s worth saying twice: It’s a great tool.

#7 Three papers on Disability and the Internet


Disability and Society
Disability and Society

Today I highlight three papers from Disability and Society that investigate digital disability prior to the advent of Web 2.0. All three papers nominated today represent research that is resolutely Web 1.0, concerning text-based and often distance environments. Some are based on research that took place in the late 90s in a discourse that is fast moving, as a result, these papers are presented with a caveat: Things have moved on. Nonetheless, any research into disability and the web owes a great deal to this fundament of internet research which attends to the social and contextual facets of disability that are central to user experience, but all too frequently fall outside the boundaries of accessibility and user experience research.

Each paper is freely available to all for the remainder of April 2011 as part of Routledge’s Education Free For All event. However, readers may like to know that outside this period Anderberg and Jonsson’s Being There and Natilene Bowker’s trailblazing PhD Thesis remain open to all out-of-hours.  Further research by the authors listed can also be found with the help of your good friend Google Scholar.

BOWKER, N. & TUFFIN, K. (2002) Disability Discourses for Online Identities. Disability & Society, 17, 3, 327-344.

Bowker and Tuffin grapple with the invisibility of some disabilities online in this research-based examination of disclosure and social context. They identify a ‘choice to disclose’ repetoir amongst participants relating to relevance, anonymity and normality. Although notions of ‘anonymity’ have been eroded in today’s networked environments where identity is often consolidated, the Web’s continuing role as a space in which the positioning of identity may take place within a subjectivity removed from impairment continues to inform notions of disability online. [readers may want to follow this treatise with Nick Watson’s Disability and Identity, for an alternate view].

SEYMOUR, W. & LUPTON, D. (2004) Holding the line online: exploring wired relationships for people with disabilities. Disability & Society, 19, 4, 291-305.

Seymour and Lupton’s research is amongst the earliest presented here, concerning interviews with 35 people in the late 90s. The authors develop their line of analysis along a continuum of other communication technologies – such as the phone. However, their discussion critically develops many of the embodiment and binary issues of disabled/non-disabled that in my view, have not yet been sufficiently theorised in critical disability studies.

ANDERBERG, P. & JONSSON, B. (2005) Being there. Disability & Society, 20, 7, 719-733.

Anderberg and Jonsson’s unhelpfully vague title and lack of keywords should not deter readers. Their phenomenographic investigation focusses on the experiences of 22 participants with significant mobility impairments. Their results speak clearly of the affordances internet technologies give some disabled people in terms of independence and interactions unmediated by Personal Assistants.

#5 ‘Hierarchies of Impairment’ by Mark Deal


DEAL, M. (2003) Disabled people’s attitudes toward other impairment groups: a hierarchy of impairments. Disability & Society, 18, 7, 13.

Disability and Society
Disability and Society

This is the second paper I’ve nominated from the pen of Mark Deal, and it’s another cracker. In this paper Deal discusses Hierarchies of Impairment. Once again, this term is essential to building an analytic vocabulary of disability for lay people, academics and techies alike. Hierarchies of Impairment have been researched since the 1970s, however, where previous work has explored how different impairments receive different status in society (and, as a result, with regard to technology, different resources and research attention) Deal extends this analysis to incorporate the attitudes of disabled people themselves. Deal’s research has powerful applied implications – particularly for those of us seeking to create inclusive environments. It identifies how we might desconstruct mainstream notions of ‘disability’ to identify those most marginalised within society. It also highlights how disablism (and aversive disablism) can function between disabled groups, allowing an analysis of representation. For those of us in technical disciplines, Deal’s thesis also allows us to evaluate the ways in which hierarchies of impairment are re-orientated by new contexts (for example, the internet) and different cultures.

A forthcoming publication co-authored with Henny Swan pushes this envelope with respect to Web Standards and the Majority World. Watch this space.

A final word: Hierarchies of Impairment is only available for free via Routledge this month to non-subscribers (April, 2011). If you’re accessing this page outside these dates, investigate Mark Deal’s excellent PhD thesis (2006) Attitudes of Disabled People Toward Other Disabled People and Impairment Groups which is available through the Enham website.

#4 ‘Disability, Technology and e-Learning’ edited by Jane Seale


Disability, Technology and e-Learning, a Special Issue of Research in Learning Technology, edited by Jane Seale.

Research in Learning Technology
Research in Learning Technology

So far this month, I’ve introduced three influential research papers from Disability and Society to highlight academic research that is free to all readers this month as part of Routledge’s Education Free For All event. Today, we divert to a new journal – Research in Learning Technology. [update: 5th Jan 2011] Research in Learning Technology is now Open Access and all back issues are available. Research in Learning Technology is the journal of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) previously entitled ALT-J, and more specifically, I’d like to highlight a special issue of the journal devoted to accessibility and edited by Jane Seale (Vol 14, Issue 1).

Nine papers and articles are included. As this issue is now five years old, many of the authors have substantially developed their positions as contexts and discourses in the field have developed. Nonetheless, many of these papers remain relevant to the field with implications for wider uses of technology, and I recommend this issue as a Who’s Who of significant authors in Accessibility in e-Learning. In the UK and elsewhere, Universities frequently represent key sites of cutting edge accessibility research. As such, this offers an excellent spring board into more recent accessibility literature across the education journals freely available this month – so flex your search operators!

Note: Many of these authors are on Twitter (for example, @briankelly @sloandr @lawrie @EADraffan @janeseale and others). Be sure to seek them out. If you are accessing this blog post after Routledge’s Open Access period finishes.  In addition,  many of the authors above have also published freely available research elsewhere. For example, Brian Kelly’s stellar back catalogue can be found at UK Web Focus.  Enjoy!

#3 ‘The use and non-use of assistive technologies’ by Soderstrom and Ytterhus


The third instalment in an academic free for all.

SÖDERSTRÖM, S. & YTTERHUS, B. (2010) The use and non-use of assistive technologies from the world of information and communication technology by visually impaired young people: a walk on the tightrope of peer inclusion. Disability & Society, 25, 3, 303-315.

Disability and Society
Disability and Society

This paper by Sylvia Soderstrom and Borgunn Ytterhus presents an essential insight into the importance of social context for the take up of technology, and the place of assistive technologies within this matrix. They remind us that users do not exist in a vaccuum, that, in affluent societies ‘how people use technology is symbolic of various values and identities’. This qualitative study is relatively small, but its results are referent to a swathe of complex socio-technical relations. In this sense it is powerfully illustrative. Where ICT is found to broadly symbolise competence, belonging and independence – the specific nature of specialised assistive technologies can symbolise restriction, difference and dependency. The implications of such findings have resonance across Human Factors, HCI and education, and emphasise the peer-to-peer nature of in/accessibility and its delivery.

#2 ‘Identity and Disability’ by Nick Watson


The second post in my solo April blog festival.

WATSON, N. (2002) Well, I know this is going to sound very strange to you, but I don’t see myself as a disabled person: identity and disability. Disability & Society, 17, 5, 18.

Disability and Society
Disability and Society

In March 2011 Aleks Krotoski, UK technology journalist and researcher wrote a piece about Disability and the Internet for the Observer. Although I recognised many of her arguments and observations, I disagreed with several key aspects of her analysis. In particular, her assertion that disabled people ‘pass’ as non-disabled online. Hers is a very blunt statement – and it is this concern, that disabled people who do not present themselves (or see themselves) as disabled online might in some way be complicit in maintaining, rather than challenging a disabling status quo that Watson’s research tears into.

Here Watson challenges a ‘passing’ interpretation of the actions of disabled people – presenting disabled people’s own accounts and identifying in the process an opposite interpretation, a political assertion of disability as normal. Watson’s research gives important nuance to this crucial area. For anyone writing, designing or researching disability and technology – this paper makes essential reading.

Note: My PhD explores this territory with respect to Social Networks. For an additional alternative reponse to Kotoski’s article, see how Ouch’s Disability Bitch goes into CyberSpasm