Prefigurative Politics and Passionate Witnessing
Rua M. Williams, LouAnne E. Boyd · 2019 · Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2019) · doi:10.1145/3308561.3355617
Summary
This experience report traces the unlikely partnership between two researchers — Rua Williams, an autistic disability studies scholar and activist, and LouAnne Boyd, a former behaviour therapist turned HCI researcher — whose work initially placed them on opposite sides of a critical divide in assistive technology research for autistic people. Williams had published critical analyses arguing that wearable technologies designed for autistic users were rooted in deficit-based misconceptions about autistic capacity for empathy, emotion, and human connection, and that the field was dominated by interventions for social conformity rather than tools supporting autistic self-determination. Boyd’s prior work was among those critiqued. The paper uses an alternating first-person narrative structure, with each author reflecting on the events and internal experiences that led to their meeting at ASSETS and subsequent collaboration. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of "situated knowledges" and the critique of the "modest witness" — the notion that only certain researchers are considered objective while others are dismissed as biased — the paper introduces "passionate witnessing" as an alternative to the pretence of dispassionate objectivity. From disability justice activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, they adopt "prefigurative politics": the practice of enacting the future you want to see rather than waiting for the right time to seek justice.
Key findings
The paper reveals through personal narrative how structural dynamics in accessibility research can perpetuate harm. Williams describes reviewing the literature on wearable technologies for autism and finding a field dominated by technologies for social conformity training — teaching autistic people to modify their vocal prosody, facial expressions, and behaviour to appear more neurotypical — while technologies supporting executive function, motor coordination, communication, and sensory regulation were "almost nowhere to be found." Boyd recounts her experience designing the sayWAT wearable prosody device: when autistic participants received constant alerts about their "flat" voice, they chose to ignore the alerts entirely, revealing they wanted to understand others’ prosody, not receive feedback about their own. Boyd’s critical realisation was that she had never asked the adults whether they wanted this technology before building it. The paper also documents how the academy’s demand for "objectivity" can silence disabled researchers — Williams’ qualifying exam reviewers characterised critical disability studies perspectives as "hostile," "biased," and requiring a "more dispassionate presentation," while the work being critiqued (which enacts what Williams calls "dispassionate violence" against autistic communities) was accepted without similar scrutiny of its assumptions. Their meeting at a conference — where Boyd attended Williams’ critical presentation and then invited Williams to her poster — became a model for how critique can lead to partnership rather than adversarial breakdown.
Relevance
This paper is essential reading for anyone working in accessibility and assistive technology research. It challenges the field to examine whose perspectives are centred in the design of technologies for disabled people, and whether the technologies we build serve disabled users’ own goals or impose normative conformity. The concept of passionate witnessing — openly acknowledging one’s positionality and lived experience as a form of rigour rather than bias — offers an alternative to the fiction of objectivity that can mask ableist assumptions embedded in research. For practitioners, the concrete example of the sayWAT device is instructive: a well-intentioned wearable prosody trainer became counterproductive because it was designed from expert knowledge about atypical prosody rather than from autistic people’s expressed needs. The paper’s model of how critical engagement between a disabled scholar-activist and a non-disabled researcher transformed from potential adversarial conflict into productive collaboration offers a replicable pattern for the field. The call for prefigurative politics — building the inclusive, just research community now rather than waiting for institutional change — challenges accessibility researchers to examine their own practices immediately.
Tags: critical disability studies · autism · research ethics · disability justice · participatory design · research methodology · ableism · neurodiversity · reflexivity