There’s something rotten in tech research. When disabled people are included, we are too often positioned as human test subjects or test pilots. Gadgets and diseases and procedures are literally named after scientists and engineers who “discover” and categorize us, and seek “solutions” for our lives. Nearly all media about disability and technology centers nondisabled people as helpers and disabled people as the helped, and it focuses typically on one disability type to the exclusion of others (though most disabled people are multiply disabled). It’s nearly impossible for disabled people to receive proper credit for the creativity, invention, and value they add to this sector. When disabled expertise is not considered legitimate knowledge within technology research, we produce technologies that do not actually address the needs of disabled communities, and we reify the idea that disabled people are passive objects of design. But disabled people are makers and tinkerers, and our unpaid and unsung creation and guidance (and haranguing) make things and make things good. 

This panel features different members of the Disability Community Technology (DisCoTec) Consulting – a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for 2023-2025 (PI: Ashley Shew). With this funding, we are able to pay disabled community members consultant rates for their expertise in advising, asking questions, and providing feedback on research projects. We are attempting to give more equal weight to disabled community expertise and to value cross-disability conversation. We do this by consulting in cross-disability groups – no lone disabled person, individual human subject, or lone test pilot talked over by experts or with their opinions disregarded as unrepresentative. We move together, in the spirit of disability justice, and community conversations are built into our process. This community conversation is part of that process too.

In this panel, we have researchers whose projects have received consultation from our disabled consultants (Kersh Afsari), graduate assistants on the project who have helped set up our sessions (Venus Azamnia and Oliver Shuey), and a few of our consultants drawn from the community in a discussion (Connie McCormack and Annabelle Fuselier). We will talk about our experiences over different consulting sessions, what worked and what didn’t work, and ideas about participatory research that truly allows for disabled expertise and epistemic justice. We will be moderated by PhD student Lyndon Frommer.