A Manifesto for Critical, Crip & Cyborg Futures

Laura Forlano, Northeastern University

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Time: Thu 2025-06-12 15.00 - 16.00

Location: Digital Futures hub, Osquars Backe 5, floor 2 at KTH main campus OR Zoom

Video link: https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/69560887455

Language: English

Abstract: This presentation is about the ways in which new technologies of so-called “automation” – such as AI-driven medical devices — shape what it means to experience disability in an algorithmic
era. Rather than mere users of technology, disabled people’s identities and subjectivities are
shaped with every software update and change in the interfaces that they use to manage
intimate processes in their bodies. In this talk, I will introduce several autoethnographic
vignettes and present several examples of art and creative practice by Type 1 Diabetic
artists/scholars before introducing a series of manifestos that illustrate a broader politics
around technology as well as open new possibilities for transformation.

Laura Forlano, a Fulbright award-winning and National Science Foundation funded scholar, is a disabled writer, social scientist and design researcher. She is Professor in the departments of Art + Design and Communication Studies in the College of Arts, Media, and Design and Senior Fellow at The Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University.

Forlano’s research is focused on the aesthetics and politics at the intersection between design and emerging technologies. She has used participatory workshops, collaborative games, exhibitions, speculative videos, prototypes and performances to imagine alternative futures for living with data and computation. She is the author of Cyborg (with Danya Glabau, MIT Press 2024) and an editor of three books: Bauhaus Futures (MIT Press 2019), digitalSTS (Princeton University Press 2019) and From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen (MIT Press 2011). Forlano is also an Affiliated Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. She received her Ph.D. in communications from Columbia University.

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