Author Meets Readers | Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal
Thursday, October 29, 2026 from 5:00 pm to 6:30 pm
- In-Person event
- Irene’s Pub Restaurant , Ottawa , ON , K1S 3W4
About the Book
From Munchausen by Tiktok to wellness apps to online communities to AI, the DISCO Network explores the possibilities that technoskepticism can create.
This is a book about possibility and refusal in relation to new technologies. Though refusal is an especially powerful mode—particularly for those who have historically not been given the option to say no—people of color and disabled people have long navigated the space between saying yes and saying no to the newest technologies. Technoskepticism relates some of these stories to reveal the possibilities skepticism can create.
The case for technoskepticism unfolds across three sections: the first focused on disability, the creative use of wellness apps, and the desire for diagnosis; the second on digital nostalgia and home for Black and Asian users who produced communities online before home pages gave way to profiles; and the third focused on the violence inherent in A.I.-generated Black bodies and the possibilities for Black style in the age of A.I. Acknowledging how the urge to refuse new technologies emerges from specific racialized histories, the authors also emphasize how care can look like an exuberant embrace of the new.
About the Author
M. Remi Yergeau (they/them/theirs) is a Canada Research Chair in Critical Disability Studies and Communication and associate professor of Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University. They currently run the Digital Accessible Futures Lab as a part of the DISCO Network. Yergeau’s scholarly interests traverse rhetoric and communication, critical disability studies, digital studies, and trans and queer rhetorics. Their book, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness (Duke UP, 2017), received three book awards. Along with 13 colleagues from DISCO, Yergeau is a co-author of Technoskepticism (Stanford UP, 2025). Most recently, they are a co-editor of Neurofutures: Neurodiversity in Crip Time along with Elizabeth Donaldson, Diana Paulin, and Ralph Savarese, which is forthcoming from NYU Press.
About the Panelists
Miranda J. Brady (she/her) is an associate professor in Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University. Her research explores issues in Motherhood Studies and Critical Autism Studies as they intersect with Communication and Media Studies. She is author of the University of Toronto Press book, Mother Trouble: Mediations of White Maternal Angst After Second Wave Feminism (2024). She co-edited the 2022 Studies in Social Justice special issue, Autism_Media_Social Justice and has authored or co-authored more than 20 peer-reviewed book chapters and articles in the Journal of Gender Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Autism, and Neurodiversity among others.
Rayvon Fouché (he/him/his) holds a joint appointment as Professor of Communication Studies and Professor in the Medill School of Journalism, Media, and Integrative Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. He authored or edited Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), Appropriating Technology: Vernacular Science and Social Power (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), Technology Studies (Sage Publications, 2008), the 4th Edition of the Handbook of Science & Technology Studies (MIT Press, 2016), and Game Changer: The Technoscientific Revolution in Sports (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017). He previously held faculty appointments in the Science and Technology Studies Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the History Department and the Information Trust Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the American Studies program in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Purdue University, and was a postdoctoral fellow in African & African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Most recently he served as Division Director of Social and Economic Sciences within the Directorate of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the National Science Foundation.
Jeff Nagy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at York University. He is a historian of computing and AI, currently focused on the intersection of AI development, the behavioral sciences, and disability. He holds a PhD in Communication from Stanford University. With the DISCO Network, he is a co-author of Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal (Stanford University Press, 2025). His research and writing have appeared in Parapraxis, n+1, New Media and Society, Technology and Culture, and elsewhere.
Rianna Walcott is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland, and Associate Director of the Black Communication and Technology lab. Her research explores Black communication practices, locating ‘Black British’ identity against the wider Black diaspora. With the DISCO Network she is a co-author of Technoskepticism (Stanford University Press, 2025), and she is currently exploring (with disgust) the increasing use of generative AI tools to mimic Black speech styles and aesthetics online. Since 2024, Dr. Walcott has led the ‘Black Homeplaces’ project, a collaborative research project that uses VR to explore diasporic placemaking and archival practices.