Rua M. WilliamsI was honored to work with Cannach MacBride, Taraneh Fazeli, and Allie Lynn at United States Artists on Shift Space 5.0. In this issue, I was able to write the first official publication about the ongoing Cyborg Imaginaries Project. I was also able to have a beautiful conversation with my dear friend and fellow Just Tech alum, Tawana Petty. Please check it out!
"The Cyborg Imaginaries project has been about how disabled people configure their own socio-technical worlds, but it’s also about how policy will not save us. In my interviews, we really uncovered how the inadequacies and intentional obstructions in policy organize society against disabled life. In my work, I am targeting policy reform in particular. I’m also trying to work with technology researchers to understand how when you do research, particularly in adaptive and assistive technology, and you don’t look at the policy landscape, then that thing you made will probably never wind up in a disabled person’s life. So we work on that problem, but I’ve also always had an eye toward how to get away from the dependency on policy to protect us. Sometimes I view policy as a kind of band-aid on a society that won’t take care of itself. Policy can also be a scaffold that supports a society to organize different ways of relating to each other, and the opposite is also true. Many of the policy workers I interviewed were always anxious about how complaints about inadequacy in their policies could lead to the removal of those policies — and now we see that they’re taking it all away anyway. So now, more than ever, we really have to think about how we can organize outside of this structure."
Conversation with Tawana Petty: https://www.shiftspace.pub/writing/mycelium-is-technology-is-power-is-poetry
Cyborg Imaginaries: https://www.shiftspace.pub/writing/cyborg-realities-cyborg-imaginaries-cyborg-revolutions
Full Issue: https://www.shiftspace.pub/
