The three of us have taught classes about Technology and Disability through a philosophical lens, though this class has not been taught exclusively through philosophy departments. We’re excited to share these with the APA community. 

AS: I work in Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech, and philosophy of technology is one of my areas of expertise. I piloted this class back in 2015-ish after becoming multiply disabled, and the class has since been added to the curriculum for Disability Studies and Medicine & Society minors, though we get students from all over. When creating the class, I imagined teaching more engineers than I currently do (where I instead see a lot of pre-health professionals and future therapists), but this topic is a passion of mine. The class was strengthened by materials and research that were part of a National Science Foundation CAREER grant I held from 2018-2023, which was focused on the stories disabled people tell about technology. 

There are a couple of goals that we have with this course—one of the main ones is for students to read disabled people as experts about their own experiences. There’s a long history of disabled people’s testimony, even about themselves, being disregarded, viewed with suspicion, or downplayed. The history of eugenics and institutionalization and ableism, which this course has to touch on as well, has often kept disabled stories from being shared, honored, or respected. We think this is true even in the context of philosophy, where cases that involve disabled people and medical dilemmas are often treated as interesting bioethics case studies or “marginal cases” to be opined upon, and often still leave out disabled experiences and knowledge. We have students read primarily from disabled authors. Technology and Disability is often one of the few classes students get where they read disabled people as experts at all, and this is especially true for undergraduates majoring in psychology and other STEM fields focused on biomedicine! 

DPW: I’m a joint-appointed Assistant Professor in Philosophy and Data Science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where I’ve taught this course for three spring semesters, cross-listed between departments of philosophy, data science, and health and human services. We work with tools and theories from philosophy of technology, disability studies, and Science, Technology, and Society to better understand concepts like the social, medical, and other models of disability and how they play into technological design, and to recognize and critique common narratives and assumptions about technology and disability. We investigate the themes, concepts, and history of the philosophy of technology, from there developing an understanding of disability studies, disability justice, and science and technology studies. We examine the varied ways humans construct, define, and understand technology as individuals, as cultures, and in relation to and enmeshed with nature. I introduce students to the social meaning of various “health” technologies and the material cultures surrounding disability, guiding them in recognizing and understanding the lived experiences of people who deploy, resist, and wrestle with technologies aimed at their bodies and minds. As my courses always have a mix of philosophy, data science, and public health students, some of whom may come in with preconceptions about technology as an unfettered good in the context of disability, even if they are critical of technology in other areas. Others, however, come in with a foundation of knowledge in these areas, and their contributions in class can aid their classmates in recognizing the ableism and technoableism present in the dominant social narratives about technology and disability. 

JE: I am an Assistant Professor of STS in the Department of Engineering and Society in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at the University of Virginia. I have taught this course twice at UVA (after teaching it a couple of times during graduate school at Virginia Tech), once during a Summer Term and once this past fall. The course fulfills engineering students’ humanities elective requirements, and also counts toward our History of Technology, Engineering Policy, STS, and Technology Ethics minors. I have included my Summer Term syllabus for this showcase, an online asynchronous course. As someone embedded in an Engineering school, teaching mostly engineering students (I did get a few from outside SEAS), the focus of my classes leans perhaps further from the philosophical than the other two. I focus a lot on pulling engineers away from the idea that technology is the way to approach disability. Engineers, for good reason, want to define a problem, then design a solution. So, framing disability away from the paradigm of “problem” is key. I do this by establishing disabled folks as the experts on disability, as designers of assistive technologies, and as the ones who decide what is and is not needed. I have had mixed results, of course. Ableism (and technoableism) is the soup we all swim in and is hard to counter.

The Syllabus Showcase of the APA Blog is designed to share insights into the syllabi of philosophy educators. We include syllabi in their original, unedited format that showcase a wide variety of philosophy classes. We would love for you to be a part of this project. Please contact Series Editor, Cara S. Greene via [email protected], or Editor of the Teaching Beat, Dr. Smrutipriya Pattnaik via [email protected] with potential submissions.