Miriam El Abbassi | Arts Editor
Featured Image: Crip technoscience was born from the intersection of technoscience studies and critical disabilities studies. | Courtesy of Pixabay
York University’s Peripheral Vision Speaker Series & The New College Disability Studies Speaker Series will be hosting professor Kelly Fritsch, and her presentation, which is aptly named, “Crip Technoscience for Disabled Cyborgs: Access, Community, Politics.” Fritsch will be presenting her lecture in the Sensorium Loft (on the fourth floor of the Center for Fine Arts) on March 21, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Crip technoscience encompasses a new and emerging field of research, born from the intersection of technoscience studies and critical disability studies. This field challenges the notion that valuable scientific discovery and technological change can only come from, “neutral, non-disabled bodyminds.”
Challenging an old view that perceives disability as something that is undesirable and should be eliminated, crip technoscience aims to create an environment where disability is simply perceived as neutral. In the words of Fritsch herself: “Neither an overcoming of disability nor lapses into a celebration of individual difference in and of itself .”
This field of study also attracts the concept of viewing the disabled body as a “cyborg,” exploring the performance of intricate humane-machine interaction, in a way current models of research have not. Traditionally, the use of the cyborg as a model has strictly looked at only the body’s relationship to technology. The argument now has addressed the notion that disabled people are cyborgs, not because of their perceived impairments, but because of their politics, and the way their own communities form.
Fritsch is an assistant professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at Carleton. Her research focuses on crip, queer, and feminist theory, with a strong commitment to exploring the relations of disability, health, technology, risk, and accessibility.
Fritsch’s current research projects include developing the emerging field of crip technoscience, as well as examining how various policies and practices impact disabled communities and disability politics. Fritsch is also working collaboratively on a disability justice-focused children’s book.
Fritsch’s lecture will touch on topics that may be vastly unheard of by the majority of the student body, but will no doubt open the floor for conversation and discussion surrounding the nature of access and disability politics.
