Kelly Fritsch
Sociology and Anthropology
| Phone: | 613-520-2600 x 2617 |
| Email: | kellyfritsch@cunet.carleton.ca |
| Website: | Browse |
Research Interests
My research engages social theory, feminist disability studies and crip theory, feminist science and technology studies, political economy, and the sociology of health, illness, and medicine. Some of my current research projects include developing the field of crip technoscience by taking up the politics of community accessibility and the production and circulation of body enhancement and capacitation technologies such as robotic exoskeletons, prosthetics, and personal assistive devices; a critical examination of how neoliberal economic policies and practices as well as economies of war, imperialism, and colonialism impact disabled communities and disability politics; and collaborative projects engaging with the practices of precision and personalized medicine and their relation to neoliberalized forms of risk and population governance to mark how practices such as tailored drug regimens or personalized genetic therapies alter our shared understandings of disability, ability, health, and illness. Overall, my research is committed to creating and expanding frameworks and practices of social justice by building on my experiences as a disabled woman and through challenging the inequitable cultural and material productions of difference.
Accessibility
My work engages ways of knowing, experiencing, and cultivating accessibility through the lenses of disability justice, crip theory, and feminist disability studies. This means challenging the idea that accessibility is only about some bodies and not others (e.g. a wheelchair user vs a non-disabled person). Instead, my work seeks to reimagine accessibility as a shifting, frictional, and relation practice rather than as a mode of solving individualized problems.
Selected Publications
Fritsch, Kelly, Aimi Hamraie, Mara Mills, and David Serlin, eds. 2019. “Crip Technoscience.” Special Issue of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. 5(1):1-269.
Hamraie, Aimi and Kelly Fritsch. 2019. “Crip Technoscience Manifesto.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. 5(1): 1-33.
Fritsch, Kelly. 2019. “Ramping Up Canadian Disability Culture.” In The Spaces and Places of Canadian Popular Culture, edited by Victoria Kannen and Neil Shyminsky, 265-272. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press.
Fritsch, Kelly. 2019. “The Trouble with Engineering Inclusion: Disabled Mothering at the limit of Enhancement Technology.” In Motherhood and Social Exclusion, edited by Christie Byvelds and Heather Jackson, 147-160. Bradford, ON: Demeter Press.
Fritsch, Kelly. 2019. “Body Enhancement.” In Disability in American Life: An Encyclopedia of Concepts, Policies, and Controversies, edited by Tamar Heller, Sarah Parker Harris, Carol Gill, and Robert Gould, 70-73. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO.
McGuire, Anne and Kelly Fritsch. 2019. “Fashioning the ‘Normal’ Body.” In Power and Everyday Practices edited by Deborah Brock, Aryn Martin, R. Raby, and Mark Thomas, 79-99. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Fritsch, Kelly. 2016. “Accessible.” In Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late Capitalist Struggle, edited by Kelly Fritsch, Clare O’Connor, and AK Thompson, 23-28. Chico, CA: AK Press.
Fritsch, Kelly. 2013. “Neoliberal Circulation of Good Affects: Happiness, Accessibility, and the Capacitation of Disability.” Health, Culture and Society 5(1): 135–149.