Rua Williams
Rua M. Williams is an assistant professor in the User Experience Design program at Purdue University. They study interactions between technology design, computing research practices, and Disability Justice. Williams deploys feminist and antiracist approaches to technoscience, critical disability studies, and science and technology studies (STS) in the design and evaluation of adaptive technological systems. Their work illustrates injustice in technology design and deployment while also highlighting practices of resistance and advocacy via adaptive uses and modifications of those same technologies.
Williams is a member of the inaugural (2022–2024) cohort of the Just Tech Fellowship. As a Just Tech Fellow, Williams will work with assistive and adaptive technology developers, assistive and adaptive equipment users, and user-experience designers to build “Cyborg Coalitions” exploring alternative processes for bespoke equipment design. This work will inform a public interest policy and design campaign to enable disabled people and communities—especially disabled people of color living in high-risk climate areas—to maintain, repair, and adapt their own assistive technology equipment.
Williams reviewed an early draft of Un/Just Care: Imagining the History (and Future) of Disability, Technology, and Care.
