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
NEWS
New project: Algorithmic Kitchen: Recipes for Disability-Led Health Technology Design funded by Wellcome’s Early Career Award.
New role: member of the Royal Society’s working group on Digital Assistive Technology (DigAT).
New project: access work featured in COLAB at Kettle Yard
New post: Research Associate with Minderoo Centre of Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge
Dr Louise Hickman is an activist and scholar of communication whose work explores how access is materially and socially produced for disabled people. She employs ethnographic, archival, and theoretical approaches to examine the politics of access. Her research is grounded in feminist theory, critical disability studies, and science and technology studies. It investigates how access is co-produced through human (often feminised) labour, technological systems, and economic infrastructures.
She is currently a Research Associate at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge, where she investigates the intersections of disability, technology, and justice. Louise is also a Wellcome Early Career Fellow, leading a disability-led research project titled "Algorithmic Kitchen: Recipes for Disability‑Led Health Technology Design." This project explores how disabled communities use creative and collective practices—particularly in kitchen and food-related spaces—to design accessible, life-sustaining environments. It reimagines the development of health technologies by grounding design in care work, interdependence, and disabled expertise, challenging dominant models of innovation that often exclude disabled perspectives.
In addition, she is an Associate Fellow with the DIGIT network and continues to co-convene the JUST AI working group on rights, access, and refusal. Previously, she worked as a Senior Research Officer in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and contributed to the Ada Lovelace Institute’s JUST-AI Network on Data and AI Ethics.
Louise earned her PhD in Communication from the University of California, San Diego in 2018, where she also held a postdoctoral position in the Feminist Labour Lab.
Artwork by Shannon Finnegan