Recording CripTech: Using the Archive
Oct 2, 2026 1-2pm Eastern/ 10-11am Pacific
The Recording CripTech digital archive documents the creative, collaborative work of disabled artists who were in residence with the Leonardo CripTech Incubator in 2022-23. After a soft launch in November 2025, Recording CripTech will be available to the public in September on Ground Works, a2ru’s online platform for arts-integrated research. Accessibility is at the core of the archive. With notes, interviews, early iterations, and more, the archive is of interest to researchers and teachers of disability studies, history of art, science and technology studies, and related fields, as well as to artists and disability communities.
a2ru invites everyone to an open webinar on October 2, “Recording CripTech: Using the Archive,” a moderated conversation among researchers, educators, access professionals and attendees. This webinar is co-presented with Leonardo/ISAST.
Registration
In keeping with the open-access mission of Ground Works, this webinar is free and open to all. Please register using the link below.
Panelists
Elizabeth McLain (moderator)
Elizabeth McLain (she/her, Assistant Professor of Musicology and Director of Disability Studies, Virginia Tech) is a chronically ill rollator-wielding autistic who aims to transform music scholarship through the principles of disability justice. Thanks to the Mellon Foundation, McLain co-directs the Disability Community Technology Center with Ashley Shew and leads Open the Gates Gaming. With the support of the NEH and ACLS, her a2ru’s Ground Works team documented the inaugural CripTech incubator with an emphasis on ethical consent processes and access. Recent publications include “Unseen Sound: One Step into the Blind Future (Academic Access Version),” with Andy Slater in Leonardo.
Oliver Shuey
Oliver (he/him) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Science, Technology, & Society and a participant in the Women’s and Gender Studies certificate program at Virginia Tech. He is a graduate research assistant for the Disability Community Technology (DisCoTec) Center shared between VT and UNC, Charlotte. His dissertation research is a critical reflection on movements for social change in US engineering throughout the twentieth century.
Liza Sylvestre
(Please note: Liza Sylvestre will be presenting on her collaborative work with Christopher Robert Jones, included in the bio and photo here). Christopher Robert Jones and Liza Sylvestre are transdisciplinary artists and writers based in Illinois. Through their art, research and pedagogic projects they explore how the complication of the normative sensory hierarchy can function as conceptual and aesthetic material. They approach arts as a potential site to both share experience and to form new ways of understanding the intersection of senses, access, and learned systems of communication. They are Research Assistant Professors at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign where they co-founded Crip*—Cripistemology and the Arts, a creative and experimental research lab and pedagogical initiative housed within the College of Fine and Applied Arts. Their work has been shown internationally at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, US), The Irish Film Institute (Dublin, IE), Plains Art Museum (Fargo, US), Weisman Art Museum (Minneapolis, US), John Hansard Gallery (Southampton, UK), Argos (Brussels, BE), The Soap Factory (Minneapolis, US), Gallery 400 (Chicago, US), BFI Southbank (London, UK), MIT List Visual Arts Center (Cambridge, US), Zimmerli Art Museum (New Jersey, US), Museum für Neue Kunst (Freiburg im Breisgau, DE), Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (San Diego, US), Museum Marta Herford (Herford, DE), O-Overgarden (Copenhagan, DK), and Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt, DE). They have been the recipients of numerous grants and fellowships including a Creative Capital award, a grant from the Mellon Foundation, a Joan Mitchell Fellowship, an Arts Work Grant from the NEA, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany fellowship.
Crystal Yin Lie
Crystal Yin Lie is Associate Professor of Comparative World Literature at California State University, Long Beach, where she teaches disability studies, health humanities, and comics & graphic narratives. Her research focuses on contemporary literature, life writing, and popular media about dementia and the memory of historical trauma as well as disability in comics and graphic narratives. Her work is published in the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Journal, American Journal of Community Psychology, and Literature & Medicine (forthcoming). She is currently co-editing the Palgrave Handbook in Disability in Comics and previously co-edited Sex, Identity, Aesthetics: The Work of Tobin Siebers and Disability Studies (University of Michigan Press, 2021).