Skepticism with/in/as Crip Technoscience: Disabilities and Technologies

Kim Fernandes (they/them/theirs)
Kim Fernandes is a researcher, writer and educator interested in disability, data and technology in urban India. They are currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Fernandes holds a joint Ph.D. with Distinction in Anthropology & Interdisciplinary Studies in Human Development in 2024. Their recent work has been funded by the Social Science Research Council and the Taraknath Das Foundation’s Marion Jemmott Fellowship. Fernandes also holds an M.S.Ed. from the University of Pennsylvania, an Ed.M. in International Education Policy from Harvard University, and a B.S.F.S. (honors) in International Politics from Georgetown University.
 

Abstract: Where and how might we place skepticism in understanding what technology does to/for disability, and vice versa? This reflection attends to disability as cultural production through technology (assistive and otherwise) with the intention to locate both productive and difficult tensions in how we come to think of what technology is "good" for. Beginning with an attention to the assumptions that often shape the development of new technologies in the popular cultural imagination, this reflection will then move to a meditation on the role of skepticism within the praxis of crip technoscience. In asking how disabled people and communities respond to technoscientific advances, the reflection also attends to how and where (else) we might make meaning of narratives of progress.

For the video recording of this presentation, please see the online symposia recordings page.

Where – and when, and how - does disability come to count? In this provocation, I think with what technology does to and for disability, particularly in relation to the question of counting and being counted. Materially, over the last few years, as an anthropologist, I have thought about this question from urban India as a geographical site. In India, disability is most frequently quantified as a percentage, one that appears on an individual’s government-issued disability certificate or unique disability ID (UDID) card. So, as an example, your disability percentage on government documentation might indicate that you are 40% blind, or 60% deaf, or other such markers. Today, in thinking about certification as a technology, I draw from my first project, Quantifying the Body: Disability, Data and Governance in Urban India, which attends to the often-intertwined processes of identifying and enumerating disability. Most recently, the UDID card has been widely hailed as a technology of identification and enumeration that simplifies and makes more transparent the state’s endeavor to make disability count, or, put more simply, a technology for “good.” So in this provocation, I look at what this technology of quantifying the body is good for. And although I think most extensively with India, the contours of state attempts at quantifying disability (whether as a percentage or another kind of number) are likely not unfamiliar to those of you thinking alongside me today from many other corners of the world, where the measurement process can look somewhat similar but also feel very different.

I often think about the ways that numbers follow us through the world, particularly ones like a disability percentage. Many of you are probably wondering, too, what it means to have a disability percentage, to come to inhabit a number assigned on the basis of static ideas about impairment and functioning. When I first began research on the process of disability certification, I spoke with many disabled people who detailed for me what it was like to make their everyday experiences legible as a percentage. During these conversations, I also noticed that several people introduced themselves as the percentage when talking about their disability(/ies), telling me not only what their disabilities were, but also what percentage disabled they’d been medically evaluated to be.

My first instinct across these conversations was to think of the percentage as something that one might wholeheartedly reject, in no small part because I was curious about how a person could stay at a fixed percentage of disability across days and months, especially when so much about being disabled – and living as such – depends on the environment. However, as I sat with (and bristled against) the question of the percentage both as a number and as a means through which disabled people had learnt to make themselves legible to the state, I noticed that there was a significant amount of negotiation that went into determining the percentage. Rather than it being assigned – and experienced – solely as a one-way determination of disability, in more conversations than I can count, I heard people tell me about the kinds of work that went into making oneself legible in the eyes of the state. This work (which, as so many of us know, is enormous) is the kind that disabled people often undertake from a place of skepticism, rather than of wholesale acceptance of being handed a measurement. 

I want to stay with the idea of the percentage as a negotiation, a contestation, for the remainder of this provocation. I do so because there is a peculiarity in how a numerical category assigned by medical and bureaucratic experts can come to have several differing, dynamic meanings. Numbers, after all, and percentages especially, are not thought of at face value as indicative of unresolved spaces – to refer to something as 35% of something else is to understand it as a ratio expressed as a fraction or a part per hundred. I then began to think more closely about what it means for a disability percentage to be understood as a dynamic form of identification, and by extension, a shifting category of citizenship, even when the process of certification aims to establish numerical certainty in belonging to this category. I thought about this question through a wide range of lenses, but today, I want to stay with a single piece for the remainder of our time together.

In their foundational text, “Crip Technoscience Manifesto,” Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch define crip technoscience as “a field of critical scholarship, practice and activism…[that] 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)” (Hamraie and Fritsh 2019, 2). They outline four commitments of crip technoscience as a means through which to “struggle for a more accessible future in which disability is anticipated, welcomed, and in which disabled people thrive” (Hamraie and Fritsch 2019, 6). These commitments include a centering of the work that disabled people do as “knowers and makers” (Hamraie and Fritsch 2019, 7), as well as an approach to “interdependence as political technology” (Hamraie and Fritsch 2019, 12). 

Here, I want to consider the powerful role that skepticism plays as a crip technoscientific practice. I mark skepticism as an affect and approach that is distinct from acceptance, which is to say, even in describing earlier that many disabled people introduced themselves to me as, among other things, their disability percentage, I do not read this as their acceptance of the percentage. As I often observed, the percentage was presented in introductions as a way of signaling one’s legitimacy in belonging to disability (specifically, disability as the state might count it through the process of disability certification). Despite this presentation, however, the people who introduced themselves with a disability percentage would frequently add later that they did not mean to indicate an unquestioning acceptance of this process of assigning a number to one’s disability. 

As one of my research participants who had gone through the certification process several times over told me: “Never think we are just getting a disability percentage – even if we don’t want the disability certificate, all of us have to try and negotiate it to make doctors understand what our lives are like.” In that same conversation, another person added, “No matter what the system asks of us, as disabled people, our job is to make it [the system] work for us.” In thinking with disabled peoples’ responses to certification as a process of state-mandated legibility, I am struck by the ways that disabled people used technoscience “to survive and alter the very systems that produce disability or attempt to render us as broken” (Hamraie and Fritsch 2019, 20). Often, despite recognizing the particular failures of these systems, disabled people continue to approach the percentage as a way to negotiate their place in the system.

There are many kinds of work that disabled people do to negotiate a percentage, whether it is sharing experiences with others who are going through the certification process, offering recommendations for the kinds of supporting documentation that might help ease bureaucratic hurdles, or suggesting hospitals and doctors that are more likely to be willing to understand certification as a negotiation, rather than disability as an experience to be accounted away. All these kinds of work are informed by disabled peoples’ everyday expertise (Dokumaci 2023, Hartblay 2020). Although many people I spoke with were previously not familiar with the certification process and its demands, going through the process led them to develop various kinds of expertise in navigating it. 

Arguably, much of this expert work that disabled people do can be seen as done toward making oneself legible within – and to – a system that does little to make room for the needs and lived experiences of disabled people. However, it is also worth pausing here to think about these efforts as crip engagements with technology in ways that ensure technology can be moved toward – and in service of - disabled peoples’ goals. In responding to the ways that technologies of identification and enumeration attempt to define the body, disabled people deploy a sustained skepticism as crip technoscientific practice.

This skepticism in turn allows for disabled people to navigate a system when they don’t have too many ways out of or around it. The skepticism toward being counted, even when continuing to participate in state processes of counting, shapes how disabled people interact with the state’s identification and enumeration efforts. Through this provocation, my purpose has been to trouble the idea that participation in being counted can be read as agreement with the process. I stayed with skepticism in particular as a response from disabled people and communities to a technoscientific “advancement” in the process of identifying and measuring disability. In doing so, I hope to have opened up ways through which to read and place some of the tensions that are inherent not only in skepticism, but also in other crip affects and practices.

References

Dokumaci, Arseli. 2023. Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Hamraie, Aimi, and Kelly Fritsch. 2019. “Crip Technoscience Manifesto.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5 (1): 1 – 33.

Hartblay, Cassandra. 2020. “Disability Expertise: Claiming Disability Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 61 (S21): S26 – S36.

Jasanoff, Sheila. 2004. States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order. London: Routledge.

Murphy, M. 2012. Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health and Technoscience. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.