CFP: First Monday, “This Feature Has Been Disabled”

First Monday has released a call for papers for a special issue entitled “This Feature Has Been Disabled: Critical intersections of disability and information studies.” Guest edited by Gracen Brilmyer (McGill University) and Crystal Lee (MIT), this special issue aims to center disabled people’s voices in relation to information studies:

Within the context of information studies—a broad field which spans archives, libraries, and their histories to databases, algorithms, and interface design—disability is often framed as an issue for legal compliance rather than a topic of ongoing practice and scholarly interrogation. Yet, centering disabled people’s voices and leveraging critical disability studies as methodology within the construction of information systems can sharpen analyses of the design of information systems, algorithmic decision-making technologies, and their impacts on marginalized communities. Alternatively, information systems and technologies often mediate disabled people’s daily lives—from the assistive tech we use, the ways we connect through online communities and hybrid spaces, and the ways we research and understand our histories—thus granular attention to the ways in which such systems operate is likewise crucial.

Possible themes for submissions include:

• The violence of knowledge organization and the historical ties between ableism, racism, sexism, sanism, homophobia, fatphobia, classism, caste-based oppression, and colonialism in such classificatory systems
• Crip hacking, tinkering, and inventing technological interventions for crip futures
• Disabled people as tech workers, tech work as debilitating, and other issues around labor
• Surveillance, biometrics, policing, and incarceration of “anomalous” bodyminds
• Balancing information privacy, information access, and intellectual property regarding disability narratives
• Digital colonialism and accessibility for Indigenous disabled archival users
• Radical interventions to accessible interface design and collective access
• Changing role of the library as community center, as laboratory, and as platform and the impacts on disabled patrons
• Internet access and historical and ongoing injustice for disabled people
• Information infrastructure and materiality as it impacts both disabled people and the environment
• Teaching and use of adaptive technologies in libraries, and archives and museums
• Academic ableism, information access, and crip time 
• Algorithmic impacts on disabled people of color
• Artificial intelligence and the ways eugenic logics are encoded into machine learning systems
• Crip relationships to apps, assistive technologies, or social media
• Sign language gloves, smart glasses, social skills robots, stair-climbing wheelchairs, and other curative/therapized technologies (or disability dongles) built to “eliminate” or “solve the problem” of disability
• The unique histories and ethnographies of speech-to-text and other technologies that began for disabled use and evolved into everyday products
• Disabled approaches to linked data and community knowledge
• Search and information retrieval for materials on disability
• Tacit knowledge for multiply marginalized disabled people
• Databases, metadata, and describing disabled identities within information systems
• Information law and policy as it intersects with disability privacy and technology use
• Medical forms, databases and medical triage
• Health data and quantified self for wheelchair/cane/walker/mobility aid users
• Structural barriers to immigration / asylum for disabled people via quantification within medical inadmissibility policies
• Access-washing in marketing, development, and promotion of products, systems, and technologies that address inaccessibility while furthering eugenic, carceral, or colonial logics, policies, and practices (such as object and image recognition and facial recognition technologies)

Abstracts are due January 5, 2022.