Roundtable: Navigating Technoscience and Disability Worlds

This contribution examines the intersection of rehabilitative, therapeutic, and medical technologies with disability, emphasizing how these innovations have often aimed to "fix" nonnormative bodies. Drawing on critical disability studies, it considers the potentially oppressive effects of curative approaches while highlighting the everyday practices through which disabled people adapt, modify, and reconfigure inaccessible environments. Using the concept of disability worlds, the contribution argues that lived experience of disability fosters creativity and innovation in technological and infrastructural domains. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach across Asian, European, and U.S. contexts, the essay examines the tensions among technological repair, normalization, disability expertise, and agency. By emphasizing microhistories, patient voices and collaborative networks of knowledge and care, it shows how technologies may normalize and exclude while also being, adapted, repaired, and reconfigured within disability worlds.