As systems of domination increasingly grip the academy with anti-intellectual, anti-democratic, and uncaring force, professors like me despair: what can we do? I have found a way to hope again through research praxis rooted in the testimony of the historically and multiply-minoritized. In dialogue with bell hooks, I will share my story as a western, white, wealthy woman with a disability who constructs Accessible Computing research in mutually-caring relationship with the community. In doing so, I extend bell hooks’s critical pedagogy to research and show how adding “ableist” to hooks’s refrain “imperialist, white-supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy” can expand our capacity to care. When we do research that cultivates a multicultural and multiability community; when we dare to share our lived truth and vulnerability with the other; when we theory our lives and live our theories–then research is the practice of freedom.
| 11:45am - 12:15pm: | Food and community socializing. |
| 12:15pm - 1:15pm: | Presentation with Q&A. Available hybrid via Zoom. |
| 1:30pm - 2:15pm: | Student meeting with speaker, held in CSE2/Gates 371. Students will walk to this from the seminar. |
Stacy Branham is an Associate Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. Branham’s research investigates interdependence and technology in multiability social settings where one or more people is disabled, yielding actionable design guidance and proof of concept prototypes. Branham has authored over 40 peer-reviewed publications at top venues, earning 5 best paper awards and 6 honorable mentions. Her work has been supported by over $24 million from Jacobs Foundation, Toyota, Intel, and the NSF. She currently serves as an Associate Editor of TOCHI journal and Program Co-Chair for ASSETS 2026. In 2021, she received the NSF CAREER Award and was named one of the “Brilliant 10” rising STEM researchers by Popular Science. She earned her Ph.D. in 2014 and her B.S. in 2007, both from Virginia Tech’s Department of Computer Science.