Louise Hickman

Research Interests: critical disability studies | feminist STS | digital humanities | labor studies | crip technoscience | D/deaf studies | ethics of care | access studies | history of technology | future of work

Louise Hickman is an activist and scholar of communication, and uses ethnographic, archival, and theoretical approaches to consider how access is produced for disabled people. Her current project focuses particularly on access produced by real-time stenographers and transcriptive technologies in educational settings. She uses an interdisciplinary lens drawing on feminist theory, critical disability studies, and science and technology studies to consider the historical conditions of access work, and the ways access is co-produced through human (and primarily female) labour, technological systems, and economic models and conditions.

Louise is currently a Research Associate at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge. She is also an Associate Fellow with the DIGIT network. Louise previously worked as a Senior Research Officer at the London School of Economics and Political Science Department of Media and Communications and Ada Lovelace Institute’s JUST-AI Network on Data and AI Ethics. She continues to co-convene JUST AI’s working group on rights, access and refusal. An academic, artist, and activist, she earned her PhD in Communication from the University of California, San Diego in 2018. Here, she held a postdoctoral position in the Feminist Labor Lab at UC San Diego.

Since 2016, Louise has also worked as an access consultant and speaker for Parkeology, a U.S. based public art program.