Workshop at CHI 2026 - Barcelona, 13-17 April

Crip HCI: Cyborg Perspectives on Disability Justice

Building on an emerging awareness of disability justice and calls for a crip HCI, this workshop brings together disabled researchers across HCI with an interest in how the politics and design of cyborg technologies relate to the rich, situated, and existential understandings that emerge from living a cyborg life. By centering the perspectives of cyborgs, this workshop de-centers extractive techno-solutionist practices to catalyze research momentum and foster the crip research community in HCI.

Introduction

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers are engaged with envisioning, designing and building technologies that are tied to specific ideas of the kinds of futures that we seek for humans living with machines. In science fiction, cyborgs — part human, part machine — have been a consistent presence in allowing for a critical and generative engagement with such future imaginaries. But, cyborgs are not only the stuff of far-off science fiction. In fact, many disabled people readily embrace the figure of the cyborg as an important aspect of their subjectivity and identity since they live intimately with a variety of assistive technologies. These include, for example, Type 1 Diabetics that use “smart” insulin pumps and sensor systems, pacemakers or implantable cardioverter-defibrillators, bionic eyes, prosthetic limbs, exoskeletons, hearing aids or cochlear implants and many other assistive devices and, even, biotechnological examples such as pharmaceuticals and hormones.

Like HCI’s focus on the relationship between individual users and their machines rather than community engagement, the healthcare system in the context of neoliberal capitalism also insists on individual management of health conditions. As such, convening and communing itself can be seen as a radical act that works against the isolation of individuals. This workshop invites self-identified fellow cyborgs to consider what the field of HCI might gain from a deeper engagement with cyborg perspectives on disability justice in order to advance the sub-field of “crip HCI” as well as inform broader studies of disability, assistive devices, health tech, and the field at large.

While HCI has long studied relationships between humans and machines that might be considered as cyborg — in realms such as labor and work and health and medicine - the field is starting to also engage with critical perspectives from disability studies. Furthermore, with some notable exceptions, HCI researchers often consider their users as objects of their research rather than participants with agency in their own right. This is particularly true when the users are disabled people, whose views are often dismissed and valued less than that of able-bodied humans, even if these humans have no lived experience. Recognizing that disability studies should inform HCI, Spiel et al. highlighted the field’s predominant focus on medical models of disability and criticized the lack of full participation of disabled people in research about them. In effect, disabled users often find themselves, if at all, in a form of pseudo-participation, relegated to expressing their lived experience as data points for the designers to analyze and use without having the power to shape the research goals itself. In a 2021 article in ACM Interactions, Williams et al. argued that: “A crip HCI would generatively integrate the plurality of cripistemologies, the unique onto-epistemologies of disabled people in resistance to normative narrative, in the practice of forging new sociotechnical futures — futures in which the presence of disabled people is not only natural and welcome but also desired. To that end, crip HCI recognizes the researcher as situated, and thus articulated within, the sociotechnical meta-contexts of society, scholarship, research, and design inquiry and practice.”

Disabled people have a rich, situated, and existential understanding of the politics of cyborg technologies as well as a desire to shape their own lives as well as those of their communities in line with principles of disability justice. Through our proximity to technology, disabled people experience both the significant harms that assistive devices perpetuate as well as the joys of living with technologies that others might delegate to “the future”. Following disability studies scholar Alison Kafer, Laura Forlano uses the term “disabled cyborg” as an identity as a reminder that it is not only the human but also the technologies that might be considered as disabled.

Selected References

Organizers

Call for Participants

To join us in this three-hour workshop, we invite you to submit a short position statement explaining why you want to participate (max. 400 words). This might be a reflection, project description or (be accompanied by) a creative/artistic submission (e.g., zine page or photos) related to your past, present, or future lived experience.

You can upload your submission to NextCloud (Password: cyborg-chi2026).

Submissions will be evaluated for quality, diversity, and relevance to disabled cyborg experiences. If accepted, you will be asked to briefly share your submission during the workshop. We plan to publish submissions (only with permission) on Tech Otherwise.

At least one author of each accepted submission must attend the workshop, and all participants must register for the workshop. The workshop will be held in-person at the conference, but we will offer equally pleasurable hybrid attendance for participants unable to travel (e.g., for disability reasons).

Timeline

Important Dates