Biography

Dr Louise Hickman is a Senior Research Officer with the JUST-AI Network at the Ada Lovelace Institute. An academic, artist, activist, she earned her PhD in Communication from the University of California, San Diego in 2018, and most recently held a postdoctoral position in the Feminist Labor Lab at UC San Diego. Dr Hickman is a member of the Critical Design Lab.

Her academic work focuses on the automation of accessibility for disabled people, as well as on questions of social justice and processes of exclusion that are driven by the politics of austerity. She uses ethnographic, archival, and theoretical approaches to consider the co-production of accessible aesthetics. 

Her current manuscript project, 'The Automation of Access', examines how access is produced by real-time stenographers and transcriptive technologies. She uses an interdisciplinary lens drawing on feminist theory, critical disability studies, and science and technology studies to consider the historical conditions of access work, and the ways access emerges out of the complex interactions between human labour, technological systems, and economic models and conditions.