Media + Modernity: “Disability as Method”

Mara Mills
“Disability as Method”
[Response: Viktoria Tkaczyk]
Tuesday, September 12, 2023 @5pm ET
N107 (School of Architecture)

Scholars in disability studies began using the phrase “disability as method” across several disciplines in the 2010s, to consider disability as a tool, a theory, an aesthetic, and a source of new media. Mills will discuss Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (August 2023), coedited with Rebecca Sanchez, a volume that convenes this scholarship across literature, the arts, anthropology, and media studies. In conversation with Viktoria Tkaczyk, she will also discuss her work on “disability as method” in the history of science.

Mara Mills is Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and founding co-director of the NYU Center for Disability Studies. She is also a founding editorial board member of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. She is recently co-editor of Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality (Oxford 2020), Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (NYU 2023), and a forthcoming special issue of Osiris on “Disability and the History of Science” (2024). Upcoming publications include the NSF-funded edited collection How to be Disabled in a Pandemic (NYU Press), a coauthored book with Jonathan Sterne on time stretching, and an NEH-funded collaborative research project with Michele Friedner on “The Global Cochlear Implant.”

Viktoria Tkaczyk is Professor in the Department of Musicology and Media Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and currently the Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of German. She has published widely on the history of early modern and modern aviation, architecture, acoustics, neuroscience, experimental aesthetics, and sound media. Her current work includes a new project exploring how humanistic and scientific technologies relate to geopolitics and resource regimes, and a collaborative project entitled “Applied Humanities: Genealogies and Politics.“ Her most recent publications include Thinking with Sound: A New Program in the Sciences and Humanities around 1900 (University of Chicago Press, 2023); “Supplied Knowledge: Reconsidering the Resources of Epistemic Tools” (Focus Section, Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society, 114/2, 2023), ed. with C. von Oertzen.