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People with disabilities are often perceived as being “given” the opportunity to work, rather than “providing” valuable labor. Centering on disabled data workers as experts involved in the quotidian construction of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in China, this article shows that disability expertise and labor can afford a technical edge to AI systems in a certain political economy. In the case examined, the work of consistently synchronizing interpretations of the ambiguous data and elusive rules of smart home systems prefers a stable annotation workforce with coordinated cognition and trained judgment. This technical demand has come to be met by a committed team of skilled disabled workers, who are pushed out from mainstream job market by systemic ableism, and pulled in by disability-informed expertise that reconfigures space, time, and political economy to meet non-normative bodyminds. Through this exceptional case run by a disabled people led organization, I draw attention to disabled people’s under-examined role as system-builders of information technologies as opposed to users, victims, or inspirations, and highlight the transformative potential of disability expertise.
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The Worthiness of Disability: Economization and Exception in Veteran and Non-Veteran Worlds
Roughly half of all post-9-11 U.S. veterans peruse disability claims through the Veteran’s Health Administration (VA), a highly technical and bureaucratic process through which veterans are often guided by certified counselors. The benefits to which they may become entitled are politically and culturally sacrosanct. This was not always the case, but now, as the VA finds itself engulfed in scandal after scandal, and the federal government swings from budget crisis to budget crisis, veterans’ disabilities, especially those acquired during the exceptional work of war, seem increasingly economized and increasingly valuable. Seemingly a world away, Americans’ with disabilities comprise more than half of the nation’s Medicaid expenditures, expenditures that have been among the lowest hanging of sacrificial political fruit (vis Medicaid block granting and work requirements). The economization of these “unexceptional” disabilities increasingly insinuates they are worthless, hence the need to insist that “disabled lives matter.” Deploying “worthiness” as an analytic that combines the spheres of value and virtue that liberal reckonings attempt to keep distinct, this paper works through ethnography and economization as well as recent work on the worth of disability to muddle the distinction between the exceptional worth of injured soldiers and the unexceptional worthlessness attached to other disabled people, moving between biopolitics and biolegitimacy, and working away from a distinction between populations and toward figures and moments of resemblance.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1751639
- PAR ID:
- 10090508
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- American Ethnological Association
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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