This roundtable conversation considers what it means to design accessible conference presentations, as well as how to survive and navigate conferences as a disabled scholar. How might we advocate for access in inaccessible and often high-stakes terrain? What strategies might we use in our own conference practices to support the work of access creation?

This virtual roundtable conversation features Michele Friedner, Ruth Osorio, and Victor Zhuang.

More information can be found here: https://events.umich.edu/event/127876

Register to attend on Zoom: https://myumi.ch/JwZrE

Panelist Bios

Michele Friedner is a social and medical anthropologist whose work examines both the category of and experience of “deafness” and “disability,” particularly in urban India. She is interested in how political economic changes in India have created new opportunities and constraints for deaf and disabled people in the arenas of employment, education, politics, religion, and everyday life.

Ruth Osorio is an Assistant Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Old Dominion University. She reads, researches, and writes about disability studies, cultural rhetorics, digital writing, and feminist and queer methodologies. In her work, Dr. Osorio centers an intersectional approach, considering how race, sexuality, gender, and other identities and experiences intersect with disability. She is particularly interested in how rhetors who have been silenced or ignored remix, adapt, re-use, and invent rhetorical strategies that disrupt the status quo.

Victor Zhuang is an Assistant Professor in Disability Communication at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University. He is a disability studies scholar working at the intersections of disability, media, cultural and communication studies. His research focuses on disability and inclusion in contemporary societies such as Singapore. Dr. Zhuang is also exploring questions of digital inclusion, in particular, the sociotechnical imaginaries of disability in emerging technologies, and the intersections of sustainable futures and disability in smart cities. He is also interested in articulations of disability arts and culture, and disability media representation.