Disabled by Design

I design from the standpoint of a disabled trans ethnic studies professor on contingent faculty lines. Every one of those positions is a parameter — shaping what I perceive, what I build, and what I refuse to accept as given. They let me see things somebody with a different neurotype, a different body, a different institutional position would not have thought of. That's a feature, not a deficit.

The name also names the problem: systems are designed in ways that produce disability. Rigid deadlines, surveillance grading, deficit-model assessments — the infrastructure disables people, then calls the people broken. The social model of disability applied to every structure I study and build.

And there's the third meaning: against the impulse to genetic-engineer away disability. I don't want a future that optimizes me out. My existence is an asset.

I don't just build software that accomplishes a task. I reinvent the concept behind the task — interrogate the power relations embedded in it, critique them, and build something that operates from different assumptions.

In my teaching, I reinvented what an assignment could be — from an endpoint for evaluation to a launchpad for discussion. That conceptual shift made it automatable, and the automation opened up the pedagogy. The system I built asks what each student is reaching for rather than scoring them against a static rubric. It surfaces class-wide themes and tensions, flags power moves that silence minoritized students — recentering whiteness, respectability politics — with guards that counteract the LLM's default biases, and surfaces burnout signals. FERPA-compliant, runs locally on a teacher's laptop. Each piece feeds the other.

I built a tool to help me do more praxis, and it helped me build a praxis engine to do more praxis. Reframe loads critical theory not as a checklist but as mandatory infrastructure — 76 frameworks that speak independently before synthesis, navigate tensions without flattening, and interrogate whose erasure is a structural condition of the conversation itself (inspired by Gayatri Spivak — probably impossible, but the attempt itself is worth it). The session systems parse nonlinear thinking and counteract LLM recency bias: WEAVE functions let you infodump across topics and the engine organizes them, PARK captures tangents mid-task with full context. A distributed intelligence model finds through-lines across sessions and generates seeds while the system is otherwise idle. Built for how I actually communicate and think, not for how software assumes people do.

The critique and the code are the same practice.

Every tool I've built emerged from conditions that demanded it. Autograder4Canvas: managing 170+ students without a TA. EvalEye: the college wasn't processing student evaluations, so the forms sat in boxes. RoboStripper: scholarly reading made accessible as audio when the ability to focus on reading degrades under political crisis. Reframe: navigating the contradictions of teaching under fascism — and then everything else.

The conditions that make me precarious are the same conditions that made this system necessary and possible.