Meet the team: Louise Hickman

Research Associate, Louise Hickman, explains how her research connects critical disability studies, access, and feminist labour with the politics of “access work”.

At the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, my position will focus on the research initiative on work, drawing on my research experience at the feminist labor lab at UC San Diego. 

I have used the analytic lens of feminist labour to generate questions central to the futurity of work from the vantage point of access and care. 

Some of these questions include: 

-How can we imagine the role of work differently? 

-What is the long-term impact of the gig economy on care work outside and inside the home? 

-What is the familial cost of precarious labour?

The range of questions evoked here demonstrates how our approach to the future of work at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy is interwoven with many related critical perspectives. 

These critical perspectives are integral to my own work and to that of my teams and collaborators.  

“My work is concerned with the long-term impact of the tech marketplace reshaping the parameters of care and access without input from impacted stakeholders.”

In my research, I use ethnographic, archival, and theoretical approaches to consider how access is produced for disabled people. 

I draw on these mixed methodologies to study the labour practices of real-time stenographers and transcriptive technologies in educational settings. 

I use an interdisciplinary lens of feminist theory, critical disability studies, and science and technology studies (STS) to consider the historical conditions of access work, as well as how access is co-produced through human labour, technological systems, and economic models and conditions. 

Through this work I also question the impulse of large tech organisations to ‘scale’ access in order to find a solution for most of their users, which is arguably on par with the early convictions of universal design.

In other words: the attempt to craft a singular design solution for all types of bodies.  

Reflecting on scaling, design practices and standardisation processes, my research is particularly concerned with recent trends to outsource accessible services to external organisations. These include a range of services, from the outsourcing of wheelchair accessible vehicles (WAV) to the automation of captioning to name just two.  

In this sense, my work is concerned with the long-term impact of the tech marketplace reshaping the parameters of care and access without input from impacted stakeholders. Understanding how to assess these changes —in conversation with policymakers — is one of the many challenges faced by the tech sector today. 

Previously, I served as a co-convenor for the feminist labour lab at UC San Diego with Lilly Irani and the JUST AI Lab for fellows (co-hosted with London School of Economics and the Ada Lovelace Institute) working on racial justice in tech spaces. With the JUST AI fellows, I developed a community agreement for conducting collaborative research in humanistic-led lab spaces. 

At JUST AI, I co-lead with Dr Alexa Hagerty, a working group focusing on data rights, access and refusal as a site to explore dissenting voices in tech-driven spaces. The deep (and vexed) connections between technology and disability justice raise additional lines of questioning:

-What is the potential for tech refusal?  

-How can we build a coalition that moves in a new direction that pairs dissenting views with concrete actions? 

-How can disabled people opt-out of the terms and conditions associated with the innovation of accessibility? Is tech refusal antithetical to access? 

“How do we move away from the idea that access to information, buildings, and online platforms necessitates the logics of invisibility, or in other words, that access “just happens”?”

As an extension to the theme of access work and refusal, I am working on an exploration of Crip AI, which resists the automation of access, and values the care and expertise provided by humans in their interface with machines. 

Crip AI, as both an object and an analytic, does not deny the coexistence of disability and technology, rather it interrogates the utility of artificial intelligence and data-driven systems from outside the boundaries set by the promises of tech solutionism. My research on Crip AI is the recipient of this year’s Lecture Prize for Arts and Science with the British Science Association. 

Most research relating to access work aims to foreground the logic of access as occurring backstage (hidden from view of the users) and elsewhere. 

My work asks: how do we move away from the idea that access to information, buildings, and online platforms necessitates the logics of invisibility, or in other words, that access “just happens”?

At the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, the work itself is imagined from elsewhere. 

To build from this position, I draw on research relating to access work, and open questions around care work, to find new scales of engagement from within HCI research in the UK and beyond.

Working with these new scales – to explore new perspectives and collaborations – the Centre will introduce a new lab space early next year tasked with focusing on the theme of this year’s discussion: “Care Work Elsewhere.”