COMMColloquium Series: Ria Gualano

About this event

COMMColloquium

Co-Designing Disability-Inclusive Worlds: Exploring Disability Narratives and Representation Through Community Engagement with Emerging Technologies and the Arts

Ria Gualano, PhD Candidate, Cornell University

3 pm in 102 Mann

Reception to follow in the Hub

Disabled and neurodiverse people continue to be underrepresented in the arts, media and technology design. In this talk, I will discuss my work to increase disability access and inclusion in virtual worlds, emerging technologies and community conversations. Broadly, my research focuses on two threads: 1) the social implications of emerging technology design, and 2) the co-curation of narratives about disability and neurodiversity through partnership with local communities. I will share how I use co-design, qualitative and arts-based participatory research methods to seek critical insights into tensions between technology and disability representation, opening up dialogue about historical limitations, present challenges and future opportunities for using emerging technologies for social change.

Ria J. Gualano is a PhD candidate in the Cornell University Department of Communication. Her research centers the communication of disability through emerging technologies and the arts, and it has been supported by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship, a Founder’s Dissertation Fellowship, and a Dean’s Excellence Fellowship. Ria’s work is highly interdisciplinary, centering disability and themes of access, representation, (in)visibility and temporality in critical explorations of virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and artificial intelligence (AI). She is particularly interested in community-based participatory research methods and curated the Invisible Aspects of Disability and Neurodiversity and Cripping Time Across Realities exhibitions. Her work has been published in venues such as Disability Studies Quarterly, Information, Communication & Society, and Proceedings of the ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility .