The ‘Working Body’: Interrogating and Reimagining the Productivist Impulses of through Crip-Centered Speculative Design

Franchesca Spektor and Sarah Fox

Abstract: Appeals to ‘nature’ have historically led to normative claims about who is rendered valuable. These understandings elevate a universal, working body (read able-bodied, white, producing capital) that design and disability studies scholar Aimi Hamraie argues ‘has served as a template […] for centuries’ (2017: 20), becoming reified through our architectural, political, and technological infrastructures. Using the framing of the cyborg, we explore how contemporary assistive have the potential to both reproduce and trouble such normative claims. The modern transhumanism movement imagines cyborg bodies as self-contained and invincible, championing assistive technologies that seek to assimilate disabled people towards ever-increasing standards of independent productivity and connecting worth with the body’s capacity for labor. In contrast, disability justice communities see all bodies as inherently worthy and situated within a network of care-relationships. Rather than being invincible, the cripborg’s relationship with is complicated by the ever-present functional and financial constraints of their assistive devices. Despite these lived experiences, the expertise and agency of disabled activist communities is rarely engaged throughout the design process. In this article, we use speculative design techniques to reimagine assistive technologies with members of disability communities, resulting in three fictional design proposals. The first is a manual for a malfunctioning exoskeleton, meant to fill in the gaps where corporate planned obsolescence and black-boxed design delimit repair and maintenance. The second is a zine instructing readers on how to build their own intimate prosthetics, emphasizing the need to design for pleasurable, embodied, and affective experience. The final design proposal is a city-owned fleet of assistive robots

Somatechnics 10.3 (2020): 327–354 DOI: 10.3366/soma.2020.0326 © Edinburgh University Press www.euppublishing.com/soma Somatechnics meant to push people in manual wheelchairs up hills or carry loads for elderly people, an example of an environmental adaptation which explores the problems of automating care. With and through these design concepts, we begin to explore assistive devices that center the values of disability communities, using design proposals to co-imagine versions of a more crip-centered future.

Keywords: transhumanism; disability justice; cyborg; speculative design; assistive technology.

Introduction I (Spektor) sat down with prolific Bay Area disability activist and elder Corbett OToole at a cozy Berkeley, CA cafe, a tape recorder between us. Lifting a hand from her wheelchair’s joystick to take a sip of tea, OToole gave me an exasperated look. ‘I don’t give a shit about exoskeletons, if I can’t even get a robust health plan’, she asserted. Assistive technologies of the future are created for normative bodies, OToole explained. Even exoskeletons, she continued, are made within a height and weight range exclusive of many disabled people. Throughout our conversation, OToole channeled the collective frustration of disabled communities robbed of agency by engineers purporting to offer ‘innovative’ assistive solutions, yet refusing to include them in the design process. To remedy this, she concluded, designers must ensure the participation of those most impacted by their designs. Though the rhetoric of innovation may be seductive (and seemingly ubiquitous in the San Francisco Bay Area), leaders of the disability rights movement like OToole continually do the work of interrogating whose bodies are erased in such visions of the future. The myth of neutrality has long defined how tech is organised, and led to harm – from Kodak’s Shirley Card used to calibrate film to white skin tones (Del Barco 2014) to recognition systems which render Black and brown faces illegible (Algorithmic Justice League 2020). In these cases, a universal, working body (read able-bodied, white, producing capital) is the locus of consideration. Design and disability studies scholar Aimi Hamraie argues this body ‘has served as a template […] for centuries’ (2017: 20), becoming reified through our architectural, political, and technological infrastructures. Erasure from (increasingly digitalised) infrastructural systems disproportionately affects crip, fat, femme, queer, trans, Black, brown, immigrant, and poor communities (Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018) – those who stand in contrast to the ‘unmarked’, white masculine body presumed to be the default user. In this article, we bring together modes of design inquiry and critical disability studies scholarship to examine how productive

328 The ‘Working Body’ imperatives creep into contemporary assistive technologies, interrogating how standards of normalcy might be shifted or queered. We draw on a series of interviews we conducted with Bay Area disabled activists as well as analysis of existing tech marketing materials to articulate new relationships to the ‘working body’, and argue for a rethinking of the ways in which technologists link labor with individual worth in product design. We argue for an approach to speculative design that images absent or under-considered narratives of the body within and around technology production (Rosner 2018; Bennett et al. 2019), using design fictions to co-imagine versions of a more crip-centered future with our interviewees. These transhumanist reimaginings are presented here in the form of three fictional design proposals: 1) a dystopian future, illustrated through a narrative featuring the breakdown of an exoskeleton; 2) an inverted future, depicted in the form of a tutorial instructing readers on how to build their own intimate prosthetics; 3) a speculative future, represented through a fleet of public wheelchair-assist robots. Rather than focus on specific technologies or capabilities, our work draws on disability studies to view the body as situated within a network of care and mutual aid.

Related Work We engage with the ideological lineage of the transhumanism movement, putting the philosophy of technological enhancement in conversation with critical disability scholarship. Connecting the two discourses is the figure of the cyborg, which features prominently in the transhumanist enthusiasm to normalise disabled bodies. In turn, disability scholarship problematises the ‘technofix’, while still regarding the cyborg as a potentially liberatory figure.

Transhumanism

Once bound in science fiction, the modern vision of the cyborg – a techno-symbiosis between human and machine – now offers us unprecedented possibilities for . This is, at least, according to the ideology of the transhumanist movement. Transhumanism is a loose international philosophy devoted to advancing the body and mind through biological transcendence, its most ardent supporters seek to create ‘posthuman beings […] liberated from disease and death’ (Duarte & Park 2014: 260). Evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley is credited as the founder of

329 Somatechnics transhumanism, first using the term for the title of an oft-cited 1957 article in which he argues for the improvement of the social condition through scientific exploration (Huxley 1968). Yet, the movement’s thematic origins trace back far earlier, propelled by the Enlightenment project of sapere aude (dare to know) and deep investment in the idea of a rational natural order (Frodeman 2019, Foucault 1984, Kant 1784). By the early twentieth century, this ‘daring’ led industrialising societies to increment previously fixed benchmarks of human evolution, while simultaneously elevating white, male, working bodies to the top. The desire to propel evolution thus remained a productivist enterprise, culminating in the eugenic push for species-wide betterment, the prospect of space colonisation, and science fiction exploring the role of bionics and cognitive enhancement in the production of life’s necessities (Bernal 1929). While the movement we now call transhumanism coalesced most directly from these twentieth century notions of progress, its broader ethos has continued to drive advancement in myriad fields and intellectual traditions, from the super exponential growth of genetic engineering, to artificial intelligence, robotics, and nanotechnology. According to the U.S. Transhumanist Party, cyborg implants should be used toward the optimisation of the human condition, and to ‘help disabled people live a life closer to normal or optimal’ (US Transhumanist Party 2020). The movement enthusiastically endorses the use of cybernetics upgrades towards disease immunity, brain-computer interfacing, super-strength, and even improved appearance. Under the expansion of transhumanist ideals, cyborg ‘optimisation’ can be located in a wide swath of contexts. Many industrial projects espouse the benefits of cyborgisation in clear capitalist terms, citing ‘higher levels of output, better quality and fewer errors, and capabilities that surpass human ability’ (McKinsey Global Institute 2016). In 2018, for instance, Amazon patented a wristband to track how warehouse workers handle packages and send haptic feedback to ‘nudge’ worker’s in order to streamline efficiency (Stubbs 2018). Car manufacturers are currently testing exoskeletons purportedly meant to help workers lift enormous weights without injury (Forbes 2019), while the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has explored brain implants to stretch the human capacity for violent combat (Bainbridge 2006). Though many of these technologies would not be labelled transhumanist outright, we argue they nonetheless belong and contribute to transhumanism’s ideological lineage of productivism. The transhumanist umbrella also celebrates cosmetic or political expression through amateurs known as ‘“body hackers”, “grinders”,or

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“self-made cyborgs”’, who perform DIY experiments by implanting magnets, seismic detectors, and RFID chips into their bodies (Duarte & Park 2014). Neil Harbisson, a colorblind artist who uses an antenna implant to ‘hear’ color frequencies, argues that by hacking the body we can reach for the superhuman (2014). While Harbisson identifies publicly only as a cyborg, his work is featured prominently in transhumanist popular press, aligning with the movement’s ambition to become ‘better than well’ (Goffi 2016). Even when these cyborgian endeavors seek to overcome a specific disability, a transhumanist orientation suggests that the normative unmarked body is itself disabled – particularly where the pace of labor is concerned. Science philosopher Robert Frodeman contends that the laser focus on becoming stronger, faster, and more productive is far from an aberrant aspect of progress; it represents a wider culture of technological consumption which is ‘implicitly transhumanist in orientation’ (2019). Frodeman points to systemic and infrastructural challenges which are not only treated as occasions for more scientific and technological reinforcement, but which also consistently offload the cost of progress onto underperforming individuals. As science and technology studies scholars Bárbara Nascimento Duarte and Enno Park argue, these manifold cyborg visions consider the body an endlessly ‘transformable, improvable, augmentable entity’ (2014) in the quest for societal improvement and economic gain.

The Disabled Cyborg

In the ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, Donna Haraway argues that the cyborg, as a fusion of human/machine and natural/artificial, collapses the rigid hierarchies that define the Enlightenment’s rational natural order (1985). In recognising the ways in which embodiment is already a hybrid and fragmented experience, Haraway uses the cyborg to upend the boundaries of traditional identity, thereby smudging away the value judgments around how ‘normal bodies’ are ‘supposed’ to appear. Disability studies scholar Alison Kafer suggests the cyborg may offer an effective model for disability theory and politics. As a ‘boundary-blurring hybrid’ (Kafer 2013), the cyborg container may allow disabled and other non-normative bodies to access the same ‘morphological freedom’ (More 1993) sought under transhumanism. Articles in the popular press already portray disabled people as ‘original cyborgs’, constructing a specific and seamless link between ‘cyborg’ and ‘disabled person’ thanks to adaptive technology (Kafer 2013). While promising in theory, this

331 Somatechnics conception does little to dismantle ableism, continuing to rely on a medical model of disability which locates the problem of difference inside the individual body. , former president of the Transhumanist Political Party and prominent transhumanist figurehead, has argued that cities should allow curb cuts to fall into disrepair, and focus instead on developing exoskeletons to ‘repair physically disabled human beings’ (Istvan 2015, Earle 2019). Here, the contemporary understanding of disabled bodies as seamless cyborgs serves to elevate medical and technological fixes – as opposed to social transformation or political action – as the only proper response to disability (Kafer 2013). In addition to the belittlement of offering disabled people ‘repair’, many in the disability community would point out that technological fixes overlook the realities of individuals who must grapple with the ever-present functional and financial constraints of their technology. Surely, even a curb-cutting exoskeleton would require maintenance and upkeep. Design scholar Laura Forlano (2020) describes her own experience using state of the art glucose monitoring and insulin pump technology meant to dynamically adjust insulin delivery. Rather than the seamless system advertised, she details the additional labor imposed on her daily life in order to make the automated system work – the constant calibration to ensure the accuracy of the sensor. Disability rights activist and cyborg Jillian Weise draws a distinction between Forlano’s experience of tenuous technological dependence, which she calls the experience of cripborg, versus that of the transhumanist tryborg. ‘They are fake cyborgs’, she says derisively of technologists and body hackers, because ‘while they preach cyborg nature, they do not actually depend on machines to breathe, stay alive, talk, walk, hear or hold a magazine’ (Weise 2018). Weise contends that it is precisely the recognition of ‘trial-and-error, repetition and glitch’ which should define cyborg condition, and by extension, the disabled condition. Istvan’s premise, therefore, serves only to foist the cost of maintenance onto already marginalised individuals. So long as transhumanist rhetoric sees disability as a wrong to make right, critical disability scholars contest that the cyborg alone cannot pave the path to flourishing, especially when the most vulnerable disabled people – queer, poor, people of color – are denied the resources of transhumanist transcendance (Hamraie & Fritsch 2019). Under techno-solutionism, disability signals ‘a future that bears too many traces of the ills of the present’, and a ‘a future no one wants’ (Kafer 2013). In their ‘Crip Technoscience Manifesto’, Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch instead offer a new orientation for the relationship between disability and technology, defining ‘crip’ as the ‘non-compliant,

332 The ‘Working Body’ anti-assimilationist position that disability is a desirable part of the world’ (Hamraie & Fritsch 2019). Further, the cyborg figure need not ‘repair’ disabled individuals to achieve equality; because everyone is mutually reliant, disability studies asserts, people with and without disabilities are already equal (Bennett et al. 2018). Through the queering power of the cripborg body, disability communities seek to replace the traditional eugenic logic of the cyborg with a profound emphasis on care networks, agency, and inherent worth.

Disability Justice and Design

In contrast to the techno-optimism of the transhumanist movement, the QTBIPOC-led disability justice praxis developed by leaders of the Disability Justice Collective affirms that all bodies are valuable, and that ‘we are powerful not despite the complexities of our bodies, but because of them’ (Sins Invalid 2016). The road toward liberation must then include collective access, interdependence, and mutual aid (Ibid.). Design historian Bess Williamson (2019: 10) illustrates how commonplace access-touchstones, like curb cuts and the ding of an elevator, became a ‘standard part of design thinking’–with the United States becoming the first country to enact accessibility legislation at a federal level. On July 26th, 2020, the country celebrated the 30th anniversary of the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits disability-based discrimination in areas of public life. While infrastructural access has improved and conversations on ‘universal design’ have gained traction, there have been only marginal improvements towards equitable employment, housing, and healthcare for those under a matrix of oppression associated with race, class, gender, and disability status (Costanza-Chock 2019, Collins 1990). Hamraie (2017: 22) discusses the friction between universal design (UD), now popularised by university curricula and corporate commitments, and disability justice approaches. UD is a framework that purports to sensitise designers to produce products and environments that are accessible to all users regardless of age, disability, or other factors. Even as UD emphasises building systems that ‘benefit everyone’, Hamraie argues, some are always posed to be advantaged (and others disadvantaged) in any given design. The UD staircase (Lollardfish 2016), an architecture fad which features a zig-zag ramp embedded in a staircase, is one example of a ‘beautiful’ solution reviled by wheelchair users who note its perilous slopes and lack of flat landings. Scholar-activist Sasha Costanza-Chock asserts that rather than masking

333 Somatechnics the reality of differential advantage, design justice practitioners must ‘seek to make it explicit: we prioritize design work that shifts advantages to those who are currently systematically disadvantaged within the matrix of domination.’ (2019: 53) According to Costanza-Chock, this means designing with, rather than for marginalised groups. It remains, however, that the work of professional design in nearly all fields is still dominated by white able-bodied men who are also presumed to be default users. Drawing on the ethos of ‘nothing about us, without us’ originating from disability activism in the 1990s, Costanza-Chock argues liberatory design can only come about with the full and direct participation of users. Human-computer interaction scholars Cynthia L. Bennett and Daniela K. Rosner (2019a), for example, interrogate the use of empathy in the human-centered design process which perpetuates power imbalances by positioning designers as the empathisers, and the disabled user as the empathised. It is by breaking down the false divisions between ‘disabled’ and ‘designer’ that design can more easily reflect the agency of those most affected. Working through a justice lens, projects such as Hamraie’s ‘Mapping Access’ rely on participatory methods to explore design as a tool for social change. ‘Mapping Access’ documents features of the built environment, engaging ‘users’ as experts in generating surveys, collecting data, creating new mapping methods, and participating in Map-a-thon events. Bennett and Rosner (2019b) also position disabled people as contributors to design practice through their research on ‘biographical prototypes’, first-person accounts of disabled ingenuity such as a back scratcher adapted to be a Tupperware grabber or jeggings altered to feature hair ties in the waistband for easier dressing. Similarly drawing on modes of participatory futuring and critiques of speculative design (Prado & Oliveira 2014), our work centers the stories of disabled experts to reimagine design from and towards crip-centered perspectives.

Designing Crip Futures We draw on a set of 6 in-depth qualitative interviews with disabled activists and community leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area, conducted over a 5-month period (from October 2018 to March 2019). We reflect on the incisive critique and hopeful visions expressed during our conversations with movement leaders including Patty Berne, Leroy Moore, Corbett OToole, Alice Wong, Laura Millar, and Liz Henry. Many of these individuals helped coin the term ‘disability justice’ and contributed to the founding of the Disability Justice Collective,

334 The ‘Working Body’ an intersectional movement that seeks to ‘center the lives, needs, and organizing strategies of disabled queer and trans and/or Black and brown people marginalized from mainstream disability rights organising’s white-dominated, single-issue focus’ (Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018: 15). Organising efforts include Sins Invalid, a disability-justice- based performance project that celebrates disabled and gender-variant artists of color, and the Disability Justice Culture Club, an activist house in Oakland which serves as a gathering place for disabled QTBIPOC community members via events and mutual aid. The praxis behind these movements stands in complex relationship to transhumanist rhetoric; though many crips self-identify as cyborgs (or cripborgs) to highlight their intimate relationship with technology, disability justice rejects transhumanism’s narrow focus on bodily transcendence. Our conversations focused on notions of the ‘future body’, as it relates to emerging technologies and the realities of disability. We situated these interviews within a speculative design approach, a method for interrogating societal concerns by imagining design beyond the current limitations of culture, politics, and technology (Dunne & Raby 2013). Without such speculation, we face underimaged or absent alternatives for the role of the body in technology – in short, no ‘choice’ but to accept a future that serves only a few. Our engagements thus sought to make sense of the role of assistive technologies in defining the future available for debate and delibera- tion. With each conversation, we asked interviewees to tell us about the assistive technologies they used, focusing on points of friction and of ease in their relationship to devices. We then asked interviewees to talk through their visions for new technological interventions, which prompted them to verbally speculate on interventions to queer productivity and facilitate leisure. Throughout the session, participants detailed assistive technology’s capacity to produce flourish- ing (self-pleasure; the sheer joy of having a prehensile tail) as well as assistive technology’s capacity to produce harm (debilitating cost, physical harm, the social perception of weakness). We then adapted these verbal descriptions into fictional narratives by clustering themes across our interviews. To complement these themes, we analysed corresponding articles and news circulated through popular trade press venues, such as marketing from existing exoskeleton and assistive technologies and crip-run blogs, zines, and community forums. We finally looked for striking visuals and metaphors emerging from participant stories or online disability discourse, which we used as points of entry to represent each theme. We adapted one participant’s vivid speculation of being trapped within a failing exoskeleton,

335 Somatechnics for instance, to discuss the theme of maintenance. By pairing introspective character-driven narratives with illustrative depictions of the tech they interact with, we sought to reproduce the multifaceted relationships disabled individuals hold with assistive technologies – whether as consumers, creators, maintainers, agents, or subjects. Matching our visuals with narrative also provides a degree of accessibility, as fictions are presented in multiple formats. We sent interviewees the fictions with full editing permissions so that they might comment, edit, and revise the narratives as they saw fit. Individuals interacted with the document to offer points of contradiction and additional citation. One participant contested uses of the term ‘disability justice’ where it did not apply to intersectional disability activism, while another provided attribution for ideas originally developed by disabled thinkers and writers which had since diffused throughout lay disability discourse. Others with more limited bandwidth – exacerbated by the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic – simply signed off on the content as it was. Notably this approach placed emphasis on single-session interviews, which bottlenecked the ways in which participants were able to shape the fictions after the initial interview. In an effort to be mindful of participant’s labor in giving feedback, we shared a complete draft of the artifacts, rather than eliciting review and collaboration throughout their development. We hope to follow this experiment in co-speculation with a more sustained participatory approach, including planning for repeated interview sessions in which to co-develop narratives. Drawing out key themes undergirding the fictions, the sections that follow reflect on bodily autonomy and the right to repair, the erasure of intimate expression, and a hyperfocus on ‘fixing’ the individual body.

Breakdown of an Exoskeleton

All technology is inherently fallible. Under government-provided disability insurance, individuals can barely get replacement parts for their wheelchairs. What might happen in a world where exoskeletons are normalised?

The Frigg Mobility Suit manual The motors attached to Ruth’s knees whir and sputter. The knee joints buckle and shoot forward again, barely catching her weight as she totters. She can feel the hiss of the motors sticking, the pneumatic pistons along her thighs locking painfully in place as the Mobility Suit goes unresponsive.

336 The ‘Working Body’

Figure 1. Exoskeleton Manual (Source: authors’ own).

Ruth finds herself alone on a residential street, and the rain begins to fall harder. Desperately, she fumbles in the hip compartment for a small laminated copy of the Suit’s manual. ‘Just call us if you need anything!’ the representative told her when she’d agreed to the giveaway program. The Mobility Suit had just been released earlier that year on an experimental license by Frigg Bionics. The company offered Ruth a free month’s trial for the price of a signature and a few quotes for the website. She’d been nervous to try the rig at first, but her insurance had just denied her a power wheelchair for the 4th year in a row, and Ruth was tired of doctor’s notes and red tape. Fuck it, she thought. Can’t hurt to try. She rifles frantically through the manual, the metal rigging contorting her legs. The assistance line is open Mon-Thurs 8am–5pm. Today is Friday, and Ruth was on her weekly grocery run before an overcast sky turned to drizzle, stopping her in her tracks. ‘For all day use at home’, the manual states, ‘make sure to keep the Frigg Mobility Suit away from liquids or excessive heat’. Ruth doesn’t remember this from the paperwork she’d signed… The manual states Frigg Bionics will service any issues with the Mobility Suit in only 3–5 business days. She stifles something between a

337 Somatechnics laugh and a sob. I’ll be stuck here until next week. As a last-ditch effort, Ruth shakes the rain out of her eyes and dials the neighborhood wheelchair repair service. Pauly picks up on the last ring. ‘Mhm. Mhm. Oh, no’. The Mobility Suit, they tell Ruth, is all custom electronics and proprietary software. They wouldn’t have the parts. But they’ll send someone out anyway, to try to get her out of there. ‘So sorry’, Pauly offers in place of a goodbye. Ruth tries to keep her breathing steady as she waits, flipping through plastic manual pages. ‘WARNING: Tampering with this product will void your warranty’, the manual tells her. She wipes her eyes. By the time the repair van finds her, drenched on the street, Ruth barely has the energy to keep herself upright. Pauly and the team help her into the van, still stuck in the locked-up suit, and rush her to the shop. The straps keeping Ruth’s legs in place are operated by self-locking cushioned belts, cased in carbon fiber. With the system unresponsive, they are finally forced to cut the exoskeleton away from her body. *** Ruth looks at the pieces of the Mobility Suit collected in a box on her kitchen table. Ruth has voided the warranty. An understatement. Panic grips her as she tries to calculate how much of the damage she will be liable for. She should have never risked the trial, not when her Supplemental Security Income (SSI) barely covers groceries. Ruth flips to the last page of the manual, to re-read the terms of her rental yet again.

Narrative Commentary To borrow Corbett OToole’s words – most assistive technologies are ‘damn shitty’. Presenting the crip cyborg as a source of new superhuman powers ignores that assistive technologies are often painful in their contact points with the body. As Alison Kafer (2013) confirms, a brace that makes it easier to walk may cause skin abrasions, a wheelchair causing pressure sores or shoulder pain. Even as such devices become integral to the body, they require constant adjustment or calibration. Intelligent canes may promise bluetooth integration, GPS navigation, and obstacle detection, yet they are not waterproof – assuming that blind people would not use them outside. In our interviews, stories about failed canes made way for similar tales of wheelchairs and motor attachments, many of which are useless or harmful in inclement weather. As our interviews continued, it became clear that tech errors were simply a

338 The ‘Working Body’ fact of tech products. When assistive tech intertwines closely with one’s body, the stakes for failure increase exponentially. As interviewee Liz Henry explained, ‘when people are having a fantasy about exoskeletons, [they think] I’m gonna have a big old body armor suit; I’m going to be like a superhero, I’m going to be like Black Panther. Imagine the real life of how your computer crashes or your brakes fail – and imagine that wrapped around your body, moving you around. It’s quite terrifying’.To ask individuals to rely on undependable technology makes dangerous assumptions about disabled people as ‘tech-needy’, in the words of disability studies scholar Emily Smith Beitiks (2012: 78). Many consumer technology companies prevent repair by requiring the work of authorised vendors or equipment manufacturers, under the guise of safe-guarding intellectual property or quality assurance. Black- boxing practices are especially pertinent to assistive technologies, which are gated behind warranties, medical insurance policies, and delimited customisation. For instance, though wheelchair motor attachments are made from basic bicycle parts that should be easily replaceable to a user’s needs, most product manufacturers refuse to offer specifications that would allow for such alterations. ‘People don’t assume disabled folks fix anything themselves’, claimed Henry. ‘If these are going to be our bodies, we should insist that they be our bodies’, they continued. An answer to these worries, this fiction questions what happens when high-tech solutions to the ‘problem’ of disability go wrong. Drawing from the historic lack of weather-proof technologies, the Frigg Mobility Suit considers what might happen to an individual who is caught in the rain. In this failure state, the user has gone outside the boundaries of expected use – that is, use outside the home – to find their circuits have shorted and repair can only be scheduled days out. As medical technology is promoted as an individual solution, Beitiks contends corporations will facilitate the distribution of techno- makeovers to those in need (2012: 33). In response, Frigg Bionics operates its giveaway program based on a corporate charity model, a common tactic of disability-based marketing. The company offers Ruth a trial of the product in exchange for good press – where initial entry is easy but repairs are costly or impossible with sustained use. To examine the techno-makeover, we interrogate the tightly intertwined barriers of financial access and medical red-tape. Disability and labor have long operated as antonyms; the bottom line is that 76% of disabled people are chronically underemployed, with a third living below the poverty line (Taylor 2004; Crip Camp 2020). OToole echoes Liz Henry, Alice Wong, and Patty Berne when she says she can barely get around the red tape of ‘basic-I-need-this-to-stay-alive’ healthcare. ‘So, don’t fucking talk to me

339 Somatechnics about a bionic ear, you know what I mean?’ she continues. The drive to create new and more expensive ‘solutions’ are viewed as rooted in the profit motive of tech development, paired with the ableist devaluing the unemployed. According to Berne, representing the relationship between cyborg/disabled person as a matter of course obscures the fact that most disabled people in the United States are un- or underemployed. In a context within which almost a third of disabled people live below the poverty line, many of these cyborg technologies remain completely out of reach of the people who are the objects of their design.

The Cyborg Monster

Prosthetics and assistive technologies tend to be designed within a productivist frame, encouraging users to engage independently with daily tasks. Often missing is the capacity for intimate expression. This fiction considers how we might invert design to center crip pleasure.

The ‘Cyborg Monster Manual’ zine We float, suspended in a night sky. We’re made of many arms, many legs – metal and flesh intertwined. There’s no telling where I end and you begin as we move together. No longer a human shape at all, but a twist of gleaming silver edges against softest skin. Asa lays down his pen on the bedside table. Mae and Imani lounge on jumbled covers next to him, propped up on pillows like thrones. Asa taps their shoulders to look, signs the page back to them. ‘What’s yours?’ Asa gestures to Mae. Mae rolls onto her side, and traces Asa’s black-painted lips as she thinks. The cat slinks onto the bed between them, trailing its ginger tail along the open sketchbook before curling under Imani’s chin. ‘To kiss, without coming up for air’. Asa watches Mae’s hands draw a line outward from her throat, grasping her breath out through an imaginary chord. Asa sketches her curly-haired profile, a breathing tube woven from vines and flowers extending from her throat. Imani peeks over Asa’s shoulder as he lays bold strokes in the sketchbook. ‘I’d want interchangeable genitals’, they sign. ‘I’m tired of being the brave disabled girl who gets a pat on the head. Some days I’ma muscular young man with glass arms, an Egyptian sphynx… a pair of Icarus wings’. Their dark face tips up to catch the twinkle lights, arms trailing outward to brush fire along Mae’s shoulder.

***

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Imani rifles through a drawer, pulls out a rectangular scrap of fabric with a hole in the middle and two velcro tabs on one end. A velcro strip lines the other end. They wrap it around their thigh, pressing the velcro edges together. ‘Fits any dildo or vibrator’, they outline the hole with their finger. ‘All you need is to sew in a cock ring, and you can attach it to almost anything’. Mae’s cheeks glow as Imani sends her a wink. ‘How’d you make it?’ Asa holds it up in the low light, following the stitches with his fingers. ‘It’s not too hard. And, just about as close as I can get to interchangeable parts for $5’, Imani pulls the sketchbook over to diagram their work. As they make measurements, the three complain about how little they can afford of the assistive sex market. ‘Like that $300 sex cushion?’ Asa and Mae roll their eyes in unison. ‘Well… what else do you think we can make?’ signs Mae. Over the next few days, sketches and discarded fabric pile up around Asa’s room. Together, they figure out how to sew pillowcases together for a stackable support cushion (‘Here goes your zero gravity, Asa’), and test vibrating motors in their mouths. They play with scarves, rolled towels, showerheads, paperclips, and angled ramps for Imani’s wheelchair.

***

‘I think we’re onto something’. Mae uploads the last of the photocopied zine pages, and begins adding alt-text image descriptions to Asa’s drawings. On the screen are 12 pages of their best hacks and how-to’s, interspersed with illustrations of Mae wrapped in vines and Imani’s muscular glass arms. Asa is hunched in the corner with the sketchbook, putting the finishing touches on the cover, a roiling web of hooks, tentacles, skin, bone, and bionic parts swirled together in black ink. Only the very center is left blank, awaiting a title. ‘What should we call it?’ Asa raises his eyebrows. ‘The Cyborg Monster Manual,’ answers Imani.

Narrative Commentary As noted by Piepzna-Samarasinha, so much crip ingenuity can be located in bed – building community, resting, and creating (2018). It is thus ironic that the image of crips in bed is so underrepresented. From ‘lifelike’ prosthetics to exoskeletons, many assistive solutions

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Figure 2. Cyborg Monster Zine (Source: authors’ own).

only move disabled bodies closer to the unmarked, capital-producing body. ‘Optimisation is everything, speed is everything’, says Alice Wong as we discuss how little room technologies make for intimacy and creativity. This fiction grapples with tech’s voracious appetite for productive bodies, while positioning queer disabled people as active makers of their own pleasure. Among the most powerful examples of this cultural reframing comes from disability activist Connie Panzarino, who took to the streets with a protest sign reading: ‘Trached Dykes Eat Pussy Without Comin’ Up For Air’ (Kafer 2013: 122). ‘Trached’ refers to a tracheotomy, an incision made to the trachea to open up a direct airway. From a cyborgian perspective, the sign brilliantly draws on the idea that technologies can grant superior abilities – albeit in subversive ways. Panzarino’s message isn’t about passing as normal, but rather denormalising in adamant refusal to comply with the bounds of heterosexuality and able-bodiedness (Ibid.). During our conversation, Liz Henry called this ‘cyborg monster’, or the use of technology towards non-normative ends. Mia Mingus, writer and disability justice organiser, calls for moving beyond a politic of desirability to seeing the

342 The ‘Working Body’ monstrous body – a body which shakes, spills, takes up space, needs help, limps, drools, curls over on itself – as powerful, and as magnificent (Mingus 2011). As disabled activists reach for holistic embodiment even at the cost of monstrosity, the very definition of ‘assistive technology’ is slowly expanding. Sex toys not only provide pleasure, but are an assistive device just as a cane or shower chair, as noted by genderqueer sex educator Eva Sweeney in reflecting on remote-operated teledildonics (Sweeney 2018). Blind sex educator Laura Millar takes this observation a step further by innovating sex education access for her visually impaired students. In collaboration with other educators, Millar constructs low-fidelity male anatomical models from sponges, tubing, and other household items to produce low-cost learning tools. In contrast, market-based, medicalised sex chair products by IntimateRider allow quadriplegics to thrust with movement from the upper torso or with assistance from a partner, but are priced at $329. Add-ons like the RiderMate Deluxe, which amount to a stacked cushion, start at $315. The overpriced set is created for the niche assistive market, assuming the disabled user is a straight, cis man having sex with an able-bodied femme partner. ‘We’re constantly making’, asserts OToole. In this fiction, Asa, Mae, and Imani illustrate this activity by upending the pressures of the market by instead collaborating on queered DIY tools to support their fantasies. Imani creates a thigh strap-on, which inspires Mae and Asa to iterate on new uses for quotidian objects. Following in Millar’s footsteps, their blueprints subvert traditional products by being lightweight and cheap – key benchmarks of access. Drawing from the diversity of art, poetry, zines, writing, and theater produced by crips (in and out of bed), we similarly explore the quiet power of DIY publishing as a form of resistance. Asa, Mae, and Imani’s work culminates in a zine called Cyborg Monster, following a rich lineage of disability-focused zines like Ashley Volion’s The Adventures of a Mis/identified Queer Crip (2015), an intimate expression of lust and frustration. In a piece against the desexualising pity of strangers, Volition writes, ‘See people have never been afraid to touch me / pat me on the head’ (2015: 6). Inspired by Volion’s deeply personal artifacts, the characters in this fiction are allowed a chance to collectively share their rage and desires. We use a zine format to invoke the idea of ‘lightweight’ design interaction, opening Asa, Mae, and Imani towards social critique, complaint, and comradery through the very process of creating together (Fox et al. 2020).

343 Somatechnics

The Body as a Collective

The majority of technologies focus their attention on the individual body as a site of change. How might a decentralised assistive tool take shape?

The HelperBot library placard Under the soft light of the banker’s lamp teeters a fortress of books – research for Keelee’s national parks project. ‘Why can’t we take them all, grandpa?’ Thom shifts a gnarled hand on his cane, raises an eyebrow at Keelee, ‘These bones need a little more help now than they used to’. As they deliberate over their keepers, Thom notices a placard on the table. ‘Welcome to the Berkeley Public Library. For the convenience of our visitors, try the HelperBot, a Berkeley Public Works Department initiative to assist you in your transit and mobility needs. Download our app to use the HelperBots stationed outside, free of charge’. ‘How do we get a HelperBot?’ Keelee wrinkles her nose. A young woman in a manual wheelchair, wearing a ventilator mask over her nose and a bright red lip, rolls up languidly beside them. ‘First time?’ She introduces herself as Rose. ‘The HelperBots are new in this neighborhood. They’re made to help you carry all those books home. Watch this’, Rose pulls out her phone and speaks into an app, ‘Call HelperBot’. From around the corner emerges what looks like a motorised basket about 3 feet off the ground, propelled by two wide set wheels towards their table. From the basket extends a set of adjustable handlebars. A small LCD screen blinks with pixel eyes and the HelperBot emits a robotic chirp to announce its presence. Rose explains the voice assist feature, telling them a HelperBot can follow along behind them, help them cross the street, carry things all on its own over short distances, or even turn her chair into a power scooter. ‘Just don’t get stuck behind one on an intersection’, Rose rolls her eyes. Keelee beams as she loads all of her books into the HelperBot’s basket. Its screen flashes heart eyes at her. ‘Thanks for all your help, Rose’, Thom smiles as he leaves with his own HelperBot, the hum of its wheels keeping pace with the staccato taps of his cane. *** Rose unlatches the HelperBot from her wheelchair’s lower tubes and sends it back down the hill. As she closes the last few feet to her house, her phone dings with a message from the HelperBot app:

344 The ‘Working Body’

‘Congratulations on completing your twentieth HelperBot Helping Hand. As a frequent user, we’d like to offer you a spot in our Community Program to track accessibility issues throughout the neighborhood. Allow the HelperBot to track your activity through the built-in camera and send weekly reports to the City of Berkeley’. Rose furrows her brow. Track my activity? She reads on. ‘All findings uploaded to a community database you’ll be able to access from an online portal. Your identity will be completely anonymous’. Rose thinks of the perpetually broken elevator and busted earphone jacks at the 19th Street Bart Station, the cracked curb cuts on her block. She imagines calling on friends to take a kvetch tour through all the most aggravating parts of the neighborhood, with the HelperBots silently recording behind them. Is it worth it? Can I trust it will even get fixed? Her finger hovers over the Accept button.

Narrative Commentary In the fiction above, the City of Berkeley has contracted with industry partner ‘Bluesky Technologies’ to deploy the HelperBot, a dedicated public service built to shift negative perception around the automated delivery robots recently dotting the city sidewalks. The HelperBot is the conceptual descendant of manufacturers like the Amazon Scout, Starship Technologies, and the Kiwibot. Late last year, disabled scholar Emily Ackerman took to Twitter to recall a dangerous encounter with a knee-high robot from Starship. While crossing a busy four-lane road, she was confronted with the delivery robot parked in the curb cut in front of her. As the walk signal ended, Ackerman was trapped in the road facing oncoming traffic. ‘Accessible design’, she insists, ‘should not depend on the ability of an able-bodied design team to understand someone else’s experience’ (Ackerman 2019). Ackerman instead calls for increased participation of disabled people in all stages of the development process, to ensure tech-based care doesn’t further harm marginalised communities. In contrast to existing assistive tech, the HelperBot shifts focus away from ‘fixing’ the individual disabled body toward decentralised support. While transhumanist rhetoric imagines the body as the ultimate site of intervention, disability activists have long opposed this as the only site, fighting to reposition the ‘problem’ of disability onto antagonistic environments. As Costanza-Chock distinguishes, the medical model seeks ‘solutions’ for wheelchair users to help them stop using wheel- chairs, while ‘the social-relational model might seek to ensure that buildings, streets, and bathrooms’ allow mobility for all users (2019: 93). When we asked Corbett OToole to describe the assistive technologies she

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Figure 3. Helper Bot Placard (Source: authors’ own). used in her daily life, she briefly acknowledged her motor chair, before discussing her ramped front door, lowered kitchen counters, raised gardening beds, light switches lowered to 36 inches, and wall plugs raised to 18 inches off the floor, and other home adjustments. Her ‘technologies’ were manifestations of design principles that made her world inherently more navigable, an inexhaustible list of external adaptations. As technology finds its place in care work, our interviewees spoke to the tension between supplementing and offloading support. On the one hand, automating care risks disconnecting communities, particularly when folks are at their sickest, poorest, grumpiest. Though they display a facade of autonomy, many of these sidewalk robots partially depend on hidden human operators – low-wage workers in countries outside the US – to function smoothly (Newitz 2019). On the other hand, care technologies provide easily accessible support when financial means and social capital are hard to come by. Berne noted that crips deserve care in the absence of community, a sentiment shared by other disability justice activists such as Piepzna-Samarasinha. At first glance, a HelperBot assists Thom in carrying a heavy load free of charge, without needing to rely on a professional attendant or

346 The ‘Working Body’ friend. However, ignoring the holistic nature of human assistance assumes a society where that labor and those bodies are discounted (Louise Hickman 2018; Bennett, Rosner, and Taylor 2020). While the HelperBot would provide Thom and Keelee a measure of ‘enhancement’, they are able to use their first HelperBot only with Rose’s help; it is Rose’s act of care which makes the HelperBot meaningful. The HelperBot also tracks infrastructural access challenges through the personal data of disabled individuals, asking to monitor Rose as she goes about her daily life as a wheelchair user. Josh Halstead, a disabled design educator, notes that assistive apps are constantly collecting personal data in order to improve. ‘But does all that data stay within the boundary of the product?’ he asks (2019: 11). Halstead notes that the consequences of data leaks for disabled people have been widely documented, citing discriminatory hiring practices and housing listings. Despite being a not-for-profit and opt-in system, our interviews suggest this inversion does not necessarily redistribute power more equitably to the user. What might data disclosure to a government agency mean for one’s food stamps, SSI, Medicare, and subsidised housing? As Rose wrestles with her choice, she at last considers the possibility that her data may simply disappear inside the black box of the HelperBot app, never to resurface as a visible public good.

Working, Not Working Through each of the above design proposals, our interviewees pushed against the tendency of abled designers and engineers to construct the body as self-contained and invincible. They troubled ableist technologies which reify the notion of a working body as a body at work. In returning to the possibilities of the cyborg, we explore the different notions of ‘working’ that arose in each fiction.

Functioning

Transhumanist rhetoric presumes a cyborg future open to endless possibilities for enhancement, never new problems. Jillian Weise (2018) writes, ‘They like us best with bionic arms and legs… They like exoskeletons, which none of us use… They want us shiny and metallic and in their image’. Wiese holds up these images to the lived realities of cripborgs who depend on technology to stay alive, those with pacemakers or on dialysis, those ‘made ambulatory by wheelchairs’,

347 Somatechnics or on antidepressants. By ignoring tech-relationships which are less shiny, visions of the cyborg are bound to ‘curative’ technologies which purport to erase the problem of chronic illness, pain, or fragility. Disabled scholar Ashley Shew (Nelson et al. 2019) questions why the sight of her prosthetic leg confirms people’s ideas about the redemptive power of technology. ‘My body represents […] a vision of overcoming disability through technology’, she states. Yet, Shew also details the work it takes to maintain a prosthesis, her limp and hip pain. ‘My body is […] not truly poised to yield itself to this technology. I swell and stretch and shrink and blister and dry out and itch and sweat’. Shew asserts that these frictions have never been a topic of public conversation. Technologies themselves are open to functional errors. Even when individuals are able to afford a device, repair and customisation proves difficult through solid-state tech and gated warranties, which depend on the manufacturer to respond to even the smallest adjustments. This is especially troubling considering some of the big ways that technology can fail. In the first fiction, Breakdown of an Exoskeleton,wereflect on an exoskeleton that has been used ‘inappropriately’ (outside in the rain) and the frightening corresponding failure state. Ruth’s body was cinched and contorted, exposing her to pain and a looming financial crisis. Though we present here just one possible failure state, there are countless others one might be subject to, say if the Wi-Fi-enabled exoskeleton is hacked and controlled by a third party or simply runs out of power. Even if an electronic release system could be mitigated with a manual override, would it necessitate assistance? From conversations with our interviewees, we know that the ‘problem’ of disability, for both humans and technology, is only displaced under the guise of functionality.

Not-working

In discussing her relationship to traditional notions of labor and value, Oakland-based painter and disability rights activist Sunaura ‘Sunny’ Taylor (2004), confesses, ‘I do not work. I am on SSI. I have very little work value (if any), and I am a drain on our country’s welfare system’. Under implicit cultural conditioning, the ‘working body’ becomes a self-regulated focal point for productivity, while simultaneously char- acterising someone who is financially dependent or not employed as ‘a waste of space’. While Taylor may have concerns for her livelihood, it never occurred to her to question her life’s value as ‘non-productive’.

348 The ‘Working Body’

Instead, Taylor pursues the activity she finds most rewarding and valuable, painting. OToole confirms Taylor’s description, pointing also to the transformative work fellow activist Alice Wong does every day as an organiser and leader in the disability community. ‘But on paper’, OToole says, ‘Alice is a welfare bum, unemployable’. Even as interviewees expanded the definition of valued work, they also surfaced the possibilities of not-working – of leisure, creativity, and crip embodiment. In The Cyborg Monster, we highlight intimacy as a key feature of that experience, exploring technologies which center pleasure rather than ‘assistance’ in ambulating, shopping, or at work. But crip pleasure and sexuality are presumed simply not to exist in the mainstream. Disabled activist Denise Jacobson recounts how doctors were so incredulous that she could engage in a consensual sex that they mistakenly removed her healthy appendix, before correctly diagnosing her with a sexually transmitted infection (Crip Camp 2020). Her story resembles many of those with whom we spoke, who described being viewed as desexualised bodies. In keeping with disabled sex educators from Millar to Sweeney, Shew asserts that pleasure and joy exist (and have always existed) for crips, not in some future form when the body is enhanced. The work of creating and queering technologies of pleasure fell then on three disabled makers in our fiction, who draw on a prolific body of art, poetry, and zines produced by crips in imagining new DIY tools.

Labor Behind the Scenes

Underneath the ‘shiny and metallic’ image presented by assistive technologies, there is hidden work happening behind the scenes. The Body as a Collective fiction highlights the extractive data practices and false sense of autonomy that come with many emergent artificially intelligent (AI) systems. For example, we reference Facebook’s practice of limiting which users can see certain advertisements, sorting people into categories such as ‘interested in deaf-culture’ or ‘assistant dog’ (Halstead 2019). Such algorithmic sorting breaches federal health privacy and anti-discrimination legislation, targeting disabled individuals in the spheres of housing or employment (Halstead 2019). Here, HelperBots are introduced by the city to mitigate controversy surround- ing existing delivery robots, yet numerous examples show how AI drawing on historical data risks exacerbating bias (Benjamin 2019). Ackerman’s encounter with the Starship sidewalk robot, for instance, shows how the exclusive consideration of able-bodied foot traffic

349 Somatechnics patterns puts wheelchair-users in danger. Though tech advances ‘are sold as morally superior’ in their supposed transcendence of human bias, technology and race scholar Ruha Benjamin argues they could not exist ‘without data produced through histories of exclusion and discrimination’ (2019: 16). Therefore, despite the ‘neutral or benevolent’ (Ibid.: 14) intentions of the HelperBot, Rose not only worries for her safety under the eye of the HelperBot’s surveillance, but also doubts the HelperBot’s beneficial capacities to transform the environment. This is relevant especially when we see that the results of automated systems are often privileged above human knowledge (Bennett & Keyes 2020: 3). Though Rose may contribute her data in hopes of fine-tuning the HelperBot, she cannot know whether the HelperBot will report inaccessible infrastructure. She discloses her data in hopes of the best, but simultaneously transfers decision making to an AI system over which she has little control.

Conclusion A transhumanist philosophy promises technological enhancement of the human condition, marked by a quest for cyborg embodiment. Following the diffusion of transhumanist ideals throughout industry, the cyborg body implies a future with higher levels of output, at superhuman capacity, and with fewer errors (McKinsey Global Institute 2016). Disabled bodies are commonly regarded as ‘original cyborgs’ in transhumanist futuring, outfitted with bionic limbs and intelligent canes in the hopes that they will be optimised – or, at the very least, normalised. Assistive technologies thus operate under a productivist ethos which conflates a working body with a valuable one. Far from being seamless, disabled individuals are forced to shoulder steep physical, social, and financial burdens to utilise assistive technologies. With and through their design concepts, our interviewees began to instead explore assistive devices that center the values of disability communities, rather than reinforce an optimisation rhetoric. While disability communities are rich sites of techno-symbiosis, disability justice rejects identifying with the transhumanist cyborg. By contrast, disability communities define a transformative move toward the cripborg (Weise 2018, Nelson et al. 2019). The design speculations presented here highlight that while the cyborg body may be self-sufficient and seamless, the cripborg body is both capable of and reliant on repair. While the cyborg body dictates productivity as a form of normalcy, the cripborg body celebrates leisure and pleasure even at the cost of outward ‘monstrosity’. Finally, while the cyborg body is constructed by an elitist

350 The ‘Working Body’ corporate narrative, the cripborg is maintained by the ingenuity, creativity, and expertise of disabled people working together in networks of mutual aid. The vision of the cripborg imagines a future distinct from transhumanist ideals, and with it, a new politics for design. Drawing on our interviews, we offer the following considerations for reimagining assistive technologies. Firstly, a cripborg orientation centers disabled people as makers, fixers, and knowledge-makers in technology design. OToole tells of a recent make-a-thon she participated in for assistive technologies, where she was not even allowed to hold equipment because it was deemed too dangerous by the ‘official’ designers performing charity. ‘It’s not about disabled people’, she says, ‘because if it was really about disabled people, it would be disabled parents designing for disabled kids, it would be disabled adults involved within technology-making – and those people aren’t involved’. Including disabled people as agents in the design process also ensures committing to a spectrum of physical and financial access, to continually ask: Who can afford this product? Will insurance cover it? Does it require able-bodied assistance to use? Was it tested with diverse disability communities? What happens when it inevitably breaks down, and who has access to the process of repair? Because assistive devices often chafe in their contact points with the body or become unreliable over time, crip-centered solutions elevate low-tech or no-tech solutions. In doing so, the ethos of the cripborg relocates the ‘problem’ of disability away from the individual, focusing instead on decentralised environmental adap- tations such as ramps and elevators, equitable healthcare, policy shifts, and mutual aid projects. Disability justice asserts that the disabled body is not broken, but magnificent (Mingus 2011). By moving beyond a productivist drive to fix, normalise, or optimise, the new goals of techno-symbiosis can expand to include repair, caregiving, and pleasure.

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We prioritize posts that will feature highly in search rankings, that are shareable and that will drive readers to your article on the EUP site.

4. Word count, style, and formatting

• Flexible length, however typical posts range 70-600 words. • Related images and media files are encouraged. • No heavy restrictions to the style or format of the post, but it should best reflect the content and topic discussed.

5. Linking policy

• Links to external blogs and websites that are related to the author, subject matter and to EUP publishing fields are encouraged, e.g.to related blog posts

6. Submit your post

Submit to [email protected]

If you’d like to be a regular contributor, then we can set you up as an author so you can create, edit, publish, and delete your own posts, as well as upload files and images.

7. Republishing/repurposing

Posts may be re-used and re-purposed on other websites and blogs, but a minimum 2 week waiting period is suggested, and an acknowledgement and link to the original post on the EUP blog is requested.

8. Items to accompany post

• A short biography (ideally 25 words or less, but up to 40 words) • A photo/headshot image of the author(s) if possible. • Any relevant, thematic images or accompanying media (podcasts, video, graphics and photographs), provided copyright and permission to republish has been obtained. • Files should be high resolution and a maximum of 1GB • Permitted file types: jpg, jpeg, png, gif, pdf, doc, ppt, odt, pptx, docx, pps, ppsx, xls, xlsx, key, mp3, m4a, wav, ogg, zip, ogv, mp4, m4v, mov, wmv, avi, mpg, 3gp, 3g2.