Bioethicist Ashley Shew’s Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement is not a typical “disabled memoir or crip story.” 

American University’s 2024 Writer as Witness selection doesn’t open with the harrowing and heart-wrenching story of how Shew became a “hard-of-hearing, chemo-brained amputee with Crohn’s disease and tinnitus” whom well-meaning people stop in the grocery store to call “an inspiration.” 

“I hate that disabled people are forced to tell their stories,” writes the professor of science, technology, and society at Virginia Tech and cofounder of the Disability Community Technology (DisCoTec) Center, a collaboration with the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “I just don’t think most disability origin stories are very interesting. Mine certainly is not.”

Disability as unremarkable is at the heart of the book, one of the first in the new Norton Shorts series featuring bold thinking and fresh perspectives on topics such as race, colonialism, and AI from leading-edge scholars—all in under 200 pages. In her small but mighty manifesto, released in September 2023, Shew explores mobility devices, medical infrastructure, neurodiversity, and the critical relationship between race and disability. 

More than 15 percent of the global population—about 1 billion people—have been diagnosed with a physical, psychiatric, learning, developmental, sensory, or cognitive disability. “Even though we have so much science about disability, we’re never told that it’s a normal and natural part of the human existence,” Shew writes.

Eventually, nearly all “temporarily able-bodied” people, or TABs, who live long enough will become disabled. “Like death and taxes, aging is inevitable,” Shew writes. “We should always be planning with disability in mind, because disability is an inherent part of having squishy meat bodies.” 

The future is disabled, she says, and in the coming years, “we should expect both more ways to be disabled and more people existing with disabilities”—the result not only of aging but of new and emerging diseases like COVID-19, changing weather and natural disasters caused by climate change, and even space travel. 

To prepare for a disabled future that is more accessible and inclusive, Shew says we must learn to recognize and root out ableism—systems of discrimination and oppression that favor nondisabled lives and ways of being, often under the guise of empowerment. Among those systems is what she’s coined “technoableism,”the harmful belief that technological wizardry is a “solution” for disability. 

These technologies are as numerous as the communities they are intended to “fix.” Fidget spinners help autistic people have “quiet hands,” while prosthetic legs enable amputees to walk “normally.” 

Antidepressants, pacemakers, wheelchairs, heating pads, hearing aids, mobility vans, ostomy bags, and even left-handed scissors are all examples of technologies that are intended to—and often do—make life easier for the disabled, Shew says. But while disability advocates have long demanded “nothing about us without us,” the technologies are largely designed by engineers, scientists, and others without the lived experience of navigating a world built for someone else.

“Disabled people are often on the front lines of tech users; we are considered the first testing ground for new tech like exoskeletons, closed captioning, automatic door openers, text-to-voice and voice-to-text software, and more—tech that is then picked up by all,” writes Shew. Yet “disabled people are almost never included in discussions about what technology means and how it integrates into daily life [and] what it means to be human in our modern world.”

Technoableism makes disabled people see themselves as chronically incomplete, she says, and distracts from the real social ill—that “the world is set up to exclude disabled people.” 

It’s an urgent and unnerving thesis, which is why the book was selected for this year’s Writer as Witness program, says Daisy Levy, a senior professorial lecturer in the Department of Literature and chair of the selection committee.

“Disability is not new territory,” Levy says. “It’s deeply relevant and runs through everything that’s happening in the world. But topically, it was something the program hadn’t yet delved into—and our students need to be engaged in conversations about disability.”

Now in its 27th year, the Writer as Witness program convenes all first-year students around a community text that they read over the summer before meeting the author in early fall. 

“I was so impressed with students at American,” says Shew, who spoke at Bender Arena on September 4. “They’re thinking progressively about disability in exciting ways and are so interested in the practical policy implications of anti-ableism. I was pleased that a lot of their questions and discussions sought to find solutions to really hard problems.”

The Writer as Witness text—always a work of nonfiction published within the last five years—explores challenging, sometimes controversial themes like corrections, White supremacy, and genocide, which are woven into the first-year writing curriculum. A diversity of voices and perspectives is also important, Levy says.

Against Technoableism “sparked important discussions among our students about agency, selfhood, and the narratives that nondisabled people tell themselves about the disabled community,” Levy says. “[Shew] is sassy and snarky, and she doesn’t pussyfoot around difficult topics, which I respect immensely.” 

Shew was struck by the interactions she had after the colloquium with AU students who revealed to her their own disabilities. One student with “chemo brain”—a term coined by former chemotherapy patients for the treatment’s short-term and permanent effects on memory, focus, information processing, and cognition—told Shew, who describes the condition in the book, that it was a relief not to have to explain it to classmates.

“They were grateful that their peers now had a vocabulary around disability”—a word bank that does not include “differing abilities,” “handicapabilities,” or other frothy euphemisms “that do away with the dis-,” Shew says. 

She encourages the use of the word “disability” as a practical matter. “We can’t easily find each other and resources on the internet, for example, if we’re not glomming on to the same language,” Shew says, adding that the term also invokes a political community in a way that “handicapped” does not. 

“I love that the word came from our community,” she says. “Reclaiming [it] as part of disabled identity is at the center of the contemporary disability rights movement. When I use it, I’m honoring my disabled elders.”

Shew reminds her readers that disability is neither an inability nor a liability. Disability, she says, prompts innovation, offers new perspectives, and fosters inclusion. Disability is not a problem to be fixed—it holds the solutions for the future.

“I want there to be more space for disabled existence, disabled creativity, disabled planning, disabled flourishing, disabled life, disabled expertise, disabled everything.”