ARTICLE

Crip Technoscience Manifesto

Aimi Hamraie
Vanderbilt University
aimi.hamraie@vanderbilt.edu
Kelly Fritsch
Carleton University
kellyfritsch@cunet.carleton.ca

Abstract

As disabled people engaged in disability community, activism, and

scholarship, our collective experiences and histories have taught us that
we are effective agents of world-building and -dismantling toward more
socially just relations. The grounds for social justice and world-remaking,
however, are frictioned; technologies, architectures, and infrastructures
are often designed and implemented without committing to disability as a
difference that matters. This manifesto calls attention to the powerful,
messy, non-innocent, contradictory, and nevertheless crucial work of what
we name as “crip technoscience,” practices of critique, alteration, and
reinvention of our material-discursive world. Disabled people are experts
and designers of everyday life. But we also harness technoscience for
political action, refusing to comply with demands to cure, fix, or eliminate
disability. Attentive to the intersectional workings of power and privilege,
we agitate against independence and productivity as requirements for
existence. Instead, we center technoscientific activism and critical design
practices that foster disability justice.

Hamraie, A., & Fritsch, K. (2019). Crip technoscience manifesto. Catalyst: Feminism,
Theory, Technoscience, 5(1), 1-34.
http://www.catalystjournal.org | ISSN: 2380-3312
© Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch, 2019 | Licensed to the Catalyst Project under a
Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license
Hamraie and Fritsch Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 2

Introduction

As disabled people engaged in disability community, activism, and

scholarship, our collective experiences and histories have taught us that we
are effective agents of world-building and -dismantling toward more socially
just relations. The grounds for social justice and world-remaking, however,
are frictioned; technologies, architectures, and infrastructures are often
designed and implemented without committing to disability as a difference
that matters. This manifesto calls attention to the powerful, messy, non-
innocent, contradictory, and nevertheless crucial work of crip
technoscience: practices of critique, alteration, and reinvention of our
material-discursive world.
Disabled people are experts and designers of everyday life. But we
also harness technoscience for political action, refusing to comply with
demands to cure, fix, or eliminate disability. Attentive to the intersectional
workings of power and privilege, we agitate against independence and
productivity as requirements for existence. Building upon earlier work
defining crip technoscience as politicized design activism (Hamraie, 2015,
2017), we articulate four political commitments of crip technoscience as a
field of critical scholarship, practice, and activism.2 In framing crip
technoscience as such, we follow feminist technoscience studies by
describing both a realm of practice and a field of knowing that has emerged
from it. Crip technoscience braids together two provocative concepts: “crip,”
the non-compliant, anti-assimilationist position that disability is a desirable
part of the world, and “technoscience,” the co-production of science,
technology, and political life (Jasanoff, 2004; Murphy, 2012). Crip theory
centers disability as a locus of resistance against “compulsory
ablebodiedness” (McRuer, 2006) and “ablenationalism” (Mitchell & Snyder,
2015), agitating against liberal assimilation and inclusion practices by
marking disability as a desirably generative and creative relational practice
(Fritsch, 2015a).
We seek to bring crip theory and feminist technoscience into closer
contact, exploring their generative frictions. In some respects, the field of
Hamraie and Fritsch Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 3

disability studies has been entangled with science and technology studies
(STS)—and feminist STS in particular—since its origins, especially through
its critiques of biomedicine and militarism and in its embrace of situated
epistemologies. In naming crip technoscience, we invoke long histories of
feminist, queer, anti-racist, and disability collaborative praxis, such as in
technoscience projects engaging Universal Design, sensory engineering,
reproductive justice, and HIV/AIDS activism.2 However, to date, crip
theorists have had limited engagement with the critical concept of
technoscience, particularly as it is used in feminist STS to mean the
productive and non-innocent entanglement of scientific knowing and
technological making.3 This limited engagement has yielded an ahistorical
position that science, technology, and medicine are anathema to crip world-
remaking, ignoring disabled peoples’ ongoing, creative, and open-ended
appropriations of science, technology, and medicine, particularly in acts of
protest and “epistemic activism” (Hamraie, 2012, 2017, p. 132). Crip
technoscience thus calls forth Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s
concept of “crip science” (2018, p. 69) to highlight the skills, wisdom,
resources, and hacks disabled people utilize for navigating and altering
inaccessible worlds.
In pushing crip technoscience as a field of research and a practice
of critical “knowing-making” (Hamraie, 2017, p. 99), we conjure frictional
practices of access production, acknowledging that science and technology
can be used to both produce and dismantle injustice. As a field of study, crip
technoscience begins from the feminist politics of technoscientific “non-
innocence” (Haraway, 1991), acknowledging that many of the technologies
that have enabled disabled people to gain access to the social world have
been produced through military-industrial research and development,
imperial and colonial relations, and ecological destruction, all of which
contribute to the uneven debilitation of human and non-human life
(Erevelles, 2011; Fritsch, 2015b; Kafer, 2013; Puar, 2017). Nevertheless,
we contend that technoscience can be a transformative tool for disability
justice.
We contrast crip technoscience with mainstream “disability
Hamraie and Fritsch Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 4

technoscience” as a field of traditional expert relations and practices

concerned with designing for disabled people rather than with or by
disabled people. In mainstream disability technoscience, such fixes are
understood as de facto goods, services for (supposedly) unfortunate
disabled people, and ultimately depoliticized. Disability technoscience
positions enhancement and capacitation as progressive moves to
overcome disability. “Hackathons” led by charity organizations embody
innovation-for-innovation’s sake and define disability as a problem in search
of a solution (Wong, 2015a, 2015b). Disabled people are often treated
purely as clients or users. For example, the organization Tikkun Olam
Makers (TOM) describes disabled people as “need knowers” and non-
disabled designers and engineers as “solution experts.” Riffing on the term
special needs, which associates disabled people with minority interests
outside of majority norms, these designations reinforce the division between
disabled people as passive recipients of access or assistive technologies
and non-disabled designers, developers, and technologists as experts.
Disability technoscience reinforces the sense that disabled people
are not already making, hacking, and tinkering with existing material
arrangements. Disability is cast as an object of innovation discourse, rather
than as a driver of technological change. Melanie Yergeau (2014)
historicizes mainstream disability “hacktivism,” arguing that hackathons
have become the “new telethon” in that they frame “disability as pitiable and
in need of remediation.”4 In response, Yergeau invokes “criptastic hacking”
as a “disability-led movement, rather than a series of apps and patches and
fixes designed by non-disabled people who cannot even be bothered to talk
with disabled people.” Criptastic hacking highlights crip technoscience as a
field of relations, knowledges, and practices that enables the flourishing of
crip ways of producing and engaging the material world.
In contrast to dominant forms of knowing-making for disability, we
invoke crip technoscience to describe politicized practices of non-
compliant knowing-making: world-building and world-dismantling practices
by and with disabled people and communities that respond to intersectional
systems of power, privilege, and oppression by working within and around
Hamraie and Fritsch Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 5

them. Within feminist STS, we find a valuable openness to the possibilities

of material production, including feminist hacking and coding (Haraway,
1991), “tactical biopolitics” (Da Costa & Phillip, 2008), and “critical making”
(Ratto & Boler, 2014; Sayers, 2018), practices that push technoscience
beyond the military-industrial into the realms of activist resistance and
world-remaking. This openness manifests in Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg
Manifesto” (1991), which inaugurated a tradition of feminist technoscience
and activism. While acknowledging the non-innocent entanglement of most
technologies with militarism and capitalism, Haraway calls for “modest
witnessing,” simultaneously resisting systems of domination and finding
ways to hack and tinker with them (1997, p. 3). She frames modest
witnessing in terms of “socialist and feminist principles of design” (p. 161),
maker practices that could work “in alliance with anti-military science” (p.
169). Feminist scholars such as Michelle Murphy (2012) have built upon the
work of activist technoscience to describe what Murphy calls “protocols” of
feminist knowing and making. The promise of feminist technoscience lies in
challenging hegemonic narratives about technology as always enframing or
deterministic, and in imagining the transformative possibilities for crip
hacking, coding, and making as frictional access practices.
While critical making is recognized as part of the feminist STS
tradition, disabled peoples’ maker practices have not yet been fully
considered in the radical political history of disability studies. The
capaciousness of feminist technoscience studies emboldens our conviction
that critical technoscience, so much a part of our crip political history and
genealogy, can also provide the discursive tools for embracing disabled
people as experts, makers, and activists resisting mainstream disability
technoscience. We call for crip technoscience scholarship and practice as
modest witness, holding in tension the non-innocence of military-industrial
science, technology, design, and media with the imperatives for disability
justice, accessibility, and world-remaking.
Disabled people design our own tools and environments, whether by
using experiential knowledge to adapt tools for daily use or by engaging in
professional design practices. Crip technoscience conjures long histories of
Hamraie and Fritsch Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 6

daily adaption and tinkering with built environments. We remember the

crucial world-building work of Independent Living activists who learned to
code, repair wheelchairs, and plan cities while refusing to remain
institutionalized. We also invoke disability activism that centers the
remaking of the material world as a central protest tactic, whether by
smashing curb cuts with sledgehammers or pouring curb ramps with bags
of cement (as ADAPT activists have done), by staging direct actions with
mobility devices (as in the case of protesters leaving behind wheelchairs
and crutches to crawl up the steps of the US Capitol Building, or in the case
of Nelia Sargent, a blind woman who chained her power wheelchair to a
nuclear reactor building in 1976 [Giordano, 2013]), or by occupying media
spaces (such as the Jerry Lewis telethon) to contest the rendering of
disabled bodies as defective and in need of a cure (Longmore, 2015). We
invoke the history of disabled resistance to assistive technologies (such as
Audre Lorde’s [1997] refusal to wear a breast prosthesis), as well as to war
and militarism (as in the case of veteran Ron Kovic, who staged a
demonstration at the Republican National Convention, “show[ing] their
solidarity by gripping the arms of each other’s wheelchairs while they are
being pushed by others” [Wolfson, 2014, p. 120]).5 We respect the
leadership of contemporary disability justice movement leaders, such as
Alice Wong (2019) and Vilissa Thompson (2019), whose strategic use of
media technology to challenge dominant narratives about disability (through
the Disability Visibility Project and Ramp Your Voice! websites, Twitter
feeds, and related podcasts) also demonstrates collective power. While crip
technoscience seeks to disrupt ableist and capitalist military-industrial
systems, we also center contemporary liberatory projects for “collective
access” (Mingus, 2010b; Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018). To struggle for a
more accessible future in which disability is anticipated, welcomed, and in
which disabled people thrive, we offer four commitments of crip
technoscience as a field of critical scholarship, practice, and activism.
Hamraie and Fritsch Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 7

Four Commitments of Crip Technoscience

Crip technoscience centers the work of disabled people as

knowers and makers. Crip technoscience privileges disabled people as
designers and world-builders, as knowing what will work best and
developing the skills, capacities, and relationships to make something from
our knowledge. Unlike typical approaches to disability that objectify disabled
people and situate expertise in medical professionals and non-disabled
designers or engineers, crip technoscience posits that disabled people are
active participants in the design of everyday life. Not only do disabled
people make access in our everyday lives in ways that do not get
recognized as design, but the lived experience of disability, and the shared
experience of disability community creates specific expertise and
knowledge that informs technoscientific practices.
We call for greater acknowledgement of the lived experiences and
material design practices of disabled people in the work of technoscientific
intervention. There is a widespread perception that access technologies are
made for us by non-disabled experts, but there is little recognition of our
own practices of remaking the material world. Yet the field of disability
scholarship grew out of activism against rehabilitative models of medical
expertise and intervention (UPIAS, 1976), crafting a materialist politics with
anti-capitalism at its center (Oliver, 1990; Russell, 1998), and continues to
struggle against “compulsory ablebodiedness” (McRuer, 2006). Crip
knowing-making forms the basis of political slogans such as Nothing About
Us Without Us (Charlton, 2000), framing disabled people not just as design
experts but also as epistemic activists whose politicized ways of knowing
the material world also situate us to produce the material conditions that
allow disability to thrive, in addition to remaking how disability is known and
experienced. Without glorifying do-it-yourself design practices, crip
technoscience recognizes that disabled peoples’ world-dismantling and
world-building labors stem from situated experiences of “misfitting” in the
world (Garland-Thomson, 2011). Crips are not merely formed or acted on
by the world—we are engaged agents of remaking.
In centering the expertise of disabled knowers and makers, crip
Hamraie and Fritsch Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 8

technoscience involves the use of materials and technologies to produce

forms of access otherwise unavailable (or economically inaccessible) via
mainstream assistive technology channels. There are many examples of
disability experience as knowing-making, so many creative and ingenious
ways of living in the world. For example, historian Bess Williamson (2012a)
has traced the ways that disabled people in the American postwar period
documented their work as “tinkerers” in community periodicals,
retrospective memoirs, and oral histories. They adapted specialized
medical and assistive equipment, altered their houses, and repurposed
everyday household tools. Disabled people turned away from medical
supply companies to hardware stores to alter objects to their own
advantage, asserting their “presence in a world that largely ignored them”
(Williamson, 2012a, p. 12). Disabled designers such as Alice Loomer
(1982), a wheelchair user, described her crip maker practices of
repurposing household items for wheelchair maintenance or for ad hoc
assistive technologies as “hanging onto the coattails of science.” Loomer
argued that her own tinkering and maintenance practices “kept [her] away
from nursing homes and attendants”: “I made it. So I know how to fix it…I
may have failed as often as I succeeded, but I have equipment that fits me”
(p. 30-31). Loomer’s work complicates the typical association of the
disabled cyborg with a desire for innovation, instead turning to maintenance
practices as sites for examining the “frictions, limitations, and failures
inherent to technoscientific design processes” (Hamraie, 2017, p. 107).
Similarly, in the 1960s, disabled engineer Ralf Hotchkiss hacked his
wheelchair to plow snow off sidewalks while attending Oberlin College, and
in the 1980s began the Whirlwind Wheelchair International, when his global
travels to find better designs for wheelchairs took him to Nicaragua:
I met these four young fellows sharing one wheelchair, and they had
already redesigned that wheelchair. They had ridden it so hard that
it had broken in 20 different places. They had reinforced it, welded it
all back together, and made it much stronger than it had been. And
they knew so much about good wheelchair design. It was clear they
were the people I was looking for to help me, and I could help them
Hamraie and Fritsch Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 9

as well, so we’ve been working together ever since. (Hotchkiss,

2011)
While wheelchair users are not often treated as engineers, the four disabled
designers had become experts in wheelchair engineering through trial and
error and ingenuity, an ethos that continues in Whirlwind Wheelchair
International’s low-cost, open-source wheelchairs, which are intended to be
maintainable for a lifetime, enabling a broader range of people to access
them.
More recently, designer Sara Hendren and anthropologist Caitrin
Lynch’s (2016) project Engineering at Home has called attention to the ad
hoc design practices of “Cindy,” a recently disabled woman with several
amputations. While Cindy “received the best available ‘rehabilitation
engineering’ technology that money can buy,” she nevertheless “found she
had little use for it,” opting instead to use tools of her own design (Hendren
& Lynch, 2016). Hendren and Lynch frame Cindy’s work as “user-initiated
design,” which can “yield a powerful course correction to the top-down
modes of manufacturing.” Another disabled designer, Sarah Welner, began
her career as an obstetric surgeon before focusing on gynecological health
for disabled people. Recognizing that “conventional examining tables are
too high and narrow” for disabled women, particularly wheelchair users,
Welner designed a table with a button-operated “hydraulic lift” and more
comfortable foot rests (Waldman, 1998). While the engineering and design
professions have historically excluded women, Welner, Loomer, and
Cindy’s work are clear examples of the places where crip technoscience
and feminist design practices meet. Gender and disability expertise diffract
through one another to question dominant modes of knowing and making.
Disabled parents have also been agents of crip knowing-making.
Disabled parents hack baby cribs and change tables, sew bells on children’s
clothing to enable blind parents to keep track of their children when moving
through public spaces, and mount car seats on portable luggage carriers to
enable blind parents who use white canes or have a guide dog to pull their
child behind them with their free hand (Fritsch, 2017). Wheelchair users
adapt slings, wraps, and nursing pillows to carry babies and toddlers on
Hamraie and Fritsch Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 10

their laps. Other parents invent various tools to help feed and bathe their
children, get them dressed, do their laundry, put on shoes, zip up coats, and
engage in play. Queer, gender non-conforming, and trans disabled people
also hack and tinker with reproductive technologies and kin formation to
become pregnant, gestate, chest feed, and share responsibilities. All these
forms of knowing-making are shared on social media (such as with the
Disabled Parenting Project’s website, blog, Twitter feeds, and related video
projects), through disability community publications and events, and during
conversations at parks and playgrounds. While disabled people face a
multitude of barriers to becoming parents, disabled parents hack, tinker, and
alter our material-discursive world, creating crip communities of knowing
and making that challenges normative assumptions about parenting as a
non-expert consumer activity.
Crip technoscience is committed to access as friction. Emerging
out of historical fights for disability rights, the terms accessibility and access
are usually taken to mean disabled inclusion and assimilation into normative
able-bodied relations and built environments. When viewed as synonymous
with inclusion and assimilation, access and accessibility are treated as self-
evident goods.6 As Kelly Fritsch explains, however, the etymology of the
word access reveals two frictional meanings: access as “an opportunity
enabling contact,” as well as “a kind of attack” (2016, p. 23). Taking access
as a kind of attack reveals access-making as a site of political friction and
contestation. While historically central to the fights for disability access, crip
technoscience is nevertheless committed to pushing beyond liberal and
assimilation-based approaches to accessibility, which emphasize inclusion
in mainstream society, to pursue access as friction, particularly paying
attention to access-making as disabled peoples’ acts of non-compliance
and protest. For example, before enforceable disability rights laws in the
United States, disabled people took direct action to create ramps and curb
cuts, making obvious the inaccessibility of the built environment. Disability
activists have taken sledgehammers to sidewalks in acts of protest, using
bags of cement to pour curb cuts, and have used the design of curb cuts
and ramps (conceived as levers for facilitating participation) as sites of
Hamraie and Fritsch Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 11

productive friction through which interdependence-based disability politics

could arise (Hamraie, 2017, p. 99-102).
The Independent Living movement has also used material
experimentation to enact crip technoscience and access friction. While the
movement was critical of rehabilitation as a field of expert knowledge, it did
not refuse the language or tools of rehabilitation outright. In addition to
appropriating the term Independent Living to promote a disability politics of
interdependence, the movement understood technoscience as a site of
politicized resistance and regularly used hacking and tinkering practices as
the basis of disability organizing. Many of their methods are captured in
designers Ray Lifchez and Barbara Winslow’s book Design for Independent
Living, produced in collaboration with the movement. The book reveals the
everyday technological hacks that disabled people in Berkeley in the 1960s
and 1970s developed to thrive in an inaccessible city. Emblematic of the
movement’s crip technoscience ethos, Lifchez and Winslow offer the
concept of “non-compliant users,” illustrating this with an image of a
powerchair user wheeling against traffic on a street without curb cuts (1979,
p. 153). This technology-enabled movement against the flow of traffic marks
anti-assimilationist crip mobility: not an attempt to integrate (as in the liberal
approach to disability rights), but rather to use technology as a friction
against an inaccessible environment.
More recently, Toronto resident Luke Anderson was frustrated by the
lack of wheelchair access he experienced on a daily basis. Trained as a
structural engineer, Anderson designed a simple portable wooden ramp in
2011 stenciled with the URL “stopgap.ca” and gifted thirteen of these ramps
to businesses in his neighborhood. Built as a temporary “stop gap” measure
to improve accessibility, the ramps are a non-compliant technology; they are
not intended to be a permanent solution or structure, do not have to follow
building codes, and do not require a city building permit or variance, all of
which can be expensive and difficult to obtain. Anderson’s experiment took
off, leading to the formation of the StopGap Foundation and the Community
Ramp project, which has now distributed over 1,200 portable wooden ramps
worldwide (Fritsch, in press).
Hamraie and Fritsch Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 12

In another contemporary example of access as friction, Collin

Kennedy, a cancer patient in Winnipeg, Manitoba, protested hospital
parking prices by filling the pay-slot on a parking meter with spray foam,
telling the local news that he planned to continue doing so “until changes
are made” (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation [CBC], 2016). When crip
time came into friction with the hospital’s parking meter time, Kennedy
challenged health capitalism: “You should be able to come here, park, get
your treatment, however long that treatment takes…This is a medical facility
where people are not going for entertainment. They’re not going for
productivity and commerce. We’re here because of life and death” (CBC,
2016). Kennedy’s activism—the use of spray foam to obstruct the parking
meter—creates frictional access through attacking a technology of capitalist
time and contests the commercialization of health care.
Crip technoscience is committed to interdependence as
political technology. We position the crip politics of interdependence as a
technoscientific phenomenon, the weaving of relational circuits between
bodies, environments, and tools to create non-innocent, frictional access.
Mainstream disability technoscience presumes disability as an individual
experience of impairment rather than a collective political experience of
world-building and dismantling. This perception has two primary
consequences. First, disabled people are perceived as dependent and the
goal of technoscience becomes to encourage independence. Second,
disability and technology are both perceived as apolitical and stable
phenomena, rather than material-discursive entanglements that take shape
through struggle, negotiation, and creativity.
The crip analytic of interdependence helps us understand how
technoscience can simultaneously be entangled with global networks of
domination and also provide opportunities for kinship and connection.
Donna Haraway’s (1991) cyborg figure, for instance, has been taken as a
material metaphor for the entanglement of nature and techno-cultures. This
figure has shaped the critical concept of technoscience by showing the
networks of knowledge and material production that comprise global
capitalism as a force organizing relations between bodies, technologies,
Hamraie and Fritsch Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 13

and environments. Disability critics of the cyborg figure, however, argue that
Haraway’s approach to the cyborg takes for granted that disabled people
easily meld into technological circuits, an assumption shaped by
imperatives for rehabilitation, cure, independence, and productivity. As
Alison Kafer (2013) demonstrates, the imagination of disability in feminist
technoscience is often limited to either eugenicist ideals of a disability-free
future or to “depoliticized” ideals of the cyborg hybrid body (p. 8-10);
disability is either a “master trope of human disqualification” (Snyder &
Mitchell, 2006, p. 125) or a “seamless” integration of body and machine
(Kafer, 2013, p. 105). Frequently, feminist technoscience conflates “‘cyborg’
and ‘physically disabled person’” (p. 105), treating disabled people as “post-
human paragons” (Allan, 2013, p. 11). Even when taken up critically, the
cyborg figure in feminist technoscience reinforces ideas about disability as
lack and disqualification (Bailey, 2012).
If, as Kafer argues, disabled people have often uneasy or
“ambivalent relationship[s] to technology” (2013, p. 119), our practices of
interdependence, access intimacy, and collective access can be
understood as alternative political technologies: “disabled people,” she
writes, “[are not] cyborgs…because of our bodies (e.g., our use of
prosthetics, ventilators, or attendants), but because of our political
practices” (p. 120). Crip technoscience offers interdependence as a central
analytic for disability–technology relations, recognizing that in disability
culture, community, and knower-maker practices, interdependence acts as
a political technology for materializing better worlds. In alliance with Moya
Bailey and Whitney Peoples’s call for “black feminist health science
studies,” crip technoscience is “suspicious of the individualism and siloing
practices rewarded in the academy and see[s] collaboration and
interdisciplinary as core” values that ought to guide intellectual and material
production (Bailey & Peoples, 2017, p. 18). These values extend beyond
the academy, however. As disability justice activist Mia Mingus (2010a)
writes, interdependence offers a politics of crip alliance and solidarity: “It is
truly moving together in an oppressive world towards liberation….It is
working in coalition and collaboration.” We call for crip technoscience to
Hamraie and Fritsch Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 14

design for collective access and disability justice.

We find interdependence as a political technology throughout the
history of disability activism. For example, in North American disability
activist histories, the most frequently narrated of these is the story of the
“504 protest,” which took place in 1977 when disability activists in Berkeley,
California, occupied the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to
protest for the enforcement of section 504 of the Federal Rehabilitation Act,
a law that mandated accessible federal programs, spaces, and services.
Activists in the Independent Living movement had sought to foster a “cross-
disability consciousness” across mobility-disabled, blind, and Deaf people
(Zukas, 2000, p. 141). At the protest, they transformed this consciousness
into a political technology, using ASL to communicate with the outside when
phone lines were cut off, rigging an air conditioner from other mechanical
parts in the building, and establishing networks of care (O’Toole, 2000, p.
47). Similar narratives have been told about the birth of Autistic community
through organizing made possible by the internet and Autistic-accessible
conference spaces (Sinclair, 2010) and are currently being written through
new crip technoscience projects (such as those highlighted in the Critical
Commentary section of this issue). These and other material practices
describe a crip technoscientific sensibility wherein disabled
interdependence also enables what Mingus (2017) calls “access intimacy,”
a crip relational practice produced when interdependence informs the
making of access.
Crip technoscience also plays with the boundaries of trust,
interdependence, and crip relations. Blind artist Carmen Papalia, for
instance, stages crip uses of technology in public space. In one practice,
Papalia uses a twenty-foot white cane on busy streets to create a sense of
antagonism with other pedestrians, which renders access as a frictioned
practice; in another, called “Blind Field Shuttle,” Papalia leads groups of
(sighted) people on walks with their eyes closed. Both practices make use
of a technology—Papalia’s white cane—to stage social interactions in public
space that put ideas of independence into question (Papalia, 2013).
Also drawing on crip political interdependence, Georgina Kleege and
Hamraie and Fritsch Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 15

Scott Wallin’s (2015) practice of “participatory description” compels narrated

visual content through group-based methods. Unlike the traditional role of
audio description “as a detached, neutral act of translation that functions
only as an enabling accommodation,” participatory description uses
technoscientific modes, including internet video databases, to “explore the
aesthetic, ideological, political and ethical underpinnings of this work of
representation and its described object or event.”
Participatory audio description has also influenced the emergence of
new technoscientific tools for accessibility mapping projects. Blind designer
Josh Miele, for instance, worked with Touch Graphics, Inc. to design tactile
and audio maps of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. Other projects use
mapping for collective access. Unlike mainstream disability technoscience
“crowdsourcing” projects, which invoke a charity model of disability wherein
non-disabled people collect data but do not engage in disability culture or
politics, emerging projects such as Mapping Access are making
participatory access-making the basis of a kind of technoscientific “access
intimacy” (Mingus, 2017) through practices such as “critical crowdsourcing”
of accessibility data (Hamraie, 2018). Rather than simply creating functional
maps, Mapping Access focuses on mapping as a tool for producing critical
relations between bodies, environments, and technologies. At collective
map-a-thons, the project enrolls disabled and non-disabled data collectors
in the process of interrogating the messiness of access-making in
institutional conditions and describing these conditions collectively. Critical
crowdsourcing practices include enrolling large numbers of both disabled
and non-disabled people to collaborate on surveying and describing
building accessibility while simultaneously identifying the aspects of the
Americans with Disabilities Act compliance that fail to consider the lived
experience of accessibility. Collaborative mapping visualizes the evidence
of inaccessibility while creating opportunities for collective response. Crip
cartographic technoscience thus enables more critical design, and
interrogation of the everyday built environment.
Our call for crip technoscience theory and practice holds in tension
Kafer’s crip politics of interdependence with the crip ambivalence toward
Hamraie and Fritsch Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 16

technology. We follow Kafer by calling on the usefulness of the cyborg (and

the technoscientific circuits it embodies) not as a disabled figure per se, but
as a tool for “stag[ing] our own blasphemous interventions in feminist
theory” (Kafer, 2013, p. 106). Crip technoscience borrows the tools of
feminist hacking and coding to blaspheme against liberal theories of
disability rights and rehabilitation imperatives, as well as against the
technological essentialisms of disability scholarship. While disability
technoscience is often deployed for unwanted cures or enhancements, we
contend that it can also be cripped, reclaimed, hacked, and tinkered with to
create a more accessible world.
Crip technoscience is committed to disability justice. Crip
technoscience aligns with the disability justice movement, with its critique
of mainstream disability rights concepts, and its focus on intersectionality,
collective liberation, and wholeness. Crip technoscience emphasizes that
disabled people are not mere consumers of, or objects for, assimilationist
technologies, but instead have agential, politicized, and transformative
relationships to technoscience. We note that (as a matter of disability
justice) disabled people often reject devices that cause pain or lead to
infections, refuse pharmaceutical drugs with undesirable effects, discard
technologies produced solely to make non-disabled people more
comfortable (rather than to make life easier for disabled people),
problematize expensive tools crafted by the medical and military-industrial
complex, and instead demand more public, widespread forms of access.
These critiques and practices align crip technoscience with impurity
(Shotwell, 2016), embracing the ugly (Mingus, 2011), and staying with the
trouble (Haraway, 2016).
While we write from our position as English-speaking, North
American, settler and immigrant scholars and makers, we commit to crip
technoscience that centers the leadership of those most impacted, including
the expertise of black, brown, and Indigenous disabled people. We call for
a crip technoscience that disrupts the entitlements of whiteness and
colonialism in designed spaces and highlights access as a frictioned project
requiring decolonization and racial justice. We imagine disability justice-
Hamraie and Fritsch Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 17

informed crip technoscience as building upon projects such as “Open in

Case of Emergency,” a 2017 issue of the Asian American Literary Review
edited by Mimi Khuc, which uses print culture, images, and symbolic
imaginaries to hack the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). This
interactive project draws upon familiar technoscientific objects (such as the
DSM), as well as poetry, tarot, and hacked science, to work through Asian
American intergenerational trauma and displacement. We also imagine crip
technoscience allying with emerging work in feminist of color
technoscience, such as a recent Catalyst “Lab Meeting” on Black Lives
Matter and pedagogy that describes possibilities for extending critical ideas
about race, intersectionality, and the environmental construction of health
to rehabilitation, immunology, and mental disability (Pollock & Roy, 2017).
Crip technoscience is not only in alliance with these projects, but takes the
position that they ought to be central to how we imagine accessible futures.
In committing to disability justice, crip technoscience explicitly
engages the tensions that arise out of taking disabled bodies to be whole,
railing against the ways that we are assumed to be damaged, tragic, or in
need of cure. To approach disabled bodies by way of wholeness marks the
importance of collective, relational, and interdependent approaches to
disability. Following Eli Clare, we crip wholeness to include “that which is
collapsed, crushed, or shattered” (2017, p. 158), emphasizing that whole
and broken are not opposites but rather can be held in productive tension.
Following a disability justice framework, marking disabled people as whole
is to “value our people as they are, for who they are, and understand that
people have inherent worth outside of capitalist notions of productivity”
(Berne & Sins Invalid, 2016, p. 17). Taking up wholeness in this way also
addresses the complexity of wanting to both accept disabled bodies as they
are while simultaneously desiring to hack, tweak, and otherwise engage and
alter our relationships to our bodies and technology. As Clare asks, “How
can I reconcile my lifelong struggle to love my disabled self exactly as it is
with my use of medical technology to reshape my gendered and sexed
body-mind?” (2017, p. 175). Crip technoscience embraces this
contradiction, making space for critically engaging technological
Hamraie and Fritsch Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 18

intervention while maintaining that such interventions are not compulsory.

We find inspiration for crip technoscience and disability justice within
what Alice Sheppard (2019) calls “cultural-aesthetic technoscience,”
particularly the ways that disability artistry, performance, and media explore
the complexities of wholeness, seeking neither to overcome disability nor
lapsing into a celebration of individual difference in and of itself. For
example, Sins Invalid, a performance collective led by queer and disabled
people of color, uses live and video performances, along with publications,
to convey alternatives to disability rights perspectives centered on
assimilation. In their performances, which feature people who use assistive
devices such as canes, power wheelchairs, and crutches, Deaf people,
amputees, and people with non-apparent disabilities, “normative paradigms
of ‘normal’ and ‘sexy’ are challenged, offering instead a vision of beauty and
sexuality inclusive of all individuals and communities” (Sins Invalid, 2018).
In their publication Skin, Tooth, and Bone (2016), the collective outlines a
framework for disability justice organizing that draws on performance and
activist work made possible through technology.
Similarly, the Canadian disability arts organization Collaborative
Radically Integrated Performers Society in Edmonton (CRIPSiE, 2018)
challenges “dominant stories of disability and other forms of oppression,
through high-quality crip and mad performance art, video art, and public
education and outreach programs” that “celebrate the generative
possibilities of ‘disability’ and ‘mental illness,’ in terms of how these
experiences can offer important alternative perspectives.” In the dance-
based video-art project Other-wise, Danielle Peers and Lindsey Eales
(2013) explore themes of interdependency, access, and wholeness,
speaking the movements of their dance as Peers’s and Eales’s bodies move
toward and away from each other, limbs entangling over and around Peers’s
wheelchair: “Lifts. Supports. Draws me out and pulls me in. Connects…We
are the chair…We will not overcome, but we are becoming.” Performative
uses of technology transform the meaning of functional technology from
rehabilitative or adaptive to cultural.
Another site of crip technoscience world-remaking is disability
Hamraie and Fritsch Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 19

fashion. For example, Chun-Shan Sandie Yi’s Crip Couture project (2017)
creates wearable art, tailor-made prosthetics, and orthotics to highlight
difference and disability. Yi works with unconventional materials, including
skin and hair, to engage the contradictions of disability wholeness. Designer
James Shutt’s Myostomy project likewise offers lingerie-inspired stoma
plugs for colostomy bag users, as well as body art products that aestheticize
the stoma (London, 2012). Like Yi’s work, these interventions transform the
typical understanding of assistive technology, rendering it as crip fashion,
art, and culture.
Crip media production is also a tool for producing new
representations of disability that challenge disability technoscience
discourses. For example, disabled artist Sue Austin developed a wheelchair
that allows her to dive underwater. Documenting these experiences in the
ocean’s depths, surrounded by blue water and oceanic creatures, Austin
highlights the joy and freedom of “revisioning the familiar” (2012) by using
a wheelchair to negotiate unexpected worlds. Appearing in the disability and
technology documentary Fixed (2014) directed by Regan Brashear, Austin’s
work offers ways of “seeing, being, and knowing” with disability that affirms
crip world-remaking (Austin, 2012).
In the digital age, YouTube and other online services have become
tools for distributing disability justice content. Autistic activist Mel Baggs’s
manifesto, “In My Language” (2007) (viewed over 1.5 million times as of this
writing), uses video and sound to make a strong case for the dignity and
personhood of Autistic people. In a series of clips, Baggs makes sounds,
touches objects, and uses their body to move through space. Later, Baggs
shows the same clips with a computer-generated voiceover explaining that
moving and feeling are a language. Because “the way [Baggs] naturally
thinks and responds to things looks and feels so different from standard
concepts,” “some people do not consider it thought at all, but it is a way of
thinking in its own right.” Instead, Baggs advocates for the agency and
power of Autistic people, particularly non-speaking people, who are often
excluded from mainstream disability narratives.
While recognizing the inequitable ways in which many people come
Hamraie and Fritsch Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 20

to disability, crip technoscience claims disabled life as desirable life, as life

worth living, and as a difference that matters. Disability rights often
foreground a pride-centered framework without acknowledging the
relationships between pride and “the violence of social/economic conditions
of capitalism” (Erevelles, 2011, p. 17). Crip technoscience acknowledges
that that pride-centric frameworks may make it “difficult to acknowledge the
overwhelming suffering that results from colonisation, war, famine, and
poverty” (Meekosha, 2011, p. 677), such that it becomes crucial to reject
“the ways in which disability is presently employed as a mechanism for
oppression in the global context” (Jaffee, 2016, p. 118). Within such
contexts, “positive re-envisionings of disability” are not always politically
salient (Puar, 2017, p. xix). Building on disability justice, however, crip
technoscience centers the transformative role of disabled people in both
technoscientific and activist conditions to both build and dismantle the world
toward more just social relations, which includes engaging the “specific
sensibilities and discourses” (Ben-Moshe, 2018) that disability culture offers
to refute disability “as a vector of social control” or “a weapon of debilitation”
(Fritsch & McGuire, in press). Following Clare, we ask, “how do we witness,
name, and resist the injustices that reshape and damage all kinds of body-
minds—plant and animal, organic and inorganic, nonhuman and human—
while not equating disability with injustice?” (2017, p. 56). This question
acknowledges the messiness of access-making in conditions shaped by
colonialism, militarism, and injustice, but also asks us to go further and
locate the conditions and transformative power of crip knowing-making
under these systems.
Disabled people use technoscience to survive and alter the very
systems that produce disability or attempt to render us as broken. Take the
example of Safwan Harb, a disabled Syrian refugee with two disabled family
members (British Broadcasting Corporation [BBC], 2016). While living in a
refugee camp, Harb designed an accessible scooter using found materials,
which enabled him and other family members to navigate the camp’s
unpaved streets. Harb’s invention signifies crip knowing-making in spaces
produced through war and displacement. Mobility, in this context, is not a
Hamraie and Fritsch Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 21

tool for reinforcing ablenationalism, productivity, or even rights. But Harb’s

invention is an outcome of a design process enacted through crip
experience. Crip technoscience recognizes the non-innocent contexts in
which knowledge and access emerge. In some cases, crip technoscience
may be an individual knowing and making that reorients the material world.
In others, it may be collective, politicized work toward interdependence and
justice. Building on Haraway, we offer crip technoscience as a critical project
that holds in tension the unjust imperatives of technoscientific innovation
with the transformative capacities to shape matter and meaning through
praxis. The point is not to achieve ideological purity outside of mainstream
disability technoscience, militarism, or capitalism, but to locate and center
threads of resistance already occurring within and against these systems.
As technoscience expands beyond Cold War–era emphases on
militarism to include conditions often deemed innocent or uncontroversial
(such as sustainability), disabled people are often caught between
imperatives to save resources and enable access (a conflict most recently
highlighted by the #StrawBan debate discussed in Alice Wong’s piece in
this issue). But crip technoscience can offer us a sensibility and set of
practices for responding to collective problems such as climate change and
pollution. Not only do disabled people act as experts and designers in
matters of how to reduce single-use plastics such as straws, but we can
also draw on our community-generated accessibility and Universal Design
practices to shape responses to the Anthropocene. For example, recent
studies estimate that volatile organic chemicals (VOCs) in fragranced
beauty products and aerosol sprays produce more C02 emissions than cars
(McDonald et al., 2018). Disabled people with chemical sensitivities or
injuries have long advocated for fragrance-free spaces to avoid migraines,
brain fog, and illness, in addition to calling for reduced industrial pollution.
Activists such as Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) have not only offered
education about fragrance accessibility, but also hacked the production of
fragrance-free products. Following Piepzna-Samarasinha, who describes
accessibility as an “act of love” (2018, p. 74), crip technoscience imagines
the hacking of non-harmful resource use as an act of planetary love through
Hamraie and Fritsch Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 22

which accessibility for marginalized disabled and chemically injured people

can also mitigate chemical harm toward the atmosphere and oceans. These
opportunities for hacking and tinkering with pervasive practices such as
VOC use also show us that crip expertise and ingenuity need not rely on
disability pride narratives to challenge global conditions harming human and
non-human life. In drawing on disability justice principles, crip
technoscience agitates against compulsory ablebodiedness and
ablenationalism, and mandates for independence and productivity. It works
on multiple scales—from the most basic everyday hacks to organized
efforts toward collective access—to materialize accessible futures as those
in which bodies need not be perceived as productive, legible, articulate, or
beautiful to be understood as important agents of world remaking.

Conclusion

Crip technoscience spans historical and contemporary design practices,

political activism, scholarly alliances, global systems, and micro-scale
resistances. We call for crip technoscience practices that challenge the
political economy of technology, particularly as it is ensnared within
injustices perpetrated by imperatives to fix, cure, or eliminate disability.
Crip technoscience struggles for futures in which disability is
anticipated and welcomed, and in which all disabled people thrive,
regardless of their productivity. By endorsing accessible futures, we refuse
to treat access as an issue of technical compliance or rehabilitation, as a
simple technological fix, or a checklist. Instead, we define access as
collective, messy, experimental, frictional, and generative. Accessible
futures require our interdependence.
We center technoscientific activism and critical design practices
rooted in disability justice, collective access, and collective transformation
toward more socially just disability relations. We call for activists, scholars,
and makers to expand possible futures for disabled people. We find crip
knowing-making in the design and implementation of architectures,
technologies, and infrastructures. We seek broad recognition for, and
Hamraie and Fritsch Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 23

engagement with, the world-building and -dismantling force of crip

technoscience.

Notes
1 Earlier work defined crip technoscience as “experimental practices of
knowing-making [that] challenged hierarchies and power relations…by
shifting expertise to those with lived experiences of disability and away
from the outside experts often designing in their name” (Hamraie, 2017, p.
99) and “technoscientific practices…that politicize disabled people’s
relationships to technologies produced by the military or pharmaceutical
companies, while valuing the technoscientific activism that has
characterized disability rights history” (Hamraie, 2015, p. 309).

2 Liberation technoscience projects have included Black Panther health

activism (see Nelson, 2013); feminist reproductive technoscience (see
Murphy, 2012); ACT UP protests against the US Food and Drug
Administration (see Epstein, 1996); and the Independent Living
movement’s accessibility activism (see Williamson, 2012a, 2012b). Crip
technoscience connects to historical activism and scholarship while
offering a politicized, anti-assimilationist lens for understanding disability in
relation to technology.

3 There are, of course, also histories of engagement between disability

studies (particularly scholarship on embodiment and culture) and critical
approaches to science, technology, and medicine. See Casper and
Koenig (1996); Mills (2011); Ott, Serlin, & Mihm (2002); Sobchack (2006);
and Sterne (2001). However, we concur with Stuart Blume, Vasilis Galis,
and Andrés Valderrama Pineda, who write, “The challenging questions
that disability raises for STS go beyond those relating to the politics of
technological change to include questions relating to knowing, to
knowledge production, and in particular to embodiment” (2013, p. 102).
Crip technoscience turns to these questions of knowing, making, and
doing.

4“New telethon” references the rehabilitation-centered media events

hosted by the late Jerry Lewis that have been widely contested by
disability activists and scholars. See Longmore (2015).

5 Veteran activism has frequently involved mobility devices. In the 1978

film Coming Home, a paralyzed veteran chained himself and his
Hamraie and Fritsch Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 24

wheelchair to the front gates of a military base in protest of the war and
high rates of veteran suicide. While depicting a radical disability protest,
however, the opening screening of the film was held at an inaccessible
theater in San Francisco. In response, disability activists chained
themselves to the front of the building in protest (Linton, 2007). Similar
tactics were used in anti-war and anti-nuclear protests in the 1970s and
1980s (A. Finger, personal communication, 2018) and in protest of the
War on Terror (Ollis, 2012). Most recently, ADAPT activists in the United
States have used their mobility and assistive devices to protest cuts to
healthcare, staging “die-ins” at US Senate Healthcare policy deliberation
meetings (McBride, 2017).

6 As disability justice activists point out, disability rights approaches are

often focused on assimilation into middle-class, white, productive,
heteronormative norms. Additionally, disability rights are often enforced
through “accommodations” that integrate disabled people into mainstream
society using standardized formulas and checklists. We find this focus on
accommodation to be depoliticizing. Crip technoscience pivots instead on
friction and protest as accessible world-making.

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Bios

Aimi Hamraie is Assistant Professor of Medicine, Health, & Society and

American Studies at Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN). Their
interdisciplinary research spans disability and feminist theory, architecture
and design, and science and technology studies. Hamraie is the author of
Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (University
of Minnesota Press, 2017). Hamraie also directs the Critical Design Lab, a
multi-institution project focused on disability, design justice, and the
lifeworld.

Kelly Fritsch is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology

and Anthropology at Carleton University in Algonquin Territory (Ottawa,
Canada). Her research broadly engages crip, queer, and feminist theory to
Hamraie and Fritsch Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5(1) 33

explore the relations of disability, health, technology, risk, accessibility, and

social justice. She is co-editor of Keywords for Radicals: The Contested
Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle (2016, AK Press) and was a 2015-
2018 Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Women & Gender Studies
Institute, University of Toronto.