Disability Theory in HCI

AccessComputing awarded a Mini Grant for 5000 dollars to fund a website series supporting researchers to integrate disability theory into their research projects and agendas. This series was led by Rua M. Williams, PI of the CoLiberation Lab and featured 7 zoom events, a 2-week design jam, and an online community hosted on discord. The series events were: two introductory sessions hosted at different times to provide live interaction to the widest possible range of time zones, one Disability Theory Lecture by Dr. Williams, one Disability Theory Panel with 5 experts from Disability Advocates and HCI researchers, a Protocol Development Workshop to explore Disability Theory methods, the Design Jam Launch, and the Design Jam Closing Ceremony. All funds went toward Panelist honorariums to ensure we could bring in experts on applying Disability Theory to technology design, research, scholarship, and policy.

Team Members

Rua

Associated Funding

• AccessComputing Mini Grant, 2024

Calls for Participation

inactive

Associated Publications

• Rua M. Williams. 2025. Disability Theory in HCI: Research Reform through Community, Learning, and Play. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Research on Equitable and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT 2025). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 160–166. Https://doi.org/10.1145/3704637.3734761
  • Despite a growing body of scholarship integrating Disability Studies into Human-Computer Interaction research, access to mentorship in this interdisciplinary approach to technology research remains limited. I detail an ongoing distributed mentoring program for disabled HCI academics supporting their research in disability, policy, and ethics. I then describe the Disability Theory in HCI Workshop Series (Fall 2024), which brought scholars together to learn broader concepts of disability theory, including disabled public scholarship. Such programs fill a critical gap in mentorship and development of cross-disciplinary research in HCI as the field continues to build capacity and interest for this paradigm shifting work.

• The lecture and panel are available on YouTube.