PhD Oral Exam - Puneet Jain, Individualized Program in Social Science

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

Disability Justice (DJ), a disabled-led movement for collective liberation, is increasingly being invoked within Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to move accessibility beyond accommodation, fixation, and technological repair. Yet, while HCI acknowledges the disabled artists, activists, and performance communities from which DJ emerged, there remains limited attention to what sustained engagement with disability culture with its activist and artistic practices – might demand of the field. This dissertation emerged through my own trajectory as a non-disabled HCI researcher drawn toward artistic practice, uneasy with engineering conventions, and beginning to work alongside disabled artists and activists Eric Desrosiers, Christian Bayerlein, and Hema Kumari. These collaborations became the ground from which this thesis examines how disability-led co-creative practices might reorient accessibility, assistive technology, and the researcher’s role, making Disability Justice less a framework to be applied than a practice to follow.

Situated across HCI, eXtended Reality (XR), Disability Studies, and Research-Creation, the dissertation takes XR as an anchor through which to investigate HCI’s engagement with Disability Justice. It situates XR as a contested sociotechnical medium shaped by normative imaginaries of bodies and interaction and traces the co-development of accessible mouth-based interaction in XR through three artistic works: Crip Sensorama: Eric’s Paintings, Crip Sensorama: Christian’s Coffee, and Waiting for Hands. Through sustained allyship with art-activist practices shared with disabled collaborators and friends, the thesis traces how Disability Justice came to shape my research practice, leading me to reimagine assistive technologies not simply as access solutions, but as provocations: exposing and unsettling ableist assumptions that persist within accessibility research despite good intentions.

This dissertation thus argues that HCI cannot engage Disability Justice by applying it as a fixed design framework. Such engagement requires sustained accountability to the artistic, activist, and relational worlds in which access is already practiced, contested, and reimagined.