Disability representation in past, present and future stories Anna Bramwell-Dicks, School of Arts and Creative Technologies
Event details
Disability History Month Open Lecture
Disability representation in entertainment media has been a topic of interest to critical disability and media scholars for many years. In this talk, Dr Bramwell-Dicks will explore how disabled people have been represented on screen in the past, together with current thinking on the topic. The majority of scholarship in this area has focused on film and television media, but as entertainment media moves into interactive and immersive formats, Dr Bramwell-Dicks argues that the potential impact of poor representation in these newer formats is great due to the agency the audience have on their own experience together with their own control over their interpretation of the story. In this talk, she will discuss various examples of well-meaning but potentially problematic representations of disabled people in these new formats. She will also talk about her current research which is aiming to understand how representation within new interactive, immersive media formats differs to the traditional screen-based media. And, most importantly, how disabled people can be more appropriately represented across all media in the future.
Auto captioning in Zoom will be provided for this event.
This event will now be held online only.
Image credit: Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
About the speaker
Dr Anna Bramwell-Dicks is lecturer of Interactive Media based in the School of Arts & Creative Technologies at the University of York. Her interdisciplinary research interests sit at the intersection of disability studies, media and computing. In 2021 she took up a 2-year research fellowship funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) through the XR Stories Creative Cluster where she focused on the Disability Representation in Past, Present and Future Stories project. In addition she has worked on both the i2web and SoundTact accessibility projects. Prior to moving into accessibility research she completed her PhD also at the University of York in Computer Science with a thesis Music While You Work: The Effect of Music on Typing Performance and Experience.