Technologies as Prosthetics is an exploration of some of the ways that disabled and gender marginalized inventors have shaped both the history of technology and our experiences of it in the present day.   This project re-presents the contributions of gender-marginalized and disabled people to the history of technology, by offering a suite of interactive digital experiences that build out a body of historical scholarship into accessible public knowledge. By centering disabled innovators, this project demonstrates the centrality of accessibility to technological progress, and pushes back against framings of accessibility as peripheral or optional to the lives we live today.

Drawing on scholarship from and beyond women’s gender and sexuality studies, the history of technology, critical disability studies, and computer science, this project works to decenter narratives of the unmarked genius of the male inventor.  Further, the project builds on scholarship that centers principles of disability, doing so in ways that reimagine the conventional scholarly monograph and turn it into a suite of accessible, interactive, evergreen artifacts. In doing so, this project also draws on the ways in which critical feminist scholarship and disability studies scholarship encourages us to imagine our audiences and their interests more broadly, extending knowledge produced within the academy beyond its walls. 

1.  How have contributions to foundational technologies by women, nonbinary people, and disabled individuals been systematically obscured?
2. What mechanisms have facilitated these erasures, and how might we reverse them?
3. What interdisciplinary methodologies and practices (from gender studies, critical disability studies, science and technology studies, computer science, and the digital humanities, among other areas) might best support the translation of these histories for audiences within and beyond academic spaces?
    

Funding for this project will support three interdisciplinary workshops that are open to all members of the Brown community that are interested, and will contribute to the development of a publicly accessible digital humanities resource that is grounded in feminist disability scholarship on technology.

This project is funded in part by the Brown Arts Institute and the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women.