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Arbeitsgemeinschaft

oracle(s) and Screen Readers: Black Feminist theory and disability access for digital pedagogies

AG Pritchard

Our working group will feel into critical pedagogical practices that create infrastructures from the knowledges that disabled people, Black feminists and non-technical experts already hold. Our work together emphasizes care, labor relations and building trust together to enact radically different computational practice. Recent scholarship around the need to address questions of otherwise practices within computer science (Amoore 2020; Amaro 2019), ongoing discussions around topics such as ethics and AI (Benjamin 2019), crip technoscience (Hamraie et al. 2019), and fairness and accountability (Pritchard et. al 2020) prompts us into creative action.

Is unlearning the lining of unknowing?

Oracle(s) and Screen Readers will address the problem of narrowly defined and imagined ways for practicing collective ethical engagements in computational practice by drawing from complex and rich traditions of Black feminist thinking and critical disability studies. The working group will focus on initiating research within two main and overlapping areas of interest:

  1. mapping the field between Black feminist theory and critical disability studies in the context of collective reading practices for digital pedagogies;
  2. experimenting with screen readers to develop our own literacy with these technologies; to speculate towards other types of access technologies that materialise indisputable access.

oracle(s) and Screen Readers brings together a transdisciplinary network of scholars and artists to research and practice digital pedagogical practices through (screen) reading Black feminist thinking. This working group asks: How can we read Black Feminist theory together against able-reading (Smilges 2021)? In what ways does this challenge norms of computer science and digital pedagogies? What forms might this reading practice take, by whom and with what computational tools?

Our working group will engage these questions together by reading Black feminist theory and experimenting with critical access technologies as disabled people who want to together learn more about screen readers, sonification and speech to text. Through this work we plan to propose creative modes for what ethics for computational practices as a practice of po(ethics) (da Silva 2014) and critical access might be.

Antragsteller:in

Prof. Helen Pritchard
FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland

Teilnehmer:innen

  • Romi Ron Morrison
    University of Southern California, United States
  • Ren Loren Britton
    Artist / MELT, Germany
  • Eric Snodgrass
    Linnaeus University, Sweden