JHI-UTSC Digital Humanities Faculty Fellow
Aparna Nair is an historian and occasional anthropologist of disability, race, technology, medicine, and public health in South Asia, with emerging interests in animal studies/history and popular culture. Her work is fundamentally interdisciplinary, and driven by her interest in exploring the pasts, presents and possible futures of disability. Her research is also undeniably shaped by her own experiences of epilepsy, and part of her research involves hospital-based ethnographic explorations of epilepsy and its meanings for identity, belonging, family and community. In her teaching, she is committed to both the public and digital humanities, and to disability justice as an organizing principle.
Fellowship Project—Everyday Technologies and the Experience of Disability in India, 1900-1990
Whether referring to prostheses or Braille presses or reading software, technology has routinely been pitched as a particularly important “panacea” to the “problem” of disability. Technology is seen as approximating normalcy in disabled populations; as facilitating anti-poverty efforts, increasing social participation, and improving access; in short, transforming disabled bodies into approximations of “normal.” But how have disabled people experienced technology in India? This interdisciplinary project will examine experience and identity through the lens of assistive technology in India in the 20th century and will be published in open access format.