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What follows is a roundtable discussion, conducted through email in early 2023, between me (Emma Ben Ayoun, editor of this issue of Spectator) and three major scholars working today: Neta Alexander, Pooja Rangan, and Tanya Titchkosky. Each has made important contributions to the growing field of disability media studies, and each brings a singular background and expertise to their work. It was an honor to be able to bring them together in this way, and to be in conversation with them. Their ideas (in these pages and elsewhere) will, I think, be profoundly valuable to disability media scholarship for decades to come.
Emma Ben Ayoun: How do you conceptualize the connection between disability (whether disability as a category, as a field of inquiry, as a justice project, etc.) and media (filmic or otherwise), both in general and in your own work? What, for you, is the most important aspect of that connection?
Neta Alexander: I come to this question and this roundtable wearing two hats: I'm an assistant professor of film and media at Colgate University, working in the intersection of digital media studies, science and technology studies, and critical disability studies, and I'm a "disabled cyborg" (to borrow a term from design researcher Laura Forlano), a cancer survivor and a pacemakerequipped cardiac patient who also was born with a facial paralysis. The ability to bring both identities into my scholarly work is a recent development that I owe to disability scholars and activists invested in auto-ethnography as a methodology for the study of how bodies meet the world. This beautiful body of literature includes writings by Leah PiepznaSamarasinha, Aimi Hamraie, Johanna Hedva, John Lee Clark, EH Clare, and Jonathan Sterne, among many other writers and scholars invested in expanding the reach of disability studies.
In the recent decade disability studies has moved beyond representational or narrative critiques of Hollywood's inherent ableism. These earlier works still help us explore and challenge topics as varied as the politics of casting, accessibility features, identification, and the ableist gaze. More recently, however, critical disability studies have sought to enrich emerging fields such as infrastructure studies, interface design, gaming, and algorithmic studies, centering the non-average user and the entanglements between bodies and digital technologies.
Theories that move...