Lydia X. Z. Brown in Conversation with Remi Yergeau and David Adelman

ID: Burgundy code background. Chartreuse/periwinkle title at the top. Multicolored decor throughout. Headshots of the panelists at the bottom.

Event Abstract: Lydia X. Z. Brown's work focuses on unearthing, examining, and challenging the intersectional harms of algorithmic technologies on disabled people living at the margins of the margins. From algorithmic worker management, credit decisions, threat assessment, health predictions, decision-making technologies, and surveillance apparatuses, algorithmic and automated technologies increasingly have an outsized impact on disabled people, particularly disabled people from multiply-marginalized communities. Lydia's work calls attention to the particular ways in which algorithmic technologies serve to exclude disabled people from public participation and social integration, exacerbate existing hyper-surveillance of and attendant harms to disabled people, and manufacture new means of regulating disabled people's lives.

ID: Lydia smiles and tilts their head slightly to the side, looking confidently at the camera. They are a young-ish East Asian person with a streak of teal in their short black hair, wearing glasses, a cobalt blue jacket and navy tie, with a blue copper wall behind them. Photo by Sarah Tundermann.

M. Remi Yergeau is the Arthur F. Thurnau Associate Professor of Digital Studies and English at the University of Michigan. They direct the Digital Accessible Futures Lab as a part of the DISCO Network, which is funded by the Mellon Foundation. Their scholarly interests include rhetoric & writing studies, digital studies, queer rhetorics, disability studies, and theories of mind. Their  Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness (Duke UP), is a winner of the 2017 Modern Language Association First Book Prize, the 2019 CCCC Lavender Rhetorics Book Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship, and the 2019 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award. They are currently at work on a second book project on disability, techno-rhetorics, and sociality, tentatively titled Crip Data.

ID: Headshot of David Adelman.

Lydia X. Z. Brown is an advocate, organizer, attorney, strategist, and writer whose work focuses on interpersonal and state violence against disabled people at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, faith, language, and nation. Lydia is Policy Counsel for Privacy & Data at the Center for Democracy & Technology, where their work focuses on algorithmic harm and disability discrimination. Lydia is also an adjunct lecturer in the Women's and Gender Studies Program and the Disability Studies Program at Georgetown University, as well as an adjunct professorial lecturer in American Studies in the Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies at American University. They are co-president of the Disability Rights Bar Association and Disability Justice Committee representative on the National Lawyers Guild board.

ID: Headshot of Remi Yergeau

David Adelman is a DISCO Network Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Digital Accessible Futures Lab at the University of Michigan. His research interests center disability and crip studies, with a particular emphasis on disability media studies, digital disability cultures, disability film studies, and critical sexuality studies. Through an interdisciplinary crip studies/feminist lens, he pursues questions which emerge at the intersection of power, culture, technology, identity, and desire.

Accessibility

CART will be provided.

If you have any questions or need event accommodations, please reach out to the DISCO Network at disconetwork@umich.edu.