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Dear colleagues,

Do you have a piece on information access and the digital world? Databases, algorithms, interface design and the construction of standard bodies? I might have a CFP for you! I’m currently co-editing a special issue that sits at the intersection of disability and information studies and I’d love to hear from you.

You can find the CFP herehttp://disabilityarchiveslab.com/call-for-abstracts-for-special-issue/ and copied below.

Feel free to forward widely. If you have any questions, feel free to email me.

Thanks, Crystal

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Special Issue of First Monday: This Feature Has Been Disabled: Critical intersections of disability and information studies

Special issue editors: Gracen Brilmyer and Crystal Lee Submission form: This Feature Has Been Disabled CFPhttps://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd4NItn-evBrebB_QnsW_Rilnw498EttZmtsj7twLrOf-jF-g/viewform?usp=sf_link

Key Dates: – Abstracts due: January 5, 2022 – Invitations to submit full papers: January 15, 2022 – Full papers due: May 15, 2022 – Estimated publication: January 2023

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.

For a special issue of First Monday, a monthly peer-reviewed open access academic journal, we seek to address disability and information systems through their materiality, methods, representation, technological specificities, lived embodiments, pedagogies — the historical to contemporary. We aim to bring together dual perspectives from Disability Studies and Information Studies in order to foster nuanced conversations at this nexus. We aim to bring together thinkers from both fields — particularly those who are disabled themselves — to map critical histories and speculative futures for information science that are informed by critical discussions in disability justice and design justice.

We explicitly ask for a range of contributions — first-person narratives, theoretical and practical scholarship, and case studies — that address the vast topics within the fields of Information Studies and Disability Studies, including interdisciplinary research, co-authored papers, and non-traditional scholarly articles. We are interested in work that attends to disability spanning all subdisciplines of information studies: the historical to the technological, analog to digital systems, individual craft practice to institutional analyses. How might centering disabled voices and disability studies frameworks as ways of knowing change the field of information studies? Similarly, how might nuanced attention to information systems change the ways we understand their interactions with disabled people and people from other marginalized and oppressed communities?

To be considered for inclusion in this special issue, please send an extended abstract (300-500 words) plus a short bio (150-200 words) to this formhttps://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd4NItn-evBrebB_QnsW_Rilnw498EttZmtsj7twLrOf-jF-g/viewform?usp=sf_link by January 5, 2022.

Authors with selected abstracts will be notified by January 15 and invited to submit their full paper drafts by May 15, 2022, and the submissions will be published pending peer review. We explicitly and intentionally invite authors who do not hold academic positions or specific academic degrees – particularly authors who are primarily advocates, activists, community organizers, programmers, and cultural workers – to submit abstracts. This special issue will foreground critical disability studies work and knowledge production that takes place both within and outside of the academy, and aims to center disabled people whose work may not be traditionally considered academic or scholarly. Along these lines, we encourage authors to cite both academic and non-academic sources from disabled people. We acknowledge how disabled knowledge outside of academia can get co-opted and used for academic capital so we implore prospective authors to cite critically and politically—thank you to our recent conversations with Liz Jackson & Alex Haagaardhttps://twitter.com/elizejackson/status/1446844470327119875?s=21 on this.

Possible themes of accepted papers might include (but are not limited to):

* 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)

Contact Info: Gracen Brilmyer: gracen.brilmyer@mcgill.cahttps://mailto:gracen.brilmyer@mcgill.ca Crystal Lee: crystall@mit.eduhttps://mailto:crystall@mit.edu

-- Crystal Lee (she/her) Massachusetts Institute of Technology twitterhttps://www.twitter.com/crystaljjlee / websitehttp://web.mit.edu/crystall/www/ / zoomhttps://brk.mn/crystal Time zone: Eastern / UTC -5