Dr. Louise Hickman is a Senior Research Officer with the JUST-AI Network and the LSE Department of Media and Communications. An academic, artist, activist, she earned her Ph.D. Communication from the University of California, San Diego in 2018, and most recently held a postdoctoral position in the Feminist Labor Lab and Design Lab at UC San Diego. Dr. Hickman is a member of the Critical Design Lab.

Working in critical disability studies, science and technology studies, and feminist theories of labor, Dr. Hickman’s research examines the intersections of social justice, access work, and the ethics of care. She specifically draws on ethnographic, archival, and theoretical approaches to consider the co-production of accessibility for disabled people. 

Her current manuscript project, “The Automation of Access,” examines how access is produced by real-time stenographers and transcriptive technologies. She uses an interdisciplinary lens drawing on feminist theory, critical disability studies, and science and technology studies to consider the historical conditions of access work, and the ways access emerges out of the complex interactions between human labor, technological systems, and economic models and conditions.