Louise Hickman

Louise Hickman is a Research Associate at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy.

Her academic work focuses on the automation of accessibility for disabled people, as well as on questions of social justice and processes of exclusion that are driven by the politics of austerity.

She uses an interdisciplinary lens, drawing on critical disability studies, feminist labour studies, and science and technology studies to consider the historical conditions of access work and the ways access is co-produced through human labour, technological systems, and economic models and conditions.

Louise previously worked as a senior research officer for the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science and for the Ada Lovelace Institute’s JUST-AI Network on Data and AI Ethics. She continues to co-convene the JUST AI’s working group on rights, access and refusal.

An academic, artist and activist, she earned her PhD in Communication from the University of California, San Diego in 2018, and held a postdoctoral position in the Feminist Labor Lab at UC San Diego.